Police said to launch probe into its Oct. 7 response, nearly two years later

Police have quietly launched a probe assessing law enforcement’s response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas assault, some 22 months after it occurred, the Walla news outlet reported Tuesday.

The report cited an internal letter sent last month by Israel Police chief Danny Levy to officers and retirees in the force, announcing the investigation and requesting their participation.

The letter stressed that the probe would not place blame on individual officers and would draw only “operational and organizational conclusions,” signaling a similar approach to that of the IDF, whose probes also skirt questions of personal responsibility.

“There will be no personal conclusions. All findings and conclusions that are formulated will be translated solely into operational and organizational conclusions, which will be used for effective organizational learning and strengthening emergency preparedness,” read Levy’s letter, as reported by Walla.

After Levy earlier this year announced the formation of a special team to investigate law enforcement’s conduct on October 7, police have kept most details of the investigation under wraps.

Former deputy police commissioner David Bitan was appointed to oversee the probe, which was to examine “what exactly happened during the entire incident, not just the particulars,” the Israel Police confirmed at the time. The retired officer served for a period as the commander in the force’s Southern District before becoming the force’s deputy chief, and retired months before October 7.

Police already conducted one smaller-scale probe into the fighting that took place in Kibbutz Be’eri on the morning of Hamas’s invasion.

Though law enforcement declined to reveal their findings to the public, they presented in March the general takeaways to the bereaved families of eight officers and one civilian who entered the embattled kibbutz in two armored jeeps, and were ambushed by Hamas gunmen.

A previous investigation, carried out under former police chief Kobi Shabtai in 2024, largely heaped blame on the IDF for failing to provide police with intelligence or signs indicating an impending attack. But the lack of coordination within law enforcement also seemed to have hampered security forces’ response that morning.

The Haaretz newspaper reported in March that senior officers in the Southern District had been unaware that members of Yamam, the police’s elite counterterrorism unit, were deployed to the Gaza border overnight, ahead of the attack.

The forces had been sent to the border after receiving warnings from the Shin Bet related to intelligence that terror operatives in Gaza had activated Israeli SIM cards in their phones, just hours before the invasion. The development was not assessed at the time by intelligence bodies as credible signs that Hamas was preparing to invade.