A 2016 warning drafted by then-defense minister Liberman predicted Hamas onslaught
Excerpts of 11-page top secret document highlight Israel’s awareness of Hamas plans to assault southern communities, failure to heed threat; warn against reliance on security fence
In 2016, then-defense minister Avigdor Liberman drafted an 11-page document warning of Hamas plans to burst through the border, overrun communities in southern Israel, and take hostages.
Monday saw several Hebrew-media outlets publish excerpts from the manuscript. Though it has long been public knowledge that Israel feared such attacks either from Gaza or from Hezbollah in the north, the October 7 massacre of Israelis in southern Israel has made it plain that it did not properly prepare to prevent them.
That Saturday morning some 2,500 terrorists burst into Israel by land, sea, and air, killing over 1,400 people, a majority of them civilians, in their homes and at an outdoor music festival. Hamas and allied terrorist factions also dragged over 240 hostages — including some 30 children — back to the Gaza Strip, where all but four remain captive.
In the eerily prescient document labeled top secret, Liberman wrote: “Hamas intends to take the conflict into Israeli territory by sending a significant number of well-trained forces (like the Nukhba [commandos] for example) into Israel to try and capture an Israeli community (or maybe even several communities) on the Gaza border and take hostages. Beyond the physical harm to the people, this will also lead to significant harm to the morale and feelings of the citizens of Israel.”
The report said the document was presented to both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot with a call to carry out a surprise attack on Hamas to foil its plans.
Liberman, a hawkish politician who heads the Yisrael Beytenu party, urged the military to put in place plans to “ensure that the next conflict with Hamas would be the last.”
Liberman warned that delaying such a strike until after 2017 would allow Hamas to sufficiently build up its rocket and ground forces to a formidable level following the 2014 war.
Liberman cited decisions made by the Hamas political bureau at a meeting held in Qatar in September 2016, in which it noted that time was needed to regroup before launching an assault with the aim of wiping out Israel by 2022.
His document noted Hamas’s intentions to build a force of 40,000 fighters and develop capabilities to attack Israel from the sea and land, acquire drone technologies and use electronic warfare countermeasures. It also noted that Hamas had significantly stepped up its financial requests from Iran.
Liberman also warned against an overreliance on the Gaza security barrier.
“The defensive barrier being built around Gaza with its variety of systems and capabilities is indeed an important component of the current security strategy in confronting Gaza, but it cannot constitute a strategy in itself. Modern history and past precedents (the Maginot Line, the Mannerheim Line, and the Bar Lev Line) have proven that fences and fortifications do not prevent war and do not constitute a guarantee for peace and security,” he wrote.
“Failure to launch an Israeli initiative by mid-2017 will be a grave mistake that could bring Israel to a serious strategic point,” Liberman warned. “It could lead to an unplanned deterioration in which under such a scenario Israel can no longer target the Hamas military leadership, or worse than this, Hamas will launch a conflict at a time convenient for it.
“I am convinced that the consequences of such an assault from Hamas would be far-reaching and in some ways even worse than the results of the Yom Kippur War,” he wrote.
Since the October 7 Hamas assault, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed that he had not been warned by security chiefs about an impending Hamas attack, and claimed all security chiefs had consistently assured him Hamas was deterred.
Netanyahu has also stopped short of taking direct responsibility for the Palestinian terror group’s deadly onslaught.
“After the war everyone will have to give answers, myself included,” he said at a press conference on Sunday, repeating comments he made earlier in the week. But, he stressed, “there was an awful debacle.”
The Liberman document adds to a mounting body of evidence of the massive failure of Israel’s military, intelligence and political leadership.
Also Monday, a New York Times analysis of the failings revealed that the military’s vaunted 8200 signal intelligence unit stopped listening in to the handheld radios of Hamas operatives in Gaza a year ago because it was seen as a “waste of effort.”
In an extensive report on the intelligence failures that enabled the October 7 massacre, the paper also said that US spy agencies had largely stopped collecting information on Hamas in recent years, believing that Israel had contained the threat from the terror group.
And while Netanyahu said he had not received any warnings of an impending attack, the Ynet news site reported Monday that on July 23, Netanyahu had sent Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar to warn Opposition Leader Yair Lapid that unless he compromised on judicial overhaul legislation that was roiling the country, “the risk for war would grow significantly.”
The report, citing several officials in Lapid’s Yesh Atid party, said that the warnings were severe enough for Lapid to back compromise efforts, despite opposition from protest leaders.
Liberman resigned as defense minister in November 2018, bringing down Netanyahu’s government, following a ceasefire agreed between Israel and Palestinian terror groups in Gaza in the wake of an unprecedentedly fierce two-day barrage of over 400 rockets fired by Hamas and other terror groups toward Israel.
“What happened yesterday, the ceasefire, together with the deal with Hamas, is a capitulation to terror. There is no other way of explaining it,” he told reporters at the time. “What we are doing right now is buying quiet for a heavy price with no long-term plan to reduce violence toward us.”
He said that he made his decision to leave office because “I could not remain and still be able to look residents of the south in the eyes.”
