Lt. Col. Aryeh Amidror named as Gaza Division intel officer involved in Oct. 7 failures

The Supreme Court on Thursday permitted the publication of the name of 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.

Lt. Col. Aryeh Amidror 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.

Amidror had dismissed detailed warnings from a female noncommissioned officer about signs of a looming onslaught as “completely imaginary.”

In November 2025, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir dismissed several senior officers, including Amidror, over their roles in the failures of October 7, 2023.

But only last month was Amidror officially released from service, after fighting his ousting in court for months. Amidror also appealed against the publication of his name, even though it had long circulated online.

Amidror’s father, retired general and former national security adviser Yaakov Amidror, has been regularly interviewed on Israeli television on security matters without disclosing his son’s role in the disaster, and once said he opposed a state commission of inquiry into October 7.

Unlike other top officers who resigned over their involvement in the failures on October 7, Amidror 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, Amidror 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 Amidror, in the lead-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.

That 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 Hamas plans, dubbed by Israel 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.”

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

The Jericho Wall plan was actualized shortly thereafter 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, Amidror 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.