According to documents, emails and interviews, Israeli officials received an October 7 Hamas battle plan for the terrorist attack more than a year before it was carried out, but deemed it too aspirational and complex for Hamas to implement.
The approximately 40-page document, dubbed “Jericho Wall” by Israeli authorities, provides details of just such a military operation, which resulted in the deaths of some 1,200 people. However, the translated version of the plan lacked the date of the attack, but described a methodical assault aimed at crushing fortifications around the Gaza Strip, capturing Israeli towns and storming key military bases, including the division’s headquarters.
The plan included detailed information on the location and numbers of Israeli military forces, communications hubs and other classified data. It raised questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks within Israeli security services.
The document was widely circulated among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of this scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’ capabilities, according to the documents and officials. It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders have seen the document.
Officials privately acknowledge that if the military had taken the warnings seriously and deployed significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas launched the attack, Israel could have mitigated the assaults or perhaps even prevented them.
Israeli security officials have already admitted that they failed to protect the country, and the government is expected to convene a commission to examine the events leading up to the attacks.
The Jericho Wall document exposes a series of flawed decisions that culminated in the worst failure of Israeli intelligence since the surprise attack that led to the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
At the core of all these failures was the single, incorrect belief that Hamas did not have the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. Officials said this belief was so ingrained in the Israeli government that they ignored mounting evidence to the contrary.
Officials did not disclose how they obtained the Jericho wall document, but it was among several versions of attack plans assembled over the years. For instance, a 2016 Ministry of Defence memorandum seen by the Times reads:
“Hamas intends to move the next confrontation into Israeli territory.”
One of the most important objectives outlined in the document was the capture of the Israeli military base at Re’im, where the Gaza unit in charge of defending the region was stationed. Hamas accomplished that goal on October 7, breaking through Re’im and seizing parts of the base.
Last year, after Israel received the Jericho Wall document, the Gaza military unit prepared its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan. However, the Gaza unit referred to the scheme as a “compass.” To put it another way, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go, but had not yet arrived there.
In short, let’s wait patiently.
Despite the dire nature, none of the emails claimed that war would be inevitable. The failure to connect the dots echoed another analytical error from more than two decades ago, when US authorities also had numerous indications that the terrorist group al-Qaeda was preparing an attack.
The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon were largely a failure of analysis and imagination, the government commission concluded.
“The Israeli intelligence failure on October 7 is sounding more and more like our 9/11. The failure will be a gap in analysis to paint a convincing picture to military and political leadership that Hamas had the intention to launch the attack when it did.”
