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(LifeSiteNews) — The attacks on October 7 have been described as the greatest intelligence failure over the past 50 years of Israeli history. Yet mounting evidence is fueling controversy over precisely how much the Israeli command knew of the attacks in advance – and why it did nothing to stop them.
Israeli news sources revealed on June 17 that Israeli intelligence knew that Hamas was about to stage exactly the kind of assault which took place on October 7.
An Israeli intelligence document distributed to the IDF on September 19, 2023, predicted the nature and scale of the assault by Hamas.
As the Jerusalem Post reported on June 17:
The document, titled ‘Detailed End-to-End Raid Training,’ was distributed on September 19, 2023, and described in detail the series of exercises conducted by Hamas’s elite units.
Israeli intelligence knew that Hamas was preparing precisely the kind of attacks which it carried out just two-and-a-half weeks after the report.
These exercises included raiding military posts and kibbutzim (collective communities in Israel), kidnapping soldiers and civilians, and maintaining the hostages once they were in the Gaza Strip.
READ: Trump says Israel must ‘finish the job’ in Gaza, makes false charge regarding October 7 ‘deniers’
The shocking fact that Israeli intelligence had foreknowledge of the attacks was published by Israeli outlet Kan News, which said, “Security sources told Kan News that the document was known to the intelligence leadership, at the very least in the Gaza Division.”
The Israeli leadership under Netanyahu has faced significant criticism in recent months over its response to the attack on October 7. Accusations that Netanyahu failed to prevent the attack have been made since they took place. The following day, on October 8, the Jerusalem Post asked whether the Hamas attack was “the greatest intelligence failure in Israeli history.”
How could this happen? The Post said, “Part of why the IDF was not ready for many of its tactics was because Hamas had not revealed them.”
These unforeseen tactics, it said, included “an entire fleet of motorized hang-gliders (something which has barely ever been discussed by the IDF)”.
Yet according to Israeli reports the IDF did know about this, and practically every other detail of the October 7 attacks – well in advance.
Israeli intelligence ‘stood down’
Questions over Israeli readiness also arose shortly after the attacks, with news that the elite Israeli signals intelligence Unit 8200 was not working on October 7 – because it had been stood down according to official policy.
The Times of Israel reported on November 28, 2023:
The military’s vaunted 8200 signals intelligence unit was not operational near the Gaza border on the morning of October 7 due to a two-year-old decision to reduce personnel and halt operations overnight and on weekends.
The move “left the army without a key asset for wiretapping and code decryption,” said the report, “possibly adding to the confusion and chaos that delayed an effective military response to the terror onslaught last month.”
The IDF had reduced the manpower of the unit thinking it would be of little use to prevent an attack.
The Times of Israel quoted a report from Israeli public broadcaster Kan News, which said that “a high-ranking officer within the Israel Defense Force’s Intelligence Corps reduced the unit’s manpower two years ago after concluding that intelligence-gathering methods utilized by 8200 would not help detect a threat from Gaza in real-time.”
Why was the elite intelligence unit of no use? According to the senior intelligence officer, “an alert in the Gaza arena will not come from the classic sources.”
The report also shows that senior officers in Israeli intelligence ignored alerts from their own analysts in the unit, describing their detailed and evidenced warnings as “fantasy.”
READ: United Nations accuses Israel of committing numerous war crimes in Gaza
This report on the following day, November 24, detailed these claims. In it, the Times of Israel said two analysts had “predicted” the October 7 attacks.
According to Channel 12’s report on Thursday [November 23], the NCO in Unit 8200 put together a report from an array of raw intelligence data detailing a scenario that essentially predicted the October 7 invasion.
She, together with the junior officer, also pointed to a Hamas drill a month before the Hamas attack, noting that it included preparations for a mass invasion with multiple entry points into Israel.
IDF knew about hang-gliders, motorbikes
This report also reveals that the IDF had discovered a “Hamas terror manual” before the October 7 attacks, which “described how pick-up trucks would be used to stage the invasion, along with motorbikes and hang-gliders as well as with the use of anti-tank missiles under the cover of rocket and mortar fire from Gaza – in the same way that events unfolded on October 7.”
The attacks were predicted, the methods known, the same unit which carried them out was observed training to do so, and the analysts who warned Israeli intelligence chiefs about this were ignored.
Protest and calls for elections
Public outcry has continued to grow since the attacks, with ongoing demonstrations against Netanyahu and his government.
In November 2023, the Jerusalem Post reported that over four-fifths of Israelis held Netanyahu personally responsible for the October 7 attacks.
Polls released in the weeks since the war began indicate that Israelis strongly believe that Netanyahu should take responsibility for October 7. In one, 80% of Israelis voiced this opinion (including a majority of his own constituents) while in another, 86% of respondents say they hold the government responsible for the attack whether or not Netanyahu admits to it.
Both Netanyahu and his party have trailed in the polls to opposition leader Benny Gantz, whose exit from the now dissolved Israel war cabinet saw his party’s lead narrow over the ruling coalition. Gantz has called for elections, echoing the demands of protesters.
This leaves Netanyahu more reliant on his extreme-Zionist coalition partners – who are implacably opposed to any peace deal and have suggested the population of Gaza be transferred to Ireland.
Israel knew a year in advance
This is not the first report that the Israeli state had foreknowledge of the attacks.
On December 2, 2023, a New York Times published a report titled, “Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan Over a Year Ago.”
The report cited evidence showing Israel had known for “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.”
The Times explained that it had seen a 40-page document detailing what Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall” – which “outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.”
Why did no one act on this intelligence? The New York Times said “Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.”
A warning in July
Yet a female Israeli intelligence analyst later warned that Hamas were training to carry out these plans.
In July (2023), just three months before the attacks, a veteran analyst with Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, warned that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint.
How did Israeli commanders respond? The Times says it had seen “encrypted emails” which documented the exchange between the analyst and her senior officer.
A colonel in the Gaza division brushed off her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by The Times.
The analyst insisted the plans were real and the threat detailed in the Israeli report was going to be carried out.
‘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.’
The analyst stressed the severity of the threat, as the Times reported:
‘It is a plan designed to start a war,’ she added. ‘It’s not just a raid on a village.’
The analyst and her colonel were not the only ones to hear of this.
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.
This exercise mirrored the operations that would take place the following October.
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.
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Parallels with 9/11
The startling report from the Times concluded with a comment from a former CIA agent, who noted that the intelligence failures around the clear signals of an imminent attack reflected a strong historical parallel.
‘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.
Singer said, “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.”
Yet there was no “gap in analysis” concerning October 7 – it was filled by an analyst whose conclusion was that an attack was being prepared according to known plans.
This attack materialized weeks after these plans were distributed again through the Israeli intelligence network. Dismissed as “fantasy,” it became reality, and so did the war the same analyst predicted would follow in its wake.
Hamas is an ‘asset’ to Zionists
Despite efforts to frame the evidence as a work of imagination, October 7 appears to have turned out exactly as it was planned. Is it a “fantasy” to imagine Netanyahu’s government knew of the plan and let it happen – or that supporting Hamas was his “strategy”?
Not according to him:
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy"https://t.co/7lTQs9E5Zf
— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) October 9, 2023
“This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
He said this again in 2019, with the Jerusalem Post reporting how Netanyahu defended the fact that Israeli officials were transporting suitcases of U.S. dollars sent from Qatar to Hamas in Gaza.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Israel’s regular allowing of Qatari funds to be transferred into Gaza, saying it is part of a broader strategy to keep Hamas and the Palestinian Authority separated.
The report records that Netanyahu explained his strategy:
‘[W]hoever is against a Palestinian state should be for’ transferring the funds to Gaza, because maintaining a separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza helps prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu’s aim was to divide the Palestinians by funding Hamas. Why? The Zionist extremist Bezalel Smotrich, who is the current heritage minister, explained why in 2015.
“Hamas is an asset,” he said.
Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (a member of the Religious Zionist Party) speaking on how Hamas is an asset to divide and conquer the Palestinians. pic.twitter.com/3XnUt6l5lV
— Mr. Sam (@CrunchyBrown) May 10, 2024
The original report from Knesset TV (in Hebrew) is here.
This again is not news. In a December 2023 article titled “How Israel Secretly Propped Up Hamas,” the New York Times published a generous assessment of Netanyahu’s strategy of backing Hamas – which continued even as Israel was learning of its plan of attack.
The Times said:
Allowing the payments – billions of dollars over roughly a decade – was a gamble by Mr. Netanyahu that a steady flow of money would maintain peace in Gaza, the eventual launching point of the Oct. 7 attacks, and keep Hamas focused on governing, not fighting.
Again, the line of an “intelligence failure” is repeated in defense of this strategy.
The payments were part of a string of decisions by Israeli political leaders, military officers and intelligence officials – all based on the fundamentally flawed assessment that Hamas was neither interested in nor capable of a large-scale attack.
Now we know that Israeli intelligence analysts knew of the plans for the attack, knew how they would be carried out and by whom, and that the warnings of this were ignored, how does the strategy of funding Hamas make sense?
The Times says this knowledge did not halt the “suitcases filled with millions of dollars.”
Even as the Israeli military obtained battle plans for a Hamas invasion and analysts observed significant terrorism exercises just over the border in Gaza, the payments continued. For years, Israeli intelligence officers even escorted a Qatari official into Gaza, where he doled out money from suitcases filled with millions of dollars.
There was a plan. It was known to Israeli intelligence. This is not widely known amongst audiences in the West, and as a result Netanyahu’s grand strategy of funding Hamas is itself viewed as a fantasy.
It is time to face reality. The intelligence did not “fail.” A plan that was decades in the making has unfolded before the eyes of the world, and the architects are carrying it out as if it had all come as some terrible surprise.
The biggest surprise of all is that it is impossible to convince intelligent people to prefer reality over fantasy. There are motives for reasoning that reality is fantasy. They are not good reasons.
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