The site of a music festival near the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel, on Thursday, Oct. 12, 2023. Israeli officials say victim testimony and evidence gathered by rights groups indicate that Hamas militants carried out widespread sexual and gender-based crimes during their Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel. (Ohad Zwigenberg/AP)
TEL AVIV — Hamas spent more than a year planning its historic assault on Israel, following battle plans built on open-source materials and high-level intelligence, Israeli intelligence officers told a small group of journalists this week.
The sophistication of the attack, and the growing evidence of long-term, strategic planning by Hamas, sheds new light on the reach of the group’s intelligence apparatus and the complacency of Israel’s vaunted security state.
Even the location of Monday’s briefing was telling: the headquarters of Amshat, a previously defunct intelligence unit within the Israel Defense Forces charged with gathering documents and other technical materials relevant to war.
Amshat was disbanded five years ago, according to the IDF. “Israel, essentially, had decided it was done with war,” said a person familiar with the unit, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters. It was revived after Oct. 7 — the bloodiest day in the country’s history, when 1,200 people were killed.
The assault stunned Israelis, who, for years, had been assured by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and military leaders that Hamas had been deterred, its fighters safely fenced off inside Gaza. But across the Israeli army, analysts had warned for months than a multipronged attack was in the works: an unprecedented infiltration of Israel by land, air and sea.
Many of the 3,000 combatants who stormed Israel’s billion-dollar border fence with Gaza as dawn broke on Oct. 7 carried battle plans with specific instructions, the Israeli intelligence officers said. Some involved plans to hit military bases as far north as Rehovot and as far east as Beersheva, as well as two spots — code named points 103 and 106 — deep in the Mediterranean Sea.
Israel has increased offshore natural gas production in recent years, although it is unclear whether energy installations were the target.
“We don’t know what they wanted there,” said an IDF officer at Amshat headquarters, speaking on the condition of anonymity in accordance with military protocol. His team has spent the past two months sifting through computers, notebooks, pamphlets and communications equipment.
The fighters came into Israel with detailed battle plans that included maps of the internal structures of military bases and civilian towns, extensive lists of weaponry and equipment used by each of its units, and checklists for killing and capturing men, women and children. They were instructed to kill hostages if they proved too much trouble. One document included a list of phrases transliterated from Arabic to Hebrew: “take your pants off,” “we will kill the hostages,” “how do you use the weapon?”
Another pamphlet included a quote: “your enemy is a disease which has no cure other than to cut out their livers and their hearts.”
Many of the papers and notebooks were handwritten and riddled with code words, complicating the effort to digitize and organize them. Some were uploaded to computers gathered from battle zones in southern Israel; others have been recovered during Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza.
The IDF officers used disposable latex gloves to handle the evidence, some of which was found with traces of human remains.
The battle plans confirm what individual soldiers in separate units across the Israeli military had been warning about for months, in some cases for more than a year — that militants were not simply carrying out drills across the border in Gaza, as many IDF leaders had claimed, but were actively preparing their largest-ever military operation.
An IDF intelligence document code named “Jericho Wall,” numbering more than 30 pages, was presented in May 2022 to Aharon Haliva, the head of IDF intelligence, and Eliezer Toledano, the head of the IDF’s southern command, the Israeli public broadcaster Kan reported last week.
The PowerPoint presentation did not specify a date for the attack. But intelligence officers understood that Hamas was planning to launch its forces on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, or on a Jewish holiday, when fewer soldiers would be guarding the border.
Other details were chillingly prescient: The assault would involve an initial barrage of rockets to serve as cover for the storming of Israeli communities and military bases, and drones and snipers would be used to disable surveillance cameras, according to Ayala Hasson, a Kan journalist.
Neither Haliva nor Toledano have commented on the “Jericho Wall” document, whose existence was later reported on by the New York Times.
A security officer confirmed to The Washington Post that IDF intelligence had gathered evidence of plans for a large-scale Hamas attack more than a year ago. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.
In April, he said, the military issued an internal alert about Hamas infiltration targeting the kibbutzim near the Gaza Strip, citing concrete evidence that the operation was likely to involve hundreds of militants.
In August, weeks before the attack, new intelligence pointed to an imminent attack, the security officer said.
“The IDF increased its readiness and believed they stopped it,” he said. “They now see it was part of Hamas’ deception.”
Warnings were again dismissed. Communities on the Israeli side of the border were never notified.
Israeli security authorities issued permits for the Nova music festival to take place a few miles from the Gaza border; 364 people were killed at the festival and dozens of others taken hostage on Oct. 7.
“To think that there was information and we were not told is more than an oversight; it is a betrayal,” said Rami Samuel, one of the event’s organizers. “An oversight can’t cost the life of 1,200 people.”
For years, in public statements and private diplomacy, Hamas had claimed that it was more interested in building Gaza economically than in renewing a conflict with Israel.
Haliva said in September 2022 that although Hamas was involved in military activities, “we see that the processes being undertaken vis-à-vis Israel to stabilize the economy and to allow entry to laborers have potential for bringing years of quiet.”
Hamas had largely refrained from firing rockets at Israel after 2021. In May, it remained on the sidelines as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant group in Gaza, engaged in a short-lived conflict with Israel.
Hamas officials even provided Israel with intelligence on PIJ to reinforce the impression that they were interested in collaboration, an Israeli security official told The Post on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the news media.
There were plans to discuss the issue again after Oct. 7, the holiday of Simchat Torah, according to the Kan report.
Also in recent months, large demonstrations were staged at the fence in Gaza to get the IDF used to the sight of crowds at the border, and, more broadly, “to lull Israel into complacency,” said Miri Eisin, a former senior IDF intelligence officer.
Eisin said that Israel’s security apparatus, and many of Israel’s allies, were more concerned with Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group to the north that in 2018 declared plans to conquer the Galilee region.
“There were plans being taken very seriously — they were up north, with Hezbollah,” she said.
Netanyahu has sought to distance himself from the intelligence failure. His office has not commented on whether the prime minister was aware of the Hamas battle plan outlined in “Jericho Wall.”
Some of the soldiers who tried to sound the alarm were among the first deployed on the morning of the attack.
Col. Asaf Hamami, 41, commander of the Gaza Division’s Southern Brigade was killed battling militants at Kibbutz Nirim. On Saturday, the IDF changed his status from “missing” to “slain during combat” and notified his family that his body was being held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
His mother, Clara, said her son’s attempts to warn the military about what was coming were dismissed repeatedly.
“You warned, you alerted, you told them, you saw what was about to happen, that we should not be complacent,” his mother said as she eulogized him at a military cemetery in Tel Aviv on Monday. “There were those who said to you, ‘You only saw the worst.’ Then the worst came, on that black Saturday, on Oct. 7.”
Steve Hendrix and Judith Sudilovsky in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
