‘Unfeasible’: How seven years of Hamas planning were dismissed by Israel

Jerusalem: Israel’s military has formally apologised for the “historic failure” of October 7, 2023, as it revealed Hamas had been planning the massacre for at least seven years.

The army’s internal inquiry into the disaster released on Friday (AEDT) concluded that its senior leadership was comprehensively duped by the terror group into thinking it lacked the intent and capacity to launch a full-scale attack.

It also revealed how opportunities to thwart the terror operation were missed on the night before it began, with officers judging the warning signs “not time-critical”.

The home of Canadian-Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver who was murdered by Hamas during the October 7 attack in Kibbutz Be’eri.Credit: Kate Geraghty

The report criticised a “flawed intelligence culture that was based on assumptions of certainty and fact, with commanders becoming ‘addicted’” to certain types of intelligence.

The result was several hours in which Hamas and its affiliates were able to run amok among Israeli communities, killing nearly 1000 civilians, more than 400 security personnel, and abducting 251 hostages.

The detailed lessons-learnt exercise found that the IDF’s Gaza division was “overwhelmed” for much of the day and that it took until approximately 12pm for any reinforcements to arrive on the scene.

Protesters led by bereaved families and families of hostages demonstrate against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a rally and memorial on the one-month anniversary of the October 7 attacks outside the Knesset in Jerusalem.Credit: Getty Images

Caught up personally in fighting street battles against Hamas, senior officers were unable to build a coherent picture of what was happening and were forced to rally their troops using mobile phones and Google Maps.

“The IDF failed in its first and foremost mission to protect Israel’s borders and protect Israeli civilians,” said a senior military official.

“Far too many civilians died that morning, that day, asking in their hearts ‘where is the IDF’? We completely understand that.”

Militants celebrate by an Israeli tank at the border fence of the Gaza Strip on October 7.Credit: AP

Ordered by the Israeli military top brass, the inquiry’s publication is likely to heap more pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to launch a wider probe into potential political failings that led to the attack, which he has so far stalled several times.

It accompanies 41 individual investigations into specific incidents that took place on October 7, which in recent days senior officers have been presenting to the survivors of the communities affected.

Here are the report’s key findings.

Seven Years in the planning

Until the morning of October 7, Israel’s military considered Gaza a “secondary threat”.

It was much more concerned – and devoted its manpower accordingly – to the danger posed by Hezbollah on its northern border and the wider menace of Iran. There was also the ever-simmering tension in the occupied West Bank.

But given that Gaza was openly run by a jihadist terror group which swore death to Israel in its founding charter, how did the IDF allow this to happen?

The answer points to arguably the most chilling aspect of the report: that Hamas engaged in a near decade-long exercise to lull Israel into a false sense of security.

Everything it did in this period, the IDF now believes, was devoted to this goal.

Documents and other intelligence gathered in Gaza since the start of the war have, the military says, allowed analysts to build up a detailed timeline of the plot.

A woman kisses a photo of her daughter who was killed during Hamas’ attack on the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, at a display placed at the site in Re’im, Israel.Credit: Getty Images

It believes that the fundamental concept of a mass attack to achieve “liberation” was first settled upon in November 2016.

An initial plan was then worked on from July the next year, which was approved two years later in July 2019.

A more detailed operational plan was brought forward in 2021 and a readiness committee established in early 2022.

From that point, there were several moments at which Hamas might have pressed the button, the IDF believes, each time calculating their own readiness and the chances of surprising and overwhelming the Israelis.

During this period, Israel was operating an informal policy of carrot and stick in Gaza.

It eased economic restrictions to an extent and allowed a certain number of Gazans into Israel to work. The idea was that Gazan civilians would have something to lose if Hamas started a war.

At the same time, every few years the IDF launched a major operation to “keep the terrorists’ heads down”, attacking rocket facilities, tunnels and personnel.

But we now know that Hamas was using the improved economic situation as a cover to build up its forces.

And, at the same time, each IDF offensive operation was exploited as an opportunity to work out the gaps in their enemy’s knowledge of them and their infrastructure.

In short, the IDF concluded, Hamas’ civil governance of Gaza did not merely take place alongside its covert build-up of forces.

Instead, it was an integral part of the deception, conning Israel into thinking the group was content to keep things quiet.

“The basic mistake is that we thought that on the other side of the fence there was pragmatism,” said an IDF official.

The report refers particularly to Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the attack, as someone Israel had believed to be pragmatic.

It also lays bare how Israel took the wrong message from its 2021 Guardian of the Walls operation in Gaza, erroneously believing it had left Hamas in a state of “operational distress”, whereas in reality the terror group had been conserving its firepower.

The result was that Israel arranged its manpower – roughly four battalions – to deal with a small handful of potential infiltrations by Hamas fighters.

They thought that rocket fire would be the main threat, for which, of course, there was the state-of-the-art Iron Dome interception system.

This, plus the billion or so dollars they had spent on their hi-tech perimeter wall, made them feel safe with a relatively small number of troops in the area.

The report found that the IDF had “excessive confidence” in this barrier and, as such, reduced troop numbers to conserve resources.

“We thought that was good enough,” said the official. “We thought that any major shift in the picture would be preceded by an intelligence update.”

“The assessment was that Hamas did not want a full-scale war and that it lacked capacity for an attack on this scale.”

Chance to thwart attack missed

The IDF now understands that senior Hamas fighters knew about the plan to launch a mass murder and kidnapping attack on Israel for about two years.

But only at the very pinnacle of the organisation’s Gaza leadership did they know the precise time.

During the night of October 6, the evening before shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, that changed.

Fighters stole through the darkened streets to rally at assembly points where they received weapons, ammunition and orders.

This week the IDF admitted that: “During the night there were early warning signs.”

In particular, they noticed a mass activation of SIM cards on the Israeli network, as well as “changes in normal behaviour”.

Did they also receive tip-offs from human sources on the ground? Even in a “frank” lessons-learnt exercise, that is not the sort of thing the IDF will discuss.

Either way, phone calls were made, including to the commander of the northern brigade of the Gaza division at about 4am.

But in the end it was decided that whatever was going on in Gaza, it was not “time critical” – perhaps an exercise by Hamas or activity in preparation for an imagined IDF operation.

Describing a set of overnight conversations that were “not very rare”, the IDF official said: “We thought something may be going on, but nothing on the scale of October 7 because we never thought that was an option.”

In short, the military hierarchy was so convinced in its broader assessment that Hamas had no appetite for a full-scale war, that it would take more than some activated SIM cards and a bit of “unusual activity” to shake them out of that mindset.

Stressing that the IDF received other signals that night which confused the picture, the official said: “Nothing was strong enough to change the prior assumptions.” He added: “It was an out-of-concept surprise.”

The report put it this way: “The Intelligence Directorate failed to detect Hamas’ concrete decision to execute the attack and its preparations in the days prior, and did not issue an intelligence warning indicating the possibility of an offensive operation by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.”

How the attack unfolded

But at 6.29am on October 7, 2023, Hamas held the two trump cards craved by all military commanders throughout history: surprise and overwhelming force.

The IDF believes that in the following hours between 5000 and 5600 terrorists passed through the security fence to wreak havoc, murder and abduct, under a barrage of 4694 rockets and mortars.

The attack was organised in three waves.

The first saw about 1500 hardened Hamas terrorists stream through the security fence between about 6.30am and 7am and head straight for the nearby Israeli villages and kibbutzim, as well as IDF outposts.

The second wave, launched between 7 and 9am, comprised about 2500 fighters and had the aim of pushing further into Israel, with ambitious targets such as Be’er Sheva, Ashkelon and various airforce bases.

This included Hamas and other terrorist groups who had not been given prior warning of the attack but who quickly got involved.

The third wave started at about 9am and included a mixture of terrorists and ordinary Palestinians, the IDF report says, who had heard the call of Hamas top brass Mohammed Deif at 7.58am to join the slaughter of about 1500 individuals in total.

“Whoever has a gun, get it out, because its time has come,” Deif had said. “Whoever has no gun, get a knife or an axe.”

In total, it is thought there were 59 points of infiltration into Israel.

The first wave of fighters are thought to have been the most focused – murdering with abandon, but also kidnapping more than 250 hostages in those early hours and dragging them back into Gaza by roughly midday.

And while the subsequent waves did not push as far into Israel as had been intended, they succeeded in flooding the area known as the Gaza envelope with heavily armed terrorists, taking up defensive positions around key junctions and conurbations, thus making it a nightmare for the military to respond.

“The result was that there were several hours during which the Gaza Division was overwhelmed,” said an official.

“The IDF was caught by surprise – this enabled the enemy to perform that massacre and abduction spree.”

One of the report’s key findings is that it took until after midday for any reinforcements to arrive on the battlefield, arguably a shocking indictment of an advanced military in a geographically small country.

Meanwhile, commanders who were already on the ground found it almost impossible to build up a coherent picture as to what was going on.

Many were engaged in fighting the enemy at close-quarters themselves, rather than dealing with the larger tactical picture.

This is partly because it is the custom of IDF officers to fight from the front, but also because of the desperate situation.

No fewer than three brigade commanders were killed in action in those hours, as well as several battalion commanders and a number of company commanders.

As far as individual units had any coherent shape, they were impossibly stretched throughout that morning, with, on average, a single battalion responsible for four or five different villages.

Some of the fiercest fighting took place around Kfar Aza, Be’eri and Re’im.

“For at least 10 hours we ceased to be efficient enough and were overrun by terrorists,” said the official.

Hamas’s tactical victory was nigh on complete.

The fightback

By 3pm there were still hundreds of terrorists at large in Israeli territory.

Having begun to build a picture of the scale of the invasion, IDF soldiers tasked with trying to get a grip on the situation were appalled at how heavily armed their enemy seemed to be.

They had also taken up positions in and among the remaining civilians, forcing impossible decisions upon front-line commanders as to whether to fire.

“They came in with so much ammo, RPGs, PK machine guns, mortars, grenades,” said a defence official.

“So you could have terrorists in one room, firing out at IDF and a family sheltering in the next room. It was very, very, very difficult.”

The same applied to air support.

An attack helicopter and armed UAVs arrived on the scene relatively early in the morning.

But in reality, without a coherent military structure on the ground to direct fire, the IDF found it hard to engage the enemy in an accurate way.

The question of friendly fire casualties, among civilians and soldiers, has haunted the military since that day – not least because some have sought to blame the heavy death toll on the Israeli counter-attack.

This week the IDF official acknowledged that “we had some”, but added that it was “very, very seldom”.

As the afternoon progressed, more and more soldiers entered the area, as well as armed civilians anxious to lend a hand.

Many of these had not been ordered, but were acting under their own initiative, the IDF said.

Eventually, defensive lines were established near the breached perimeter fence, both to prevent any more terrorists breaking out, and to kill or capture gunmen trying to get back in.

By midnight it is thought that there were “tens” of terrorists still at large in Israel.

The infiltration was not declared officially over until October 9.

The strategic picture for Hamas

The trauma of October 7 and the controversy surrounding Israel’s military response has tended to push careful analysis of why Hamas perpetrated the massacre in the first place to the sidelines.

However, the IDF believes it now understands the strategic goals behind the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

As part of its intelligence appraisal of the disaster, analysts believe Hamas had a shopping list of outcomes from the attack.

At its most basic, they wanted to “rattle” Israel, to cause it damage and put it through the horror of abducting hostages.

More ambitiously, Hamas hoped to stir up support among Arab Israelis and Palestinians living in the West Bank, effectively putting the country in a state of civil war.

However, their ultimate goal, the IDF intelligence assessment suggests, was to bring about the destruction of the state of Israel by prompting Hezbollah to launch an all-out offensive from Lebanon, and ultimately to bring in Iran.

Neither, of course, happened.

Hezbollah began firing munitions across the border on October 8, but until the escalation and – at least temporary – defeat last year, the Shiite militia group was measured in its attacks.

In the words of an IDF official: “Hamas’s miscalculation was that they thought the support they would get from Hezbollah would be much more than what they got on the day.”

Iran, meanwhile, fired two large rocket attacks on Israel, but not launched the kind of military action that would come close to threatening the existence of the Jewish state.

Both Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump have now made the elimination of Hamas a red line in their approach to the future of Gaza, despite the remaining 24 living hostages the terror group holds.

Leaving aside for a moment the comprehensive destruction of the enclave and death of tens of thousands of civilians, it is hard to see how the tactical victory of October 7 improved Hamas’ strategic situation.

What next?

The IDF launched this inquiry itself as a fact finding tool to improve future performance, not to hunt down culprits.

However, that does not mean that individuals will not be held to account.

Many senior officers with questions to answer about the failings that led up to October 7, and the failings on the day, are still in post.

It is expected that some sackings will take place, but that these will be a matter for the incoming IDF chief of staff, the retired Major Gen Eyal Zamir.

The outgoing chief, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, effectively sacked himself in contrition for the IDF’s failures once he felt that Israel’s wars in the north and the south were under control.

This comes alongside a deep soul-searching exercise about the IDF’s relationship with intelligence.

“We became addicted to the precise intelligence information we received,” said a military official, adding that it gave commanders the impression they “knew everything”.

The IDF’s Intelligence Directorate has also admitted to “overconfidence” and “not enough doubt”.

In recent years the directorate’s balance of activity has shifted from pure intelligence, such as work to understand the enemy, to planning operations to harm the enemy, which brought about a number of successes.

While it will not abandon this altogether, a shift back to its core role is expected.

Since 2018, the report found, the Intelligence Directorate had been in possession of information suggesting a large-scale Hamas attack.

However, they dismissed this as an “unrealistic or unfeasible plan, reflecting Hamas’s long-term aspirations rather than an actionable threat.”

Although this week’s report looks only at the army – and indeed only at the army’s southern command – it will inevitably pile pressure on the politicians who set Israel’s overall strategy on Gaza to face scrutiny.

Netanyahu has repeatedly fought off attempts to launch the full governmental inquiry that so many of the families of the dead are calling for.

This week’s military publication may only increase the public appetite for such an exercise.

The Telegraph, London

Earlier coverage of the Hamas-Israel conflict

• As it happened on October 7: Hamas attacks Israel, Israel declares war
• ‘We are at war’, Netanyahu declares after Hamas launches surprise attack on Israel
• Hamas had bigger plans on October 7: Intelligence about Hamas’ motivations reveals an intention to strike a blow of historic proportions and provoke an overwhelming Israeli response.
• Escape from chaos: An Australian father faced heartbreaking dilemma – flee Gaza to his children, or stay with his wife?
• Open letters: Mass resignations, boardroom turmoil and angry donors are some of the ways the Israel-Hamas war is filtering down into Australia’s high-powered arts world.
• Gaza’s youth: One of the cruelest ironies of war is that they are never started by children; yet it is children who suffer the most.