Israel knew of Hamas’ attack plan over a year ago

Israeli officials obtained Hamas’ battle plan for the October 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it occurred, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials have dismissed the plan as ambitious, finding it too difficult for Hamas to implement.

The roughly 40-page document, codenamed “Jericho Wall” by Israeli authorities, outlined point by point exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.

The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not specify a date for the attack but described a methodical assault intended to overwhelm fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.

Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the start of the attack, drones to disable the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and armed men rushing into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot. happened on October 7.

The plan also included details on the location and size of Israeli forces, communications centers and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks within Israel’s security establishment.

The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’ capabilities, documents and officials said. It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders have also seen the document.

Last year, shortly after the document was obtained, officials from the Israeli army’s Gaza division, which is responsible for defending the Gaza border, said Hamas’s intentions were unclear.

“It is not yet possible to determine whether the plan has been fully accepted and how it will be manifested,” said a military assessment reviewed by The Times.

Then, in July, just three months before the attacks, a senior analyst from Unit 8200, Israel’s intelligence service, warned that Hamas had conducted an intensive, daylong training exercise similar to what was outlined in the blueprint.

But a colonel in the Gaza division dismissed her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by The Times.

“I strongly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas exercise, she said, fully corresponded to “the content of Jericho Wall.”

“It’s a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just an attack on a village.”

Officials privately admit that if Israel had taken these warnings seriously and sent significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas was attacking, Israel could have weakened or possibly even prevented the attacks.

Instead, the Israeli army was unprepared when terrorists poured out of the Gaza Strip. It was the deadliest day in Israel’s history.

Israeli security officials have already acknowledged their failure to protect the country, and the government is expected to set up a commission to study the events that led to the attacks. The Jericho Wall document exposes a years-long series of missteps that culminated in what officials now consider the worst failure of Israeli intelligence since the surprise attack that led to the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

Underlying all these failures was a single, fatally incorrect belief that Hamas did not have the ability to attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so deeply ingrained in the Israeli government, officials said, that they ignored growing evidence to the contrary.

The Israeli army and the Israeli Security Service, which is responsible for counter-terrorism in Gaza, declined to comment.

Officials would not say how they obtained the Jericho Wall document, but it was one of many versions of attack plans collected over the years. For example, a 2016 Defense Ministry memorandum seen by The Times states: “Hamas plans to move the next confrontation to Israeli territory.”

Such an attack would most likely involve hostage taking and “occupying an Israeli community (and perhaps even some communities),” the memo reads.

The Jericho Wall document, named after the ancient fortifications in today’s West Bank, was even more explicit. It details rocket attacks to distract Israeli soldiers and rush them into bunkers, and drones to take out the extensive security measures along the border fence separating Israel and Gaza.

Hamas fighters would then break through sixty points in the wall and storm the border with Israel. The document starts with a quote from the Quran: “Surprise them through the gate. If you do that, you will surely triumph.”

The same phrase has been widely used by Hamas in its videos and statements since October 7.

One of the main objectives outlined in the document was to overrun the Israeli military base in Re’im, home to the Gaza division responsible for protecting the region. Other bases under the division’s command were also listed.

Hamas carried out that objective on October 7, sweeping through Re’im and capturing parts of the base.

The boldness of the blueprint, officials said, made it easy to underestimate. All armies write plans that they never use, and Israeli officials believed that even if Hamas invaded, it could muster a force of a few dozen, not the hundreds that would eventually attack.

Israel had also misinterpreted Hamas’s actions. The group had negotiated permits to allow Palestinians to work in Israel, which Israeli officials took as a sign that Hamas was not seeking war.

But Hamas had been drawing up attack plans for many years, and Israeli officials had obtained earlier versions of them. What could have been an intelligence coup turned into one of the worst miscalculations in Israel’s 75-year history.

In September 2016, the Office of the Minister of Defense put together a top-secret memorandum based on a much earlier version of a Hamas attack plan. The memorandum, which was signed by then-Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, said an invasion and hostage taking “would lead to serious damage to the consciousness and morale of the citizens of Israel.”

The memo, seen by The Times, said Hamas had purchased advanced weapons, GPS jammers and drones. It also said Hamas had expanded its fighting force to 27,000 people – after adding 6,000 to its ranks over a two-year period. Hamas had hoped to reach 40,000 by 2020, the memo said.

Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the Gaza military division prepared its own intelligence report on this latest invasion plan.

Hamas had “decided to plan a new attack, of unprecedented scale,” analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said Hamas planned to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” aimed at overwhelming the divisions.

But the Gaza Division called the plan a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go, but had not yet gotten there.

On July 6, 2023, the veteran analyst from Unit 8200 wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises supervised by senior Hamas commanders.

The training included shooting down Israeli planes and taking over a kibbutz and military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the attack plan on the Jericho Wall, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times.

The analyst warned that the exercise was closely aligned with the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out.

The Gaza division colonel welcomed the analysis, but said the exercise was part of a “totally fanciful” scenario and was not indicative of Hamas’s ability to pull it off.

“In short, let us wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.

The back and forth continued, with some colleagues supporting the analyst’s original conclusion. She soon drew on the lessons of the 1973 war, in which Syrian and Egyptian armies overran Israeli defenses. Israeli forces regrouped and repulsed the invasion, but the intelligence failures have long served as a lesson to Israeli security officials.

“Fifty years ago we already lived through a similar experience on the southern front in connection with a scenario that seemed imaginary, and history can repeat itself if we are not careful,” the analyst wrote to her colleagues.

Although ominous, none of the emails predicted that war was imminent. Nor did the analyst dispute the conventional wisdom among Israeli intelligence officials that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was not interested in war with Israel. But she rightly judged that Hamas’s capabilities had improved dramatically. The gap between the possible and the ambitious had narrowed considerably.

The inability to connect the dots reflected another analytical failure more than two decades ago, when U.S. authorities also had multiple indications that the terrorist group Al Qaeda was preparing an attack. The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were largely a failure of analysis and imagination. a government commission concluded.

“Israeli’s intelligence failure on October 7 is starting to look more and more like our September 11,” said Ted Singer, a recently retired senior CIA official who worked extensively in the Middle East. “The failure will be a gap in the analysis to paint a convincing picture to military and political leaders that Hamas intended to launch the attack when it did.”