Hamas gathered intel, footage from Gaza border towns for 7 years before Oct. 7 slaughter
Channel 12 airs surveillance recordings, lists of southern communities with attack plans for each, gathered by terror group since 2016
Hamas was monitoring local Israeli leaders, security officers, and individual communities near the border with the Gaza Strip for at least seven years before carrying out its brutal October 7, 2023, massacre, a television news report revealed on Sunday evening, airing for the first time surveillance camera footage and sensitive documents seized from computers used by the terror group.
Among the material showcased in the Channel 12 news report, one document dated November, 2020, showed that Hamas had the IP addresses and serial numbers of all of the security cameras in the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council and the Ashkelon beach areas, including Kibbutz Kfar Aza, one of the worst-hit communities on October 7.
Another document featured in the report showed a semiofficial list of security guards working in the Sha’ar Hanegev area, with their phone numbers, including those from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Kibbutz Nahal Oz and Kibbutz Mefalsim.
In a particularly grim finding, the report showed six pages of case files on each community with assessments of the status of the attack plan for each, which the terror group eventually put into action on October 7, 2023, sending some 3,000 terrorists across the border into Israel. Some 1,200 people were murdered and 251 hostages were taken to Gaza by terrorists that day.
The vast majority of those killed as gunmen seized border communities were civilians — including babies, children, and the elderly. Entire families were executed in their homes, and over 360 people were slaughtered at an outdoor music festival, amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
Some of the public places raided by Hamas on October 7 were seen in the materials seized from the terror group’s computers dating back to 2016, including the health clinic and kindergarten in Kibbutz Be’eri, and the police stations in the cities of Ofakim and Sderot. There were also lists of libraries and synagogues, according to the report.
Alongside the intelligence effort, the Hamas terrorists involved in the devastating attack were reportedly selected from among hundreds of elite commandos from all over Gaza, and underwent training for several years along with continuous testing to gauge their skills.
“We see very, very precise and very detailed intelligence from an army, an army for all intents and purposes, the Hamas military wing in the Gaza Strip that is collecting information on targets for attack and essentially preparing intelligence target files,” Shalom Ben Hanan, a former top Shin Bet official, told Channel 12. “The resolution, the details that are all so precise, and the very, very wide deployment of many intelligence assets is what is so surprising.”
In particular, the report said that the Palestinian terror group was tracking local leaders and security officials in southern Israel well before the 2023 massacre, including Sdot Negev Regional Council’s chief Tamir Idan and security officer Rafi Babian, of whom Hamas was found to have a photo at the Gaza border fence.
Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council chair Ofir Libstein, also presumably in the terror group’s crosshairs, was killed during fighting with Hamas infiltrators on October 7, while Idan was saved from an RPG attack, according to the report.
Former Eshkol Regional Council head Gadi Yarkoni said that his home had been “marked” to be attacked amid the onslaught.
“It seems that they’d checked [my address] some time ago… because I moved houses around three years before the event, and [the terrorists] showed up at my old house,” he told Channel 12.
The Israel Defense Forces has conducted several internal investigations to understand what went wrong before and during the Hamas onslaught, but the government has refused to appoint a state commission of inquiry and has opposed any probes that could include looking at political failures surrounding the devastating surprise attack last year, its lead-up, and its aftermath.
The latest Channel 12 report was one of many outlining the extent to which the Israeli intelligence establishment failed to realize that Hamas was capable of mounting a large-scale attack on Israel and was preparing to do so.
The Times of Israel Community.