Daily Briefing Mar. 4: Day 515 – Devastating IDF Oct. 7 probes depict years of misconceptions

Welcome to The Times of Israel’s Daily Briefing, your 20-minute audio update on what’s happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world.

Military reporter Emanuel Fabian joins host Amanda Borschel-Dan for today’s Daily Briefing.

Israel carried out an airstrike in Syria on Monday evening, targeting a military facility near the city of Tartous in the country’s northwestern coastal region. And today, the Defense Ministry says it is carrying out activities to clear explosives from an area of the Golan Heights near the Syrian border. Fabian updates us on IDF activities inside Syria.

We spend the rest of the episode on a series of IDF probes into the failures on October 7, 2023. We learn about the immediate failures, including that the attack came as a surprise with no intelligence warning. Hamas had numerous forces and was attacking several areas simultaneously. And the IDF had far fewer forces and minimal capabilities available: When the attack began, involving over 5,000 terrorists, just 767 IDF troops were stationed on the border.

And then we turn to specific investigations into the air force, the navy and  intelligence, and we learn about the series of disasters that led to the tragedies at the Nahal Oz IDF base and Kibbutz Kfar Aza.

And finally, we zoom into one of the many tales of heroism that were highlighted in the reports, the story of Kfar Aza resident Brig. Gen. Yisrael Shomer, who fought off terrorists with a kitchen knife before securing a weapon and eventually killing 20.

Please see today’s ongoing liveblog for more updates.

For further reading:

Israel attacks military site in northwestern Syria; no casualties reported

Entire Gaza Division was overrun for hours, and IDF didn’t know it; 767 troops faced 5,000 terrorists

IDF identified but ignored 5 warning signs of Hamas attack on eve of Oct. 7, its probe shows

The intel on Hamas attack plan was there, but IDF simply refused to believe it, probe finds

Before Oct. 7, IDF probe shows, Hamas duped Israel into thinking it did not pose a major threat

IDF’s Oct. 7 probes show it misread Hamas for years, left southern Israel utterly vulnerable

Terrorists took Kfar Aza in an hour. Recapturing it took the IDF days, probe finds

‘Systemic failure’: How Nahal Oz base, 850 meters from Gaza yet utterly vulnerable, fell to Hamas

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Check out yesterday’s Daily Briefing episode here: