IDF chief admits: First troops only reached Kibbutz Nir Oz after last terrorists had left

In further remarks by IDF chief Herzi Halevi on the IDF’s October 7 failures, broadcast tonight on Channel 12, he addresses the fact that the first IDF troops did not reach Kibbutz Nir Oz, where a quarter of residents were killed or kidnapped, until the last terrorists had gone.

Speaking to local council chiefs in southern Israel, Halevi says a lot has been said in the media about too many troops going to Sderot, the Gaza border town that was among the many communities attacked. Two sets of forces were dispatched to Nir Oz, he says, but they got caught up in other battles en route and did not reach the kibbutz. “The results were terrible. As someone from Nir Oz told me, the first soldier arrived after the last terrorist had left. That’s the worst thing that we could hear.”

Halevi says that the absent intelligence material “in this war was a big part of the failure. We would have wanted advance warning, we would have wanted to know [what was about to happen]. That could have changed the reality. We didn’t get it…”

He then discusses the indications of Hamas planning something that were received in the hours before the invasion. “The central question here is: could we have understood what was received that night differently, and obviously then to have made different decisions.”

He notes the fact that Hamas terrorists turned on Israeli SIM cards on Friday evening, October 6, and that this was reported by IDF intelligence. But, he says, this had happened “in the previous year… 10-12 times.” It was checked, he says.

He says the movements of senior Hamas figures were also checked.

The checks indicated that what was going on was “routine” and that there were “good alternative explanations” for what was happening in Gaza.

For instance, he says, Hamas, in the weeks ahead of its invasion and massacre, “was mainly discussing directing attacks from Gaza to be carried out in the West Bank.”

This had been raised with the political leadership, he says, and had prompted talk about carrying out “targeted strikes [on key Hamas figures] in Gaza.”

“A lot of what we saw [in the hours before the invasion], we attributed to their knowledge that the cabinet on Sunday might approve a further targeted strike,” Halevi says.

Halevi says the IDF’s top brass were updated on the worrying indications from Gaza at about 3 a.m. on October 7 and that this was unduly late: “The General Staff, me included, entered the picture at about 3 a.m. I think that was too late. The first signs came at 9 to 9:30 on the [previous] evening… But they were insufficient…”

He says it is not the case that officers were wary of waking up the chief of staff. Rather, “everyone who was looking [at the information] believed [what they were seeing in Gaza] was not about to happen now or tomorrow. [They thought]: There is something. It’s not clear. It’s not [something to justify an urgent] alert.”

Summing up the “main failures,” Halevi says: “The level of alert was not raised.” He adds: “Too many things [that were unfolding in Gaza] were unclear…” And, he says, the IDF needed to be “sharper, and we erred.”

During the IDF’s subsequent probe of that night, he says, a chart had been drawn up that shows, “This is what we knew that night, and this is what we should have known that night.”

When you look at those two sets of data, says Halevi, “and especially at the differences between them, you say, If [only] there had been a single person who had seen that whole chart on that night.”