Mivtahim residents held the line as Hamas invaded, preventing deadlier outcome — probe

Members of a local security squad, together with armed civilians and an off-duty soldier, managed to repel dozens of Hamas-led terrorists who infiltrated Mivtahim, a town on the southern Gaza border, on October 7, 2023, despite what the Israel Defense Forces has now acknowledged as a failure to protect the community.

According to the findings of an IDF probe published Friday, around 25 terrorists attempted to overrun the Gaza border community in the early hours of the October 7 onslaught. The probe, led by Col. David Ron, determined that the response by the military was delayed and inadequate, leaving the moshav to fend for itself in the face of an organized assault.

The investigation spanned approximately nine months and drew on a wide range of sources, including interviews with combat personnel, reviews of operational logs, surveillance footage, observation reports, radio recordings and transcripts, maps recovered from the attackers and various intelligence materials.

“The IDF failed in its mission to defend Moshav Mivtahim,” the investigation concluded. However, it credited the bravery and determination of the local civil defense squad — led by Dan Asulin, the head of the moshav’s local security team — with saving lives and halting what could have been a far deadlier attack.

The fighting left five defenders dead: four members of the standby squad — Asulin, Gil Avital, Lior Ben Yaakov and Tal Maman — and one IDF soldier, Staff Sgt. Itay Nachmias. At least four terrorists were killed, three were apprehended, and others fled the area or were injured.

The investigation revealed that Mivtahim’s defense squad, although fully staffed, was not fully armed or trained due to outdated directives that left many members without sufficient weapons or combat gear.

Reinforcements were slow to arrive, the probe said, due to the scale of the October 7 attack across southern Israel, which saw Hamas forces infiltrate dozens of communities simultaneously, paralyzing much of the IDF’s response chain.

The 80th Edom Regional Division, responsible for the area, was stretched thin trying to protect all of it. The probe found that the military’s delayed arrival contributed to the moshav’s prolonged exposure to danger.

Despite these disadvantages, local fighters and volunteers from the nearby Yesha moshav, along with Nachmias, an off-duty soldier from the IDF’s Multidomain Unit, engaged the terrorists in direct firefights inside the community.

Timeline of the attack

The assault began at 6:35 a.m., when terrorists were spotted advancing toward Mivtahim, following Hamas’s massive barrage of rockets from Gaza toward Israeli communities in the western Negev and elsewhere around the country.

Within minutes, Asulin, the local security team chief, activated the civil defense squad via WhatsApp. By 7 a.m., reports of contact with terrorists began to emerge, and defenders positioned themselves at the community’s main junction.

By 8 a.m., terrorists had breached the perimeter from the west, launching grenades into residential areas and engaging in house-to-house combat. Fierce fighting followed near the synagogue and the central roundabout.

Between 8:24 and 8:30 a.m., three defenders — including two local security team members and the off-duty soldier — were killed in a shootout while attempting to block the terrorists from advancing further into the community. Minutes later, the two additional defenders were killed in separate exchanges of fire near the seniors’ club and kindergarten.

Throughout the fighting, residents sought shelter in reinforced rooms. In at least one case, a family successfully fought off intruding gunmen from inside their safe room.

By 9:40 a.m., surviving terrorists began fleeing, stealing civilian vehicles to escape.

At 10:27 a.m., a second group of terrorists attempted to infiltrate Mivtahim but was quickly repelled by an IDF LOTAR counterterrorism unit, which had reached the community on foot after arriving by air three kilometers away.

Additional IDF and police reinforcements began entering the area around 11:00 a.m., conducting sweeps alongside special units. By 12:50 p.m., command of the moshav’s defense was handed to a surviving local security team member, who assumed the role of acting head of the team after Asulin was killed.

Between 1:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m., troops captured three terrorists who had been hiding in a residential courtyard after tying up foreign workers. Medical teams treated wounded civilians, evacuating one to Soroka Hospital in Beersheba.

Full control of the moshav was only secured after 1:00 a.m. on October 8, when a unit from the IDF Border Defense Array School took over. ZAKA volunteers began taking away the dead shortly thereafter, with the final clearance completed by 7:00 p.m. that evening — nearly 36 hours after the attack began.