Gaza Division intel officer on October 7 formally dismissed from the IDF

A senior intelligence officer who is believed to have played a key role in the failures that led to the Hamas terror group’s October 7, 2023, onslaught was formally dismissed from the military on Thursday, following months of deliberations over the matter.

Lt. Col. “Aleph” — identified only by his first initial in Hebrew — was the intelligence officer of the Gaza Division, the Israel Defense Forces division responsible for the Gaza Strip and its border, and held the position on and before October 7, 2023.

Aleph had dismissed detailed warnings from a non-commissioned officer about the looming onslaught as “completely imaginary.”

In November, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir dismissed several senior officers, including Aleph, over their roles in the failures of October 7, 2023.

The military began proceedings to end the officer’s service, but Aleph fought his ousting in court, temporarily preventing a military committee set to dismiss him from convening and placing a gag order on details of the proceedings.

On June 30, the court ruled that the dismissal process was lawful and within the military’s authority, rejecting all of Aleph’s claims.

The military committee then convened, and following its review and recommendation, the head of the Personnel Directorate, Maj. Gen. Dado Bar Kalifa, on Thursday ordered Aleph’s release from IDF service.

Aleph was notified of the decision, which the IDF said he may appeal to Zamir.

The officer’s identity — despite having circulated online for months — is still barred from publication, as Aleph appealed to the High Court against his name being officially published by the media.

Aleph’s father is regularly interviewed on Israeli television on security matters, without due disclosure of his son’s role, and once said he opposes a state commission of inquiry into October 7.

Unlike other top officers who resigned over their involvement in the failures on October 7, Aleph never took responsibility or left the military of his own accord.

He chose to stay in his role as Gaza Division intelligence chief until the end of his planned tenure, and later was appointed to a position in the Military Intelligence Directorate’s Unit 9900, which specializes in visual intelligence, or VISINT. In January 2025, the military froze his planned transfer to a new role after a radio report revealed the controversial planned move.

In the days before the October 7 onslaught, the Gaza Division intelligence officer had dismissed warnings by a noncommissioned officer in the signals intelligence Unit 8200 that Hamas had a clear plan in place to attack Israel.

The NCO, known as “Vav” — the first Hebrew letter of her name — warned in an email sent to several IDF officers, including Aleph, in the days leading up to the deadly Hamas terror assault that “the sword is coming,” and urged them to “warn the people” while there was still time.

The urgent warning followed the issuance of a dossier put together by Unit 8200 on September 19 — less than three weeks before October 7 — that warned Hamas was training for a large-scale invasion of Israel.

The document included an outline of Hamas’s plans for an attack on Israel. It detailed a series of exercises by Hamas’s elite forces who drilled raids on Israeli towns and military posts. The terror group’s operatives were also said to have studied how to hold soldiers and civilians hostage when back inside Gaza, and under what conditions the hostages could be killed.

The plans, dubbed Jericho Wall, were first presented to intelligence officials as a 40-page report more than a year before October 7.

After intelligence officials appeared not to heed the warnings presented on September 19, “Vav” warned in the email that “the training shows us that the ‘Jericho Wall’ plan is an operative, practiced plan, meaning that Hamas already has forces that have practiced these outlines and know how to implement when the order comes.”

The email, sent to the Gaza Division intelligence officer, among others, also warned that due to the apparent imminence of whatever Hamas was planning, Israel’s intelligence would likely not have enough time to “prevent the incident” altogether. Instead, Vav suggested that relevant parties begin “formulating plans for dealing with the incident, should it actually happen, in order to reduce the damage.”

Aleph responded to the email by writing that “the described scenario is completely imaginary.”

The Jericho Wall plan was actualized on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists burst through the Gaza border and carried out a deadly assault in southern Israel, slaughtering some 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages.

In the months before the onslaught, Aleph was also said to have disregarded warning signs noted by IDF surveillance soldiers as unimportant.

At least three months prior to the attack, surveillance soldiers serving on a base in Nahal Oz reported signs that something unusual was underway at the already-tumultuous Gaza border, situated a kilometer from them.

The activity reported by the soldiers included information on Hamas operatives conducting training sessions multiple times a day, digging holes and placing explosives along the border.

According to the accounts of the soldiers, no action was taken by those who received the reports.