This is the question that everyone has - October 7 - How Did We Get Here?
We are continuously
learning of more and more of the information that the powers that be had prior
to October 7 and did little to nothing. So much is still not known. Most will come out in
the Official Committee of Inquiry after the war, but some of that information
will not be made public due to security concerns.
Following is
the information that is public knowledge as of today and is documented. It is presented relatively chronologically but
some aspects ran in parallel throughout same and different periods of time.
1. Six years ago,
Hamas launched its own television station: Al-Aqsa TV. The station quickly
became a highly-effective propaganda tool, which Hamas continues to use to
preach its message of hatred of the West, Jews, and Israel.
“A fictional series on Palestinian TV last year seemingly
predicted key elements of Hamas’ Oct. 7 sneak assault on Israel — from the
terrorists’ white vans to targeted kibbutzim and the abduction of Israeli
soldiers.”1
There were so many similarities to the real attack on October
7, such as the white Toyota pick-up trucks fitted with machine guns, attacks on
border Kibbutzim, taking soldiers hostage, cutting off communications which
they did on several of the kibbutzim to prevent them from calling for help,
attacks on and seizing army bases.
At an award presentation for the series,
“Yihya Sinwar (the head of Hamas in Gaza) ominously said at a public ceremony honoring it in 2022 that the
series was “an inseparable part of what we are preparing.” 1
The 30-episode series called ‘Fist of the Free’ was presented
during Ramadan 2022 when viewership is the highest in the Arab and Muslim world.
You can believe that our security and intelligence people
listen and record everything that comes from Hamas TV and radio. (I just learned that some of our security agencies stopped or reduced listening to Hamas radio because they claim there was nothing of interest)
Nothing happened.”
The Hamas Money Machine, at various times was valued at half a billion dollars.
“Israeli leaders believed that Hamas was more interested in governing than
fighting. By the time the agents discovered the ledgers in 2018, the prime
minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was encouraging the government of Qatar to
deliver millions of dollars to the Gaza Strip. He gambled that the money would
buy stability and peace.” 2
Netanyahu was focusing all of his efforts on Iran and getting the US to scrap
the Nuclear Agreement with Iran and he succeeded, which then enabled Iran to
continue developing nuclear material without any international intervention or inspections.
3. In May 2022, a senior analyst (she is a non-commissioned office but has considerable seniority) in Intelligence 8200 unit who, over the course of a year put together a mosaic of intelligence information from all of her sources and presented her findings to her commander. It is believed that her document is what is being referred to as the “Jericho Wall” blueprint for a Hamas attack/war. Her findings were very close to the actual attack of breaking through the security fence and the following attacks on army bases and settlements. It detailed rocket attacks to distract Israeli soldiers and send them hurrying into bunkers, and drones to disable the elaborate security measures along the border fence separating Israel and Gaza. Her commanding officer dismissed her analysis and told her it was a figment of her imagination.
4. In July 2023, just a few months before the attack, another veteran analyst in the same 8200 unit confirmed her findings, warning that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint. Again it was presented to the commanding officer who again dismissed their findings.
“I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the
email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, fully matched “the
content of Jericho Wall.”
“It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just a raid on a
village.”3
They weren’t satisfied with their commanding officer's response and were able to arrange for the head of army intelligence to
come to their base to hear their findings. This ability to present to the head
of army intelligence was a lesson from the Yom Kippur War, 50 years ago. It’s a
shame that more lessons weren’t learned and acted on.
Their direct commanding officer was on vacation and when he heard, he cut his
vacation short so as to be there when the head of army intelligence comes. The
head of army intelligence heard the report and also dismissed their findings. Currently, we have no idea if he reported their findings up the military chain or if it ever
reached the Prime Minister.
5. A month before
the attack, Egyptian Intelligence told Israel that something big was going to
happen. “Egypt intelligence official says Israel ignored repeated warnings of
‘something big’” “He said Israeli
officials were focused on the West Bank and played down the threat from Gaza.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is made up of supporters of West
Bank settlers who have demanded a security crackdown there in the face of a
rising tide of violence over the last 18 months.”4 “In one of the
said warnings, Egypt’s Intelligence Minister General Abbas Kamel personally
called Netanyahu only 10 days before the massive attack that Gazans were likely
to do “something unusual, a terrible operation,” according to the Ynet news
site.
“Unnamed Egyptian
officials told the site they were shocked by Netanyahu’s indifference to the
news and said the premier told the minister the military was “submerged” in
troubles in the West Bank.” 4
6. On all of our
borders, we have women soldiers who are the forward observers. Their very important entire job
is to be watching the cameras on the borders through their computers and
reporting on every potential threat or issue. And many of them reported
extraordinarily suspicious activities for months with the highest threat
reported about in the weeks before the attack. They reported on exercises of
the Nukhba forces in training areas that were built to look like border army
bases and settlements. They reported that these ‘exercises’ were not mere
exercises and they were getting ready for something big. On top of that, they
saw a group of senior Hamas officers with their Toyota pickup trucks, the same
used in the attack, on a hill overlooking the security fence with binoculars
looking at every security arrangement on the fences. These are similar to the analysts’ reports from 8200 Unit of Intelligence. The commanding officers
of the observers dismissed all of these reports and we have no idea at this
time, if any of those reports went further up the chain.
Right after the war started, the father of one of these observers was
interviewed on the news. He told of his daughter being home for Shabbat and
breaking down crying. He said that she never discussed what she did or her
observations because they were military secrets and she was forbidden to tell.
On that Shabbat, just a couple of weeks before the attack, she told her parents
that she couldn’t hold it in any longer. She described the situation and their
findings (of all of the female observers on the Gaza border) and the commanders’ refusing
to accept that there was an issue. Since the beginning of the war, more and
more of these observers (currently serving and those who have finished their
service) have been speaking out about
all of their reports being ignored.
*all of the above Israeli intelligence and observer information came from women. Did
that play a part in the dismissal by the senior officers? Another question to
ask is why all of these observers needed to be on the borders and without weapons?
They could easily have performed the same job from anywhere in the country as
they were not physically looking through the cameras. It was all done remotely anyway.
15 of these soldiers were killed on October 7 and another 5 were kidnapped.
“Senior commanders
refused to heed the warnings of the young female surveillance soldiers tasked
with watching the Gaza border in the weeks before the brutal Hamas massacre on
October 7, and the soldiers believe sexism was a factor in their being ignored,
according to a Friday report.
Rather than hide its
plans for the attack, the Hamas terror group was training in plain sight.
Soldiers in the Border Defense Corps who raised the alarm told the Haaretz
daily (Hebrew) they believe sexism played a part in the fact that they were not
heeded.”5
7. I recently found
out about another observation group in the army, the Observation Balloons. All
of the balloon operators are men but the observers are all women. Their
observations were the same as the camera observers and they also reported. I
don’t know to what level their reports got to, if they went past their
commanders. As an aside, one of these balloons crashed in Gaza in June 2022. “Hamas
revealed that the balloon is equipped with six high-resolution cameras with
night and fog visibility, as well as thermal imaging. “We are now working on
re-operating this balloon to use it to monitor the movements of the Israeli
army,” the Hamas official told Al-Monitor. Hamas has been using locally-made
drones and cameras available on the market to monitor Israeli military movements
until now. “6 Was Hamas successful in re-operating the fallen balloon? We don't know. I hope the army does.
8. “Months before Hamas’ October 7 onslaught, the Shin Bet security service received intelligence that the Palestinian terror group was planning to carry out “a big move” shortly after the Jewish High Holy Days — but the information was cast as insignificant.”
“The Shin Bet got the tip during the summer from a human source in the Gaza
Strip who warned Hamas was planning to attack during the week after the Jewish
fast day of Yom Kippur.” This is the first report that we have seen or heard
about that actually had a date of the upcoming attack. “
“The report said the Shin Bet source in Gaza had reported the information to the agency after hearing it from another person who had told him the details. The source’s operator conveyed the raw information to Shin Bet colleagues, but they marked it as insignificant, concluding that “if this really nears implementation, we’ll receive additional intelligence” corroborating it, the report said.”7 The Shin Bet’s response to this report was that the information was not corroborated and that the source was a new source, although they have since admitted that the source had been highly reliable in the past. The head of Shin Bet has said that the intelligence was not passed on to him, he said that the agency won’t be blaming junior officers and admitted that the Shin Bet failed to prevent the attack.
9. “Israeli intelligence the night before the Hamas attack picked up signs of irregular activity among Hamas operatives in Gaza but top IDF and Shin Bet leaders decided not to put military forces on the borders of the enclave on high alert, three Israeli officials told Axios.”8 In the early morning hours before the attack, there was a meeting with the chief of general staff, the head of the Shin Bet and other senior military and intelligence people. They were discussing solid information that was presented and knew absolutely that there was going to be an attack on that day. They believed it would be between 10-20 Hamas terrorist who would attempt to break through the fence and attack. They reported it to Netanyahu’s military attachรฉ. They agreed to continue the meeting later that morning but the attacks started at 6:3am. We have no idea if their report reached the Prime Minister or the Defense Minister.
The head of the Shin Bet did have an elite unit called Tequila sent to the
border. Tequila is a unit that was developed exactly for the purpose of dealing
with a terrorist infiltration but an infiltration of this magnitude was never
imagined. This unit was the first one to arrive on that fateful October 7 morning and
10 Shin Bet members were killed that day.
The big question is, why the hell didn’t they raise the security threat level
for the army bases on the border and the settlements? They didn’t even inform
the army bases about the threat.
10. In the months
prior to the attack, there were a number of terrorist attacks on settlers in the Palestian village of Hurara in the West Bank with some settlers being killed. The settlements
around there are small and the settlers have to go through Hurara to get
anywhere. Ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir together with the settlers had a
sukkah built in the middle of Hurara to show who’s the boss and who owns the
area. They demanded and got full divisions of soldiers to come off the border
to protect this sukkah and the settlers during sukkot, leaving the Gaza border
with far fewer soldiers. For most of the war, this movement of soldiers was
denied but the army admitted it in early December 2023.
“Two companies of troops from the IDF’s Commando Brigade, which were deployed
to the Gaza border during the Jewish holiday season in September and October,
were sent to the West Bank just two days before Hamas’s October 7 massacre,
according to a Monday media report.” 9 In this report, the army
admits moving 100 soldiers from Gaza to Hurara but we must remember that until
December, the army denied taking any soldiers off the border for the sake of
protecting the settlers. I have little doubt that the final number of soldiers
moved from the border will be much higher than the 100 admitted to.
11. When Netanyahu was
first elected Prime Minister in 1996, he made it his mission to assure that the
Oslo Accords wouldn’t go anywhere and that he could always claim that there was
no Palestinian partner for peace. He did all he could to weaken the (what was at
that time, moderate) Palestinian Authority and made sure that Hamas was always
just strong enough to prove his point.
“As far back as December 2012, Mr. Netanyahu told the prominent Israeli
journalist Dan Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a
counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Mr. Margalit, in
an interview, said that Mr. Netanyahu told him that having two strong rivals,
including Hamas, would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian
state.”6
“The conception of Netanyahu over a decade and a half was that if we buy quiet
and pretend the problem isn’t there, we can wait it out and it will fade away,”
said Eyal Hulata, Israel’s national security adviser from July 2021 until the
beginning of this year.” 6
“Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician who is now Mr. Netanyahu’s
finance minister, put it bluntly in 2015, the year he was elected to
Parliament.” “The Palestinian Authority is a burden,” he said. “Hamas is an asset.”10
12. Qatar has been
financing Hamas since 2007 but it became official in 2014 with $30 million a
month cash transfers being coordinated with Israel.
In the weeks before the attack, Qatar asked the head of the Mossad “Does Israel
want the Qatari payments to continue?” And his answer was “yes”.
In a Jerusalem post article in 2019 – “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
defended Israel’s regularly allowing of Qatari funds to be transferred into
Gaza, saying it is part of a broader strategy to keep Hamas and the Palestinian
Authority separate, a source in Monday’s Likud faction meeting said.”11
“Even as the Israeli military obtained battle plans for a Hamas invasion
and analysts observed significant terrorism exercises just over the border in
Gaza, the payments continued. For years, Israeli intelligence officers even
escorted a Qatari official into Gaza, where he doled out money from suitcases
filled with millions of dollars.” 10
13. “Mr. Netanyahu
even lobbied Washington on Qatar’s behalf. In 2017, as Republicans pushed to
impose financial sanctions on Qatar over its support for Hamas, he dispatched
senior defense officials to Washington. The Israelis told American lawmakers
that Qatar had played a positive role in the Gaza Strip, according to three
people familiar with the trip.” 10
In 2020, Netanyahu sent the head of the Mossad and a senior military person to
Qatar to beg that they continue making the payments in Gaza.
14. Qatar has
provided Hamas in the Gaza Strip with over $1.1 billion from 2012 to 2018, with
the approval of the Israeli government. Some say it is closer to $1.5 billion and others say it is even greater than that.
Netanyahu and the security establishment were convinced over years that Hamas
could be mollified and deterred with the money and work permits. My brother, Dr. Gershon Baskin who has spent more time talking to Hamas than anyone in Israel
except the prisons authority has always said that they can’t be mollified and
we can never have peace with them, only long term ceasefire - Hudna
15. Now about the
tunnels. It turns out that the army and all of our intelligence agencies were
very well aware of the continuing building of Hamas tunnels.
The “spaghetti” of Hamas tunnels (as
the army is calling it) has exposed major intelligence blunders and
miscalculations. There was a feeling in the army and intelligence community
that Hamas will not be using tunnels for attacks in Israel since we built the
“anti-tunnel” fence that went deep underground along the border. They
calculated that Hamas had 100-200 kilometers of tunnels. Currently, with the
exposure of so many tunnels, it is estimated that they have between 500-750 kilometers
of tunnels that go much deeper, wider and longer than anything they imagined.
The intelligence and army also knew that Hamas was continuing to dig tunnels
after the implementation of the anti-tunnel fence, never knowing that they
managed to smuggle in a huge boring machine that easily digs tunnels big enough
for trucks to go through. Just like all of the multiple defensive measures at
the border, the $1.5 billion fence, the cameras, the spy balloons and other
measures that all failed primarily due to arrogance, the worries about the
tunnels ended when they placed the deep anti-tunnel wall. The question,
apparently never asked, is if they aren’t going to use the tunnels for attacks,
then why are they still digging them. If it was asked, the question got buried
by arrogance. One answer to the question is Hamas’ strategic plan to have the
underground city from which to attack Israeli ground forces which they knew
would come after an attack like October 7. As a matter of fact, in the first
weeks of the war, Hamas and many in the Arab world believed that Israel was not
reporting the hundreds (possibly thousands) of soldiers killed by Hamas booby
traps and ambushes from the tunnels. This brings us to another issue. The army
has stated on a few occasions that they have complete or almost complete
control over large sections in Gaza. And then we see more soldiers being killed
in those areas through booby traps and ambushes and much of this is the result
of the use of the huge network of Hamas tunnels. Until the army can make the
same statement about control of the underground of Gaza, we don’t have real
control.
How do I sum
up the question of how and why we got to October 7, 2023? We can go back to
2005 when Arik Sharon was Prime Minister and unilaterally left the Gaza Strip
in the name of security. We left and Sharon closed the border. The closing of
the border was both tactical and strategic. He knew that with a closed border,
the administration of Gaza would fail miserably and he could point to that failure
as an excuse not to negotiate with the Palestinians for a state in the West
Bank. Although the idea of disengagement from Gaza had been thrown about through
a few different administrations, “Sharon’s plan was born to fight against the
popularity that the Geneva initiative was gaining around the world and
especially in Washington.”12 There were elections in Gaza and Hamas
won. The population of Gazan voters didn’t necessarily vote for the religious fundamentalist
ideology of Hamas but more as a vote against the PLO and wanting different
leadership. The outcome of the elections
is well known. A ‘civil war’ between the PLO and Hamas broke out with many
killed and many acts of revenge between the 2 factions including kidnapping
members and throwing them off the roof of 15 story buildings. Hamas won and
kicked the PLO out of Gaza. Since then, there have been many attempts at reconciliation
between these factions and they have all failed.
Or do we go
back to Begin and Shamir who actually helped fund the start of Hamas. They
wanted an alternative to the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian
people and thought that they could block Arafat’s rising popularity in the
Occupied Territories. “Seeking to undermine Arafat’s popularity in the Occupied
Territories, Begin’s government approved an application from a 42-year old
quadriplegic religious leader in the Gaza Strip, Sheik Ahmad Yassin, to license
his humanitarian organization, the Islamic Association. Later, with the
explosion of the first Intifada (1987-1993), the Islamic Association launched a military
arm called Hamas.”13
“Over the objections of many Palestinian Islamic leaders including the
Commissioner of the Muslim Waqf in the Gaza Strip, Rafat Abu Shaban, Israel
registered the newly formed “Islamic Association” which Yassin founded.
Yassin was
willing to cooperate with the Likud government because he, too, shared the goal
of undermining Arafat’s secular influence over the Palestinians. More
importantly, and in line with Likud policies, he sought to block the creation
of a Palestinian State based on land-for-peace.” 13
Yes, it
could be said that Begin and Shamir had their hands dirtied in the formations
of Hamas and Sharon went ever further by ‘providing’ them with a parcel of land
to govern which would become the Palestinian Capital of Terrorism, but these
events could be considered ancient history.
While so
much is still unknown and it will take years for us to get a much bigger and
clearer picture of the real events that led to October 7 (and much information that
will stay secret for the next 50 years as per State Security protocol), all of
what I have written above gives us a pretty good idea of what happened, what
didn’t happen, who acted and who didn’t act. We don’t yet know who exactly knew
what and who didn’t know. Based on all
the above data, the Intelligence agencies senior officers and politically
appointed heads, the top army Staff Officers including the Chief of General Staff
and most of all, Prime Minister Netanyahu who has been PM for most of the last
20 years, all knew so much of what I have presented. Without knowing specifics
of decisions made and not made, everyone, and I mean everyone knows that they
all failed us and broke the sacred covenant that the country has with its
citizens; to provide safety and security. With their negligence and arrogance, they
took away our feelings that our homes are our safe havens and that we have a government
and an army behind us. After October 7th, if we were to ask anyone
who has been living on the Gaza border, and most likely those on the northern
border, if they feel that they are protected by the government and the army,
the answer will be a resounding ‘NO!” There are many people responsible for
what led up to October 7 but none more so than Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
3.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html
6.
https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/06/27/hamas-israel-surveillance-balloon/
7.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/report-shin-bet-dismissed-tip-on-hamas-plans-timing-for-major-attack/
8.
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/12/hamas-attack-israel-intelligence-failure-high-alert-shen-bet
10.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html
12.
Gershon Baskin in comments
to this author
13.
https://thearabdailynews.com/2018/05/10/how-israel-helped-midwife-the-birth-of-hamas/
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