Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago
Category: News & Politics
Via: hallux • last year • 14 commentsBy: Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman - NYT
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.
The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.
The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.
Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot — all of which happened on Oct. 7.
The plan also included details about the location and size of Israeli military forces, communication hubs and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks inside the Israeli security establishment.
The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities, according to documents and officials. It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document, as well.
Last year, shortly after the document was obtained, officials in the Israeli military’s Gaza division, which is responsible for defending the border with Gaza, said that Hamas’s intentions were unclear.
“It is not yet possible to determine whether the plan has been fully accepted and how it will be manifested,” read a military assessment reviewed by The Times.
But a colonel in the Gaza division brushed off her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by The Times.
“I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, fully matched “the content of Jericho Wall.”
“It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”
Officials privately concede that, had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them.
Instead, the Israeli military was unprepared as terrorists streamed out of the Gaza Strip. It was the deadliest day in Israel’s history.
Underpinning all these failures was a single, fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so ingrained in the Israeli government, officials said, that they disregarded growing evidence to the contrary .
The Israeli military and the Israeli Security Agency, which is in charge of counterterrorism in Gaza, declined to comment.
Officials would not say how they obtained the Jericho Wall document, but it was among several versions of attack plans collected over the years. A 2016 Defense Ministry memorandum viewed by The Times, for example, says, “Hamas intends to move the next confrontation into Israeli territory.”
Hamas fighters would then break through 60 points in the wall, storming across the border into Israel. The document begins with a quote from the Quran : “Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will certainly prevail.”
The same phrase has been widely used by Hamas in its videos and statements since Oct. 7.
One of the most important objectives outlined in the document was to overrun the Israeli military base in Re’im, which is home to the Gaza division responsible for protecting the region. Other bases that fell under the division’s command were also listed.
The audacity of the blueprint, officials said, made it easy to underestimate. All militaries write plans that they never use, and Israeli officials assessed that, even if Hamas invaded, it might muster a force of a few dozen, not the hundreds who ultimately attacked.
Israel had also misread Hamas’s actions. The group had negotiated for permits to allow Palestinians to work in Israel, which Israeli officials took as a sign that Hamas was not looking for a war.
But Hamas had been drafting attack plans for many years, and Israeli officials had gotten hold of previous iterations of them. What could have been an intelligence coup turned into one of the worst miscalculations in Israel’s 75-year history.
In September 2016, the defense minister’s office compiled a top-secret memorandum based on a much earlier iteration of a Hamas attack plan. The memorandum, which was signed by the defense minister at the time, Avigdor Lieberman, said that an invasion and hostage-taking would “lead to severe damage to the consciousness and morale of the citizens of Israel.”
The memo, which was viewed by The Times, said that Hamas had purchased sophisticated weapons, GPS jammers and drones. It also said that Hamas had increased its fighting force to 27,000 people — having added 6,000 to its ranks in a two-year period. Hamas had hoped to reach 40,000 by 2020, the memo determined.
Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan.
Hamas had “decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope,” analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division.
On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing.
The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times.
The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out.
The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off.
The back-and-forth continued, with some colleagues supporting the analyst’s original conclusion. Soon, she invoked the lessons of the 1973 war, in which Syrian and Egyptian armies overran Israeli defenses. Israeli forces regrouped and repelled the invasion, but the intelligence failure has long served as a lesson for Israeli security officials.
“We already underwent a similar experience 50 years ago on the southern front in connection with a scenario that seemed imaginary, and history may repeat itself if we are not careful,” the analyst wrote to her colleagues.
While ominous, none of the emails predicted that war was imminent. Nor did the analyst challenge the conventional wisdom among Israeli intelligence officials that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was not interested in war with Israel. But she correctly assessed that Hamas’s capabilities had drastically improved. The gap between the possible and the aspirational had narrowed significantly.
The failures to connect the dots echoed another analytical failure more than two decades ago, when the American authorities also had multiple indications that the terrorist group Al Qaeda was preparing an assault. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were largely a failure of analysis and imagination, a government commission concluded.
“The Israeli intelligence failure on Oct. 7 is sounding more and more like our 9/11,” said Ted Singer, a recently retired senior C.I.A. official who worked extensively in the Middle East. “The failure will be a gap in analysis to paint a convincing picture to military and political leadership that Hamas had the intention to launch the attack when it did.”
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Netanyahu is toast.
"It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document, as well."
I doubt that the Israeli .intelligence experts will ever underestimate the Hamas terrorists again.
At any rate, Hamas started a war in cannot win
This document is devastating to Netanyahu and the administration. Along with the member of unit 8200 warning and referring to the Yom Kippur war sets the stage.
The adage of ''Never underestimate your enemy'' rings true with devastating results.
heh, I called this a month ago on one of your articles. bibi and his radical religious supporters are finished.
"Know your enemy." - a quote from The Art of War, written by Sun Tzu MORE THAN 2200 YEARS AGO. IMO although Israel is bound to win this war, it will also lose something, its reputation.
Advice from 2200 years ago rings true today.
What could Netanyahu and Israel have done a year ago? Any action by Israel would have been immediately condemned by the UN and the European democracies. Even the most basic step of the IDF increasing border security would have been denounced in the unbiased liberal press. And that wouldn't have done anything to stop the rocket attacks.
Israel is going to be condemned no matter what it does. The rest of the world only searches for excuses to claim a phony higher moral standing.
Netanyahu oversaw lessening border security around gaza in order to move troops to buck up the Israeli military presence in the west bank. Read something for god's sake.
I just read (in the seed) that Palestinian terrorists had deliberately planned to attack and kill Israeli civilians and take Israeli hostages over a year ago. And Netanyahu is being blamed for deliberate terrorism by Palestinians?
Maybe you're right. Maybe Netanyahu and the IDF should have been conducting air strikes and raids over the last year. That's because there is no negotiating with terrorists.
fact remains that the Hamas animals attacked Israel while Israel was minding its own business.
Fuck what happens to them or their supporters.
oh then liberal supporters of Palestinians would be crying that Israel was gearing up for an invasion.
Well, gee, it must be all Netanyahu's fault animals attacked Israel in spite of a ceasefire.
YES that is.................../s
The analyst who reported this should be the new Israeli Minister of Defense.
Meh .. all hindsight .. the reality is that Hamas struck with precision, causing as much chaos and death as possible while doing it, just as 'our' twin towers were struck with precision by a terrorist group - US intelligence allegedly had knowledge in advance of that attack as well .. we know that ahead of the Boston bombing intelligence chose to ignore Russia when they warned about radicalized brothers, or a misspelling caused them to be missed while reentering the US .. one half dozen or another
So, Netanyahu might be toast - he has lived his life, serviced in the Israeli military, served as the UN ambassador, as well as servicing as the leader of the nation twice.
Remember when he pissed Obama off during a meet and greet press conference at the White House over the Iran deal and then later spoke to the United States congress as an attempted end run around Obama? Netanyahu def has brass ones.
Netanyahu is the best leader for Israel at this moment in time .. after this war is completed, he should step down without a fight. He will have accomplished part of a lifelong goal if he succeeds in eliminating Hamas.
P.s.... this whole blame game conspiracy BS is getting old - (D)s suck at conspiracy theory but Ooo boy are they throwing it around. ........................ Then there are the ones attacking people for being antisemitic as antisemitism oozes out of their pours. Very interesting time to be an American! If it was the Proud Boys marching on campuses the protesters and antifa would be blocking the streets trying to keep them from spreading their hate .. but when it is students and antifa being hateful it is okay ........ unreal ......................... I suppose the difference is the students are not 'extreme' racists like the proud boys?
Have a nice day .....
I recommend watching this .. is it enlightening .. as I said the guy has brass ones.
Netanyahu at War | FRONTLINE (pbs.org)