The Israeli military had advanced notice about a plan by Hamas to raid southern Israel including accurate predictions about the number of hostages the group would seize, a new report has found.
The internal report shared with Gaza Division commanders, entitled ‘Detailed raid training from end to end’, was released on 19 September and found that Hamas fighters had been training for a huge assault on Israel, a warning that was ignored by officers, Israeli broadcaster Kan reported.
Three weeks later, Hamas and its allies launched a series of assaults into southern Israel, killing 1,190 Israelis and taking 251 captives back to Gaza, sparking a brutal Israeli war on the Palestinian enclave that has seen more than 37,000 people killed.
“I feel like crying, yelling and swearing,” one of the authors of the report said about the ignored warnings, according to Kan.
October 7 was almost a mirror of how the report warned an assault would play out, even predicting the number of hostages who would be seized by Hamas at between 200 and 250, while detailing how its fighters from its elite units would assault military posts and towns.
The 7 October events remains a hugely sensitive issue in Israel with demands for commanders and politicians to step down due to the collapse of the southern front on that day.
Israel’s High Court issued an injunction on Sunday to suspend an investigation by State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman into the military and Shin Bet over alleged failings that led to Hamas’s surprise attack on 7 October.
There appeared to be some pretty intense efforts from within the IDF to take this warning seriously.
They even tried to cancel the Nova music festival but got overridden by higher ups. And their weapons got taken away.
And the weirdest is how long it took the helicopters and reinforcements to arrive.
But as you said it might have been the IDF just been extremely incapable. We have certainly observed as much the past 8 months.