IDF didn’t act on alerts of Hamas aerial activity hours before Oct. 7 attack — report

Separate report quotes top security officials saying in lead-up to Oct. 7 that the terror group was deterred, wanted a long-term settlement, and ripe for concessions from Israel

Then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant conducts a daily security situation assessment with senior security officials, including IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi (R), October 26, 2023. (Ariel Hermoni/Defense Ministry)
Then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant conducts a daily security situation assessment with senior security officials, including IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi (R), October 26, 2023. (Ariel Hermoni/Defense Ministry)

It was 2 a.m. on October 7, 2023, when accounts reportedly started to filter into an Israeli Air Force command center of strange activities from Hamas’s aerial division and signs that the terror group appeared to be readying its rocket array for action.

Calls were made, generals were woken and by 3 a.m. the head of the Israel Defense Forces Southern Command general was reportedly on the line with senior officers for a situational assessment on what could be going on.

In a report put together a short time later based on that assessment and more consultations, Maj. Gen. Oded Basiuk, the head of the IDF Operations Directorate, proposed a few possibilities. Hamas could be carrying out a drill, he wrote, or perhaps readying for what they thought was an Israeli attack.

The third option, he wrote, was that Hamas could be “readying for action against Israel in the coming hours, including a seaborne infiltration or attack on a gas rig, an invasion, kidnapping, an extraordinary terror attack, rocket fire [or] an airborne infiltration,” according to a report by the Ynet news site Thursday.

At the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, not far from the IDF’s southern command headquarters, thousands of young people were sleeping or partying in tents. By the end of the day, hundreds of them would be dead, and scores more kidnapped into Gaza. They were never warned.

At the time, a senior officer was said to have urged that the IDF shut the party down.

“The moment there is intelligence of preparations to shoot rockets, even in the face of contrary information, why don’t [we] demand, first and foremost, to immediately clear the place?… It won’t be the first party or performance that the Southern Command shuts down,” said the officer, according to a person aware of IDF investigations into the Hamas attack, Ynet reported.

The account of the early-morning warnings, based on what Ynet says are documents seen by senior government officials pushing for the ousters of the IDF’s top brass, are the latest in a series of reports pointing to intelligence failures, disregarded warnings and deleterious overconfidence by military and intelligence figures leading up to the attack.

Israelis visit the site of the October 7, 2023, Re’im-area Nova music festival massacre, on October 6, 2024. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Together with a separate report on military officials downplaying the seriousness of the Hamas threat in the months before the attack, they also shine a light on the army’s over-reliance on the Gaza border fence as an impenetrable barrier, an assumption proved wrong to devastating effect by thousands of armed terrorists who streamed into Israel with ease that dark morning.

On Tuesday, both IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi and Southern Command head Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman said they would resign from the military over their roles in the failures that led to the Hamas terror group’s October 7, 2023, onslaught.

According to Ynet, which also quoted officials present for the early morning discussions, there was a stark disconnect between the gravity of the threats as written in Basiuk’s report and how seriously they were taken by IDF brass.

Despite the warnings, few actions were taken, partly due to fears of burning intelligence sources.

“The Operations Directorate head emphasized the need to beware of a rash defense,” the report quoted from a document on that morning’s activities, which called on security forces “to maintain careful preparations.”

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi (center) speaks to officers in southern Gaza’s Rafah alongside Southern Command chief Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman (left) and Gaza Division chief Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram (right), December 18, 2024. (Israel Defense Forces)

A senior officer cited by Ynet said the concern about burning intelligence sources was a mark of the IDF’s obliviousness.

“If anyone thought there is a danger, stopping it would be more important than any source,” the officer said.

After speaking to Finkelman and Basiuk at around 4 a.m., Halevi ordered sorties deployed over Gaza to gather more intelligence, but only made plans to reconvene for discussions at 8:30 a.m. “barring dramatic developments,” Ynet said.

At 6:29 a.m., Hamas fired a massive rocket salvo at Israel, providing cover to thousands of terrorists who stormed the south to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza.

Maj. Gen. Oded Basiuk, chief of the IDF Operations Directorate, attends a Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee meeting at the Knesset, on July 18, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

‘Leave Gaza alone and focus on what is really necessary’

Israel’s top defense officials had for months underrated the possibility of such an attack, believing that Hamas was deeply vested in maintaining quiet and preferring to focus on threats to Israel from Lebanon and Iran, according to a Wednesday report by Channel 12, which was based on quotes from four Gaza-related security consultations between March and September 2023.

On March 21, 2023, then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant visited the headquarters of the IDF Gaza Division, where Basiuk, the Operations Directorate chief, reportedly told him that “an operation in the Gaza Strip is not in Israel’s interest.”

Col. Ami Biton, who led the division’s northern brigade at the time, was also said to assure Gallant, that should Hamas fighters breach the border fence, the IDF could fend them off “at every possible point of invasion with attack helicopters, drones, tanks and armored vehicles.”

Gallant, according to the report, summed up that “Hamas is left with rockets; it’s in a place of weakness.”

The next meeting documented in the Channel 12 report took place on June 14, 2023, at Gallant’s office in the defense ministry. On the agenda was the approval of concessions to the Gaza Strip: a renovation of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, the construction of a port and an increase in entry visas for laborers to work in Israel.

A picture taken on October 10, 2023, shows the closed gates of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. (Said Khatib / AFP)

According to Channel 12, the security chiefs present enthusiastically supported the measures.

Mossad chief David Barnea was said to have praised the concessions as the first plan that would give Israel reprieve from the on-again, off-again fighting in Gaza. The fighting had most recently flared up the previous May, in the IDF’s Operation Shield and Arrow against Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Hamas did not join the fighting, heightening the impression it did not want conflict.

Barnea, according to Channel 12, pushed for the concessions to the Strip, saying they would let Israel “leave Gaza alone and focus on what is really necessary — Iran.”

IDF chief Halevi also reportedly supported the concessions, saying they would coax Hamas into reining in attacks on Israel.

“They do restrain [attacks], but with rewards, we could get something more significant,” said Halevi, according to Channel 12.

Brig. Gen. Amit Saar, head of the Military Intelligence research department, reportedly seconded Halevi, saying that “what we’ve seen in the past year is that Hamas has no interest in violence in Gaza.”

“They want quiet, they need quiet,” said Saar, according to Channel 12.

Gallant was again reportedly satisfied that Israel had cut off Gaza as a route of attack, and assessed that Hamas was searching for alternatives in Lebanon and the West Bank.

On September 12, Halevi also assessed that communities in the area — which would be ravaged on October 7 — were safe from a Hamas invasion. Touring the Gaza border, Halevi touted the high-tech barrier that Israel had built between the communities and the Strip, and stated that “Operation Shield and Arrow was successful [and] succeeded in deterring Hamas.”

Just 10 days before Hamas invaded, security chiefs were still convinced the terror group wanted calm.

At a September 27 meeting, convened by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his office, Gallant reportedly said that “Hamas is signaling to us that it wants to reach a years-long settlement with Israel.”

Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is seen at the Knesset in Jerusalem, on December 23, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, then the head of the Military Intelligence Directorate, also said at the meeting that “authentically, Sinwar is still interested in a settlement,” referring to slain Hamas chief  and October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar.

When someone — it was unclear who — objected that Israel had lost some of its deterrence vis-a-vis Hamas, Gallant was said to reply: “Not true — we could have done another round [of fighting] in Gaza but we would have reached the same result.”

Channel 12 said the IDF declined to comment on the report. Gallant — who was dismissed in November and later quit parliament — said his reported quotes “paint a partial, tendentious picture,” and that he did not receive intelligence of Hamas’s attack plans.

The ex-defense minister repeated his call for a state commission of inquiry to investigate the Hamas attack. Netanyahu’s coalition on Wednesday shot down legislation to force the government to form such a commission.

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