Extensive, detailed foreknowledge and escalating inflammatory actions prior to October 7th suggest Israel provoked Al-Aqsa Flood as a pretext for ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza.

In this post I argue that Israel intentionally provoked and facilitated the Hamas attack on October 7th, 2023 to create a pretext for its ongoing US-backed ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. Israeli officials knowingly pushed Hamas toward violence with a series of inflammatory actions and statements while the IDF amassed a mountain of detailed, concrete intelligence that Hamas was planning a major cross-border multisite massacre and hostage-taking operation. The IDF left the Gaza border unusually vulnerable and allowed an enormous festival to take place undefended in an area of maximal danger despite multiple warnings from inside and outside the security apparatus.

During the attack, a large and indeterminate number of Israelis were killed by the IDF under official orders to prevent the kidnapping of hostages no matter the cost (the Hannibal directive). Almost immediately, Israeli officials fabricated a series of allegations of grotesque atrocities supposedly committed by Hamas, including systematic mass rape and targeted mass beheadings and burnings of infants. Since then, the events (real and fake) of October 7th have served as public justifications for the actions Israel has taken to achieve its long-standing goal: the elimination of the Palestinian people. Below I lay out the evidence for all of those statements (and more), followed by a timeline with articles and excerpts demonstrating detailed Israeli foreknowledge of the attack.

Also, as a special extension to this post, the great Graph Follow (Twitter handle: @GraphFollow, email: graphfollow@protonmail.com) constructed an interactive, scrollable version of the article’s timeline of Israeli foreknowledge of October 7th. Unfortunately Substack doesn’t allow rich embeds like that, so I can’t directly place it in the article, but below is a link to this awesome piece of work:

Click here to scroll an interactive timeline from Graph Follow describing Israeli foreknowledge of the October 7th attack.

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“Major Points of Hamas Infiltration” (Source).

Introduction

It’s been half a year since October 7th, 2023, when Hamas launched its massive cross-border attack from Gaza into Israel (“Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”), killing and capturing hundreds of Israeli soldiers and civilians. The scale and success of the incursion seems to have surprised even the attackers, with Hamas representative Ali Barakeh noting the ease with which Israel’s defenses dissolved: “We were expecting to get a smaller number of hostages and return, but the army collapsed in front of us, what were we to do?”

In response (“Operation Swords of Iron”), Israel has displaced all of the 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza, destroyed most of the homes and infrastructure in the territory, and, as of April 24th, 2024, killed more than 42,000 people, including nearly 16,000 children (those numbers include several thousand missing people who are presumed to be dead beneath rubble). Given the near-total collapse of Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure, a large number of deaths go uncounted. Famine and disease are beginning to kill as well. Many officials within the Israeli government support plans to transfer some or all of the Palestinian population out of Gaza to other nations, a process they have euphemistically termed “voluntary migration.”

Notably, this push mirrors previous attempts by the Israeli government to expel Gazans. Several key ministers in the Israeli government recently attended a “Resettle Gaza” conference that called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and reintroduction of Israeli settlements into the territory. Despite issuing multiple public rejections of a Palestinian population transfer, as of February Egypt was reportedly preparing a camp to concentrate fleeing Gazans in the Sinai.

In other words, Israel appears to be capitalizing on the October 7th attack to achieve some of its long-held genocidal ambitions for the Palestinian people. The Hamas incursion has seemingly provided them with an excuse to make a serious effort at forcing Palestinians out of Gaza and integrating the region into what certain ethnoreligious radicals refer to as “Greater Israel” — a vision in which the state of Israel cements permanent political control over the occupied Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank. In addition to the oft-invoked argument that God promised these lands to the Jews, there are major economic incentives for Israel to annex Gaza and expel the Palestinian people.

Natural gas reserves worth many billions of dollars are located off the territory’s coast, and in the months before the attack, Israel announced plans to move foreward with development of the fields. Similarly, in recent years there has been renewed interest in the creation of the Ben-Gurion Canal, an Israel-controlled alternative to the Suez Canal. Diverting the Ben-Gurion Canal through Gaza would significantly shorten it, conceivably saving billions of dollars (the total cost of construction for the canal with its current, non-Gaza-crossing design is estimated to be between $16 billion and $55 billion).

These considerations raise a disturbing question: Is it possible that the Israeli government facilitated the unprecedented attack by Hamas in order to create a pretext for a “defensive war” aimed at ethnically cleansing Gaza? On its face it is a far-fetched idea, but I think there’s a strong case to be made.

Strategic Provocation

From where I stand, it looks like the October 7th attack was a particularly consequential result of what former CIA branch chief & US Army psychological operations team leader JD Maddox has termed “strategic provocation.” In “How to Start a War: Eight Cases of Strategic Provocation,” an article published in 2016 in the journal Narrative and Conflict: Explorations in Theory and Practice, Maddox introduces the concept as follows:

“Strategic provocation has been a consistent prelude to war. A leader intent on starting a war must develop a compelling narrative for their domestic constituency and the international community. For some, strategic provocation– defined here as the use of deceptive tactics to instigate violence against one’s own state — has been a reliable means of initiating war under the guise of self-defense.”

Is it possible that Israel engaged in “the use of deceptive tactics to instigate violence” against itself? Compare the above excerpt with the language used by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an interview he gave to shit-head propagandist Douglas Murray in January of 2024:

“We couldn’t get the domestic consensus to make…a definitive solution to the problem of Hamas. That is, no one would agree across the Israeli public to go in and basically destroy Hamas—go throughout Gaza and destroy Hamas. We didn’t have the international consensus either; nobody would understand why are we doing it. Both conditions were created because of the Hamas, uh, savage attack on Israel on October 7th.”

Side-by-side, those two quotes make it clear that, prior to October 7th, Israel faced the exact set of problems that strategic provocation operations are deployed to solve—they did not have the domestic or international consensus required to invade and destroy Gaza. According to Netanyahu, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood created both of those conditions. Nissim Vaturi, a Knesset member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, attributed the attack to Divine Providence: “We were meant to fight this war against Hamas, as is happening now, and luckily for us it came from the heavens.”

It’s easy to imagine that factions within the Israeli government might have determined that the narrative benefits of allowing a major attack by Hamas would outweigh the (undeniably burdensome) costs. Furthermore, Maddox’s description of the conditions that typically give rise to strategic provocation fits Israel/Palestine like a glove:

“At their most basic, these narrative operations are premised upon enduring brinkmanship between two opposing forces that are usually intent on securing sovereignty or land, often despite popular distaste for violence. Provocation occurs because an aggressor sees the need to develop a narrative justifying his own unpalatable, violent intentions. And while a zeitgeist of animosity may haunt both parties of an argument, provocation operations are deliberately planned to trigger a climax of violence that would not occur without some devilry.”

Of course, that doesn’t prove anything, but the case is strengthened when we compare the situation between Israel and Hamas before, during, and after October 7th with the specific signatures of strategic provocation that Maddox lays out in his article. He claims to have identified ten steps that provide “a pattern that can be used by observers to discover impending or past operations.” Steps one through four are carried out by the provoking state in the lead-up to the desired attack, steps five and six occur during the provoked violence, and steps seven through ten describe the immediate escalatory responses of the provoking state. The steps are:

1. Popular narrative development (lead-up to attack)
2. Impossible demands (lead-up to attack)
3. Military/political “noise” (lead-up to attack)
4. Narrative escalation (lead-up to attack)
5. Intentional personnel sacrifice (during attack)
6. Cross-border lures (during/just before attack)
7. Atrocity allegation (during/immediately after attack)
8. Rapid condemnation (immediately after attack)
9. Pre-positioned response force (during/immediately after attack)
10. Rapid post-condemnation violence (immediately after attack)

(1) Popular Narrative Development

The first step that Maddox identifies, popular narrative development, prepares the ground for the operation, priming the domestic population to respond to the planned violence with particular interpretations dictated by political/economic elites. This can be a long-term process, and in Israel the fundamental narrative underlying the existence of the state is essentially that the Jewish people have a God-given right to what they consider their ancestral land (including the West Bank and Gaza) regardless of what anyone else says about it.

Clearly the seeds for the ongoing expulsion and violence in Gaza are part of the DNA of the Zionist project, and this framing permeates the society and influences how many Israelis conceive of their personal identity and values. This allows any form of resistance to the occupation by Palestinians (peaceful or not) to be recast as prima facie evidence for irrational, antisemitic hatred and instrumentalized toward a narrative of victimization for Israel. In that sense, the background popular narrative development preceding this provocation operation was already part and parcel of Israeli culture.

(2) Impossible Demands

According to Maddox, the state that is attempting to provoke its adversary frequently makes impossible demands which, “when unmet, provide the fodder an aggressor needs to further develop his self-victimizing narrative domestically, and to develop his official casus belli among the international community.” Over the past year and a half, the Israeli government has signaled absolute opposition to the creation of any truly sovereign Palestinian state, essentially promising to enforce permanent occupation and demanding that Palestinians shut up and take it.

As reported in Middle East Monitor, in December 2022, shortly before re-ascending to the office of Prime Minister, Netanyahu explicitly ruled out the idea of a Palestinian state that administers its own security: “‘The only peace that will hold is one that we can defend,’ Netanyahu told [NPR]. ‘And the one that we can defend is one in which the Palestinians have all the powers to govern themselves, but none of the powers to threaten our lives.’” Similarly, according to Arab News, Netanyahu stated that “Palestinian hopes of establishing a sovereign state ‘must be eliminated’” in a closed-door meeting of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament). In a document titled “Our Narrative…Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas explicitly cites statements like these as playing a significant role in triggering the attack:

“The Israeli officials confirmed at several occasions their absolute rejection to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Just one month before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a map of a so-called ‘New Middle East,’ depicting ‘Israel’ stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea including the West Bank and Gaza. The entire world at that – UN General Assembly’s – podium were silent towards his speech full of arrogance and ignorance towards the rights of the Palestinian people.”

Below you can see an image of Netanyahu at the UN General Assembly less than a month before October 7th, 2023, holding up the map excluding Palestine referred to in the above quote:

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds a map of ‘The New Middle East’ without Palestine during his September 22, 2023 address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)” – Common Dreams – (Archived link)

It’s hard to think of a more impossible demand than, “You are going to live under our dominion indefinitely.” On August 9th, 2023, Middle East Monitor quoted Hamas spokesman Jehad Taha as saying, “Repeated statements made by the occupation Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he will not allow the establishment of a Palestinian state proves his fascism. […] Such remarks emphasise Netanyahu’s hostile and aggressive plans towards the Palestinians.”

(3) Military/Political “Noise”

It’s less clear whether military/political “noise” was deliberately deployed by the Israeli government in advance of October 7th, but the political environment was undoubtedly noisy. Throughout 2023 (until October 7th) Israel was rocked by mass protests over the Netanyahu government’s attempts to neuter the Israeli judiciary (an effort with an “ultimate purpose” to “annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population” according to an open letter signed by several hundred academics and celebrities from the United States and Israel). An Israeli military intelligence official reportedly warned Netanyahu in March and July that “the sociopolitical crisis that rocked Israel was encouraging Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas to risk action against Israel, even simultaneously.” Potentially of note, the New York Times reported in April that leaked Pentagon documents suggested that Israel’s Mossad intelligence service played a role in fomenting those protests (which may have ultimately included several million participants).

(4) Narrative Escalation

The Israeli government was very clearly engaged in narrative escalation (Maddox’s fourth criterion for identifying strategic provocation operations) toward the Palestinian people prior to the October 7th attack. In addition to the aforementioned rejections of a sovereign Palestinian state, shortly after taking office Netanyahu stated in a series of tweets that “[t]he Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. […] The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.” Netanyahu’s powerful finance minister Bezalel Smotrich explicitly called for a Palestinian village in the West Bank to be “wiped out” and later directly denied the existence of the Palestinian people: “Is there a Palestinian history or culture? There is none. […] There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” In June of 2023 this proudly fascist maniac was handed full authority over approval for construction and expansion of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank.

Simultaneously, Netanyahu’s Kahanist National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir spearheaded a series of extremely provocative actions surrounding Al-Aqsa Mosque/Temple Mount, a sacred site for Muslims and Jews that is well-known as a “historical flashpoint” in tensions between Israel and Palestine. In an effort to prevent religious conflict, for decades the reigning status quo at the mosque —enforced by Israel—has been to forbid Jews from praying within its walls. In the weeks before Netanyahu’s coalition took power, Ben Gvir referred to those restrictions as anti-Jewish “apartheid” and signaled his intention to force a change. Responding to Ben Gvir’s appointment within the government, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh stated:

“We will absolutely not permit the implementation of Zionist plans at the al-Aqsa Mosque or in Jerusalem more broadly…The sword of Jerusalem has not and will not be sheathed”

Previous Israeli provocations at the mosque like Ariel Sharon’s visit in 2000 have triggered eruptions in violence like the Second Intifada and 2021’s Israeli massacre in Gaza. In 2023, Ben Gvir visited the temple on three occasions, and he made a defiant show of praying during his second visit. The Jordanian Foreign Ministry explicitly warned that Ben Gvir’s visits threatened “to escalate the situation into more rounds of violence,” and Hamas spokesman Hazem Qasem labeled the visits a “dangerous escalation” and a “provocation.” Israeli police repeatedly conducted raids and mass arrests at the mosque in April of 2023.

Then, just days before the October 7th attack, Jewish settlers stormed the mosque with the direct supervision and support of the Israeli army and the Israeli police (the latter of which is under the direct authority of Ben Gvir as Minister of National Security). Egyptian mediators tasked with easing tensions between Hamas and Israel emphasized that these actions “could have a direct impact on events along the Gaza border.”

(5) Intentional Personnel Sacrifice and (6) Cross-Border Lures

Speaking of warnings from Egypt, ten days before October 7th, Egypt’s intelligence chief personally called Netanyahu and warned him that Hamas was preparing “something unusual, a terrible operation.” The specific nature of the warning hasn’t been made public, but this raises the issue of prior Israeli knowledge of the attack, bringing us to Maddox’s fifth criterion for identifying a strategic provocation operation: intentional personnel sacrifice. Based on the reception to some of my tweets about this issue, this is a pretty controversial topic—as Maddox notes in his article, “Overcoming disbelief in the violent proclivities of their fellow man is a common weakness among observers.” I just ask that you consider the evidence with an open mind. To reiterate, in my opinion, the most parsimonious explanation for the information that is about to be presented is that Israel intentionally chose to allow Al-Aqsa Flood to occur — even acting to increase the operation’s kill count — in order to justify the current paroxysm of violence in Gaza.

Within hours of the initial events on October 7th, seemingly every Very Serious Person arrived at the same conclusion: in a haze of hubris, Israel had experienced a catastrophic “intelligence failure,” underestimating the abilities of Hamas and being caught completely unawares. Before the day had even gone by, one Guardian headline asserted: “Hamas’s murderous attack will be remembered as Israeli intelligence failure for the ages.” The same day, Politico quoted Israel’s former deputy National Security Adviser David Frielich as saying, “It’s a failure in terms of intelligence, operationally. It’s clear we were caught totally unprepared by this.”

On the 8th, Jonathan Panikoff, “former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East, who is now at the Atlantic Council think tank” confidently enlightened the public: “This was an intelligence failure; it could not be otherwise.” In a column titled “Hamas attack is an intelligence failure that may take Israel years to unravel,” famous spook apologist David Ignatius of the Washington Post gave us the inside scoop: “Intelligence failures involve a strange hubris. The tough guys get sucker punched.” On October 9th, that bastion of objectivity The Economist published a story entitled, “Hamas’s attack was an Israeli intelligence failure on multiple fronts.”

This reaction was based on the broad assumption that the attack was a total surprise that caught everyone in the Israeli government off-guard—an impression reinforced by a number of statements from government functionaries both on and off the record. As a representative example, the New York Times reported on October 8th that “American and Israeli officials said none of Israel’s intelligence services had specific warning that Hamas was preparing a sophisticated assault.” In line with this, on October 29th, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted and then deleted a total denial of any foreknowledge of the attack (the image below includes a screenshot of the original tweet and a Google translation from the original Hebrew):

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s total denial of any foreknowledge of the October 7th attack, tweeted and deleted October 29th, 2023.

“Under no circumstances and at no stage was Prime Minister Netanyahu warned of war intentions on the part of Hamas. On the contrary, all the security officials, including the head of the Amman [Israel’s military intelligence directorate] and the head of the Shin Bet [Israel’s domestic intelligence service], estimated that Hamas was deterred and turned to the settlement. This is the assessment submitted time and time again to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet by all the security forces and the intelligence community, including the outbreak of war.”

In fact, it’s a demonstrable lie that the October 7th attack was a bolt from the blue for Israel. As documented in the timeline at the bottom of this post, the Israeli security apparatus had already intercepted plans for what would evolve into Operation Al-Aqsa Flood as early as 2014, just prior to the IDF massacre in Gaza that Israel branded “Operation Protective Edge.” All of the details were there—Hamas was planning a large-scale cross-border incursion using paragliders and vehicles, with the goal of killing and kidnapping large numbers of Israelis. Israeli officials internally acknowledged that such a severe attack would precipitate a full scale war between Israel and Hamas. Netanyahu reportedly made an interesting, somewhat non-committal statement during a security cabinet meeting discussing the plans: “At the moment, the goal is to prevent the [Hamas] operation [Emphasis added by me].”

Of course, a lot can change over the course of a decade, so if that had been the only warning that Hamas was planning something of this scale, it wouldn’t mean much. But that wasn’t the only warning. Sometime in 2022, the Israeli government reportedly secured another set of Hamas plans—codenamed “Jericho Wall” by Israel—describing essentially the same ambitious attack. Around that time, Hamas began to openly carry out large-scale training exercises near the Gazan border. These included intensive drills that simulated border incursions and mass kidnappings using detailed replicas of Israeli border communities and military outposts. Hamas proudly posted videos of the drills to the internet. These developments did not go unnoticed within Israel’s security services: In July 2022, an IDF intelligence officer prepared a briefing titled “The Mass Invasion Plan of Hamas” that outlined exactly what eventually happened on October 7th and included the statement, “This invasion constitutes the gravest threat that IDF forces are facing in the defense [of Israel].”

“A diagram shown on Channel 12 on December 4, 2023, from an IDF report in July 2022, on potential Hamas invasion plans.” – From Times of Israel (Archived link)

Oddly, in the same timeframe (some unspecified date in 2022), the IDF’s military intelligence wing, Unit 8200, made the decision to stop monitoring Hamas’s hand-held radio traffic. This choice becomes baffling in light of reports that Israeli civilians near the border were also monitoring these signals at the time and picking up clear evidence that Hamas was “practicing the breaching of the fence and arriving from the sea, conquering kibbutzim such as Zikim, Netiv Ha’asara and Nir Oz, seizing hostages and destroying everything in their path.” When the Israelis reported what they were hearing to the IDF, their concerns were dismissed as “fantasies,” and in April of 2023 the IDF apparently “restricted the group’s ability to monitor Hamas’ wireless traffic.” It’s hard to say why the IDF decided these civilians needed to stop listening to Hamas communications at just that time, but I’d like to note that the IDF reportedly originally believed that Hamas was planning to execute Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in…April of 2023. And, thinking back to the “narrative escalation” section, note that the Israeli police conducted large, provocative raids at Al-Aqsa Mosque in April as well, providing another interesting temporal coincidence.

As 2023 continued, signs of an impending attack intensified. Sometime during the summer, a Gazan source for Shin Bet (Israel’s domestic intelligence service, roughly equivalent to the FBI) notified his handlers that Hamas was planning a major attack in early October of that year, during the week after Yom Kippur. Border sentry surveillance units stationed next to Gaza continued to observe frequent, large-scale Hamas drills simulating incursions into Israel with mass hostage-taking. Drawing on observations like these, a few weeks before October 7th, a junior officer and an experienced non-commissioned senior officer in IDF’s Unit 8200 presented a detailed report to superiors that essentially predicted the attack—these warnings were also dismissed as “fantasies.”

Throughout September, four times in the three weeks leading up to October 7th, the head of IDF’s “Devil’s Advocate” intelligence unit — tasked with challenging prevailing conceptions and opinions in the military apparatus — presented his thesis that Hamas was likely to launch a major attack in the near-term. His written arguments “were widely distributed among all decision-makers in the military and the political echelon” on September 21st and 26th. On the 26th he made the same case at a strategic assessment meeting for IDF’s intelligence branch. On the 27th he repeated his arguments at a weekly debate attended by IDF’s head of military intelligence.

Furthermore, leaders of Israeli communities near the Gaza border reportedly received ominous WhatsApp messages in the weeks before the attack:

“[T]he messages warned that, ‘The coming holidays will be black holidays,’ and that on Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles) the communities around Gaza will be conquered.

The community leaders contacted the IDF and asked if, in light of these threats, the planned festivals and holiday events should be held.

Military sources responded that the events should take place, explaining, ‘Everything is fine. On the contrary – we are headed towards the area becoming quieter. Money is flowing into Gaza and workers are coming into Israel.’”

It’s still unclear who sent these warnings, but they provide yet more evidence that the IDF was aware of dangerous rumblings from Gaza well in advance of the attack.1

Israeli civilians along the Gazan border continued to hear anomalously intense training by Hamas as October 7th approached. One woman who worked as a tour guide in the Gaza strip area gave an interview on the radio in September in which she discussed her worries that Hamas was planning a major attack. She noted that “they’d been training for weeks right up against the border, sometimes in massive numbers. I tried to warn the [IDF] officers, but they told me I didn’t know anything about it and that I was safe.” A tweet posted by a reporter on October 3rd aligns with the woman’s report and makes it clear that the increased activity in Gaza was no secret to Israeli border-dwellers:

“The Islamic Jihad organization started a noisy exercise very close to the border of missile launches, breaking into Israel and kidnapping soldiers. Dedi Fuld, a resident of Netiv HaTara: `It was significantly closer than previous times. The children wake up during the holiday break and ask what’s going on, there are explosions, booms. It is not similar to previous exercises.’”

In other words, the signs were unmistakable even for everyday people living along the border—militants in Gaza were preparing for a major, violent hostage-taking incursion into Israel.

These facts make it all the more strange that the IDF chose to move two Commando Brigade companies — approximately 100 troops — away from the Gaza border just two days before October 7th. This decision came in the context of an already-lopsided troop distribution, with five times as many soldiers allotted to the West Bank compared to the Gaza border. The dearth of defenses near Gaza clearly had not gone unnoticed by Hamas, as Haaretz reports:

“In an interview in late August, senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri (now deceased) said that most of Israel’s regular forces – 30 battalions – were in the West Bank, while only a small number were stationed along the Gaza border. ‘That’s an operational consideration for acting now,’ he added (according to Dr. Matti Steinberg’s Hebrew translation of the original Arabic).”

The above quote confirms that before October 7th Hamas was monitoring the Gaza border’s troop distribution and publicly referencing its lack of defense as a factor in their plans to act against Israel in the near-term. Notably, in early September, the Israeli army engaged in training exercises “for a multi-front confrontation scenario that could include a confrontation with Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran” and warned that it would “hold Hamas responsible for any attacks from Gaza or the West Bank during Jewish holidays and respond to any attacks forcefully and with a possible military operation.” All of this makes it even more difficult to understand the decision to move soldiers away from Gaza in the face of overwhelming evidence that an attack was imminent.

So now we know that Hamas knew that Israel’s border defenses were in an unusually weakened state. And Israel knew that Hamas knew. Despite this, and despite the intelligence about Hamas’s preparations for Al-Aqsa Flood, Israel did not fix the problem, which calls to mind Maddox’s sixth criterion for identifying strategic provocation: cross-border lures. To illustrate the concept, Maddox describes a scenario in which the deceptive state moves troops close to its border to convince its enemy an attack is imminent, provoking a pre-emptive strike, but a visible weakening of border defenses could also serve as an effective lure for an attack by presenting a picture of vulnerability to the enemy.

Another potential cross-border lure that gave rise to a bloodbath of intentional “personnel” sacrifice (in more ways than one) presents itself in the “Universo Paralello Israel Edition—Supernova Sukkot Gathering,” often referred to as the Nova Festival, where 364 people were killed (a third of the October 7th fatalities). The music festival was held just 5 kilometers from the Gaza border beside Kibbutz Re’im, which is also the location of the military base for the IDF’s Gaza Division. In fact, there were two back-to-back parties at the site, with the original “Unity” festival scheduled three months prior for October 5th and 6th. The Nova Festival from October 6th to the 7th was added just a few days in advance of the event, after an as-yet-unexplained location change at the last minute.

Map showing Nova Festival and Kibbutz Re’im, (Source)

In Israel, mass gatherings like this require military approval, and multiple officers in the Gaza Division and at IDF’s Southern Command HQ registered their disapproval of the extension. On December 25th, 2023, Haaretz reported that some Gaza division officers privately “told of irregular conduct and pressure surrounding the approval of the party.” This culminated in the Gaza Division’s operations officer Lt. Col. Sahar Fogel being instructed by the IDF HQ’s operations division to allow the event despite his express opposition (and that of his colleagues).

The author of the Haaretz report noted that he had not verified whether Lt. Col. Fogel was aware of the intelligence that had been pouring into the Israeli surveillance system about the intensifying preparations by Hamas on the other side of the border. Additional information that has gone almost completely unnoticed in English-language media suggests that he likely was aware. In February of 2024, Elkana Federman, the head of security for the Nova Festival, gave an interview on Israel’s Channel 14 in which he made the following explosive statement, as reported in World Israel News:

“I had a guard at the festival who had served in the Re’im Division [near Gaza border], and a week before the festival he sent me a voice message … basically warning me, saying, ‘Elkana, something is going to happen over Sukkot. I just wanted to let you know, there are a lot of warnings. As the whole country knows, the situation in the Gaza envelope isn’t the greatest, so I said I’d warn you so you could be ready. I don’t know what will happen, maybe something will happen, and maybe not.’ He spoke with me like that, in codes.”

[…]

“I passed the voice message on [to local IDF officials], and they told me everything was all right, that the army would be able to handle whatever needed to be handled and that there were always alerts and that everything was fine. I did my part. […] I’m just a security officer, not a high army guy who can change something in my purview.”

This statement alone would be important, if a bit vague. The head of security for the Nova Festival confirmed that he received a warning from a member of the IDF’s Gaza Division (housed in the Re’im base) of a major Hamas action during the planned Sukkot festivities and that he transmitted this warning to the IDF, which dismissed it (just like every other warning they received). From this we could already conclude that it’s plausible that the internal military opposition to the festival’s extension was related to these warnings. But Federman went on to drop another bombshell. After the attack, he called the IDF guard who had left him the cryptic message before the festival. He described their conversation as follows:

“You were speaking in codes. Tell me exactly what they showed you. […] He told me ‘Elkana, they told me there was going to be an invasion, and that they were planning to take over settlements. I just wasn’t allowed to tell you that.’ And that’s what happened. […] If he knew what he knew, a driver on the Gaza border…what did those above him know? Because he’s a small screw in the system.”

I would be remiss if I failed to note that the World Israel News report throws in a disclaimer: “It’s not clear who were the ‘they’ that passed the information to the guard and why they told the guard not to reveal it.” But, well, come on. It’s pretty obvious who “they” were. The most straightforward reading is that the IDF driver received information through the grapevine from others in the military apparatus about the impending Hamas attack. The fact that he felt the need to be circumspect and avoid giving details suggests he may have received the information from a superior who ordered him to hold it close to his chest. Nonetheless, he felt compelled to try to obliquely warn Federman anyway because he was worried about the carnage that would occur at a music festival amidst a major hostage-taking operation. Even if that reading is incorrect and the IDF driver got the information from some other source capable of intimidating him into withholding details against his better judgment, the fact that this stuff was floating around at the time renders it absurd to believe that the IDF was truly caught off-guard by the attack.

To recap, it seems the IDF forced the approval of the Nova Festival at the last minute over a variety of objections and despite wide-ranging intelligence suggesting an imminent attack by Hamas. They must have at least heavily guarded the festival, right? Surely they made certain that lots of competent IDF soldiers were stationed at their posts to keep the attendees safe. After all, the party was held in Kibbutz Re’im, which, again, is the location of the IDF base housing the army’s Gaza Division. In fact, according to Haaretz, “it turned out that army units that were on alert in the area at the start of the Hamas attack had no knowledge of the party.” Furthermore, the security force provided for the festival consisted of just 27 police officers, “most of them not in possession of long arms, as required when based near the border.” Given an attendance of between 3,000 and 4,000 people, that works out to less than one poorly-armed guard per 100 partiers.

As the festival-goers danced through the evening of October 6th and into the morning of October 7th, Israel’s security apparatus picked up a succession of signals from Gaza that were serious enough to trigger multiple urgent overnight meetings among decision-makers in the IDF and Shin Bet. Israeli media outlets have reported that “‘concrete’ indications pointed to a likely coming ‘day of battle’ in which a limited force of terrorists would attempt to infiltrate the border, seize control of one or two communities and attempt kidnappings.” One of these indications (reportedly among several, most of which have not been clarified) consisted of the activation of hundreds of Israeli SIM cards in Gaza in the early hours of the morning of October 7th. The activation of hundreds of cell phones in Gaza configured for communication within Israel would clearly suggest an impending incursion by hundreds of fighters. Although the prevailing assessment was supposedly that the SIM cards were being activated for a training exercise, the director of Shin Bet elected to send a commando team to the border to defend against a potential hostage-taking operation.

The man who signed the papers authorizing the Nova festival, IDF Gaza Division’s Northern Brigade commander Col. Haim Cohen, was aware of these developments, having been notified of the consultations and warnings that occurred throughout the night. Nonetheless, nobody in the IDF or Shin Bet warned the Nova Festival organizers so they could disperse the party. Instead, the attendees remained unaware of any danger until shortly after sunrise, around 6:30 am, when the first blitz of rockets from Gaza streaked overhead and descending paragliders became visible in the distance. This finally triggered a decision by the organizers to evacuate the party, and thousands of revelers managed to escape by vehicle before Hamas militants caught wind of the event and redirected some of their forces toward it.

The throng of fleeing vehicles eventually clogged the road out, slowing traffic to a standstill and forcing many escaping attendees to scatter on foot across the sparsely forested desert scrubland as militants swarmed the area. At 7 am, one of the party organizers called the IDF and reported that the festival was under fire, but the Gaza Division’s Home Front Command head Elad Zandani told the caller that they were on their own — no one was coming to help. It would be eight hours before surviving concertgoers were evacuated from the bush by the IDF. During the interim, 364 partiers and 17 of the 27 police officers guarding the festival were killed, and 40 hostages were taken. A rough timeline from the New York Times is reproduced in the image below:

Timeline of the wait for help from the IDF at various locales, with Nova festival highlighted in blue (Source)

It’s difficult to comprehend how the defense of the Nova festival could have been such a spectacular failure on the part of the Israeli military. The IDF had every reason to believe that the party posed a serious risk, but higher-ups rammed through a last minute approval of the event while failing to notify any local units or provide any security. Despite the army’s undeniable awareness of this state of affairs, Hamas was given eight hours to kill and kidnap festivalgoers nearly unimpeded.

Furthermore, as it turns out, the IDF seems to have contributed to that massive kill-count after belatedly showing up to “defend” the party. Although later officially denied in a statement by the Israeli Police, an anonymous Israeli police source told Haaretz in November that their investigation of the Nova festival found that “an IDF combat helicopter that arrived to the scene and fired at terrorists there apparently also hit some festival participants.” This was one of several early indications of a particularly controversial aspect of the events of October 7th: the killing of Israelis by IDF forces. Notwithstanding the fact that the venerable Washington Post has attempted to link such claims to antisemitism and Holocaust denial, it is at this point undeniable that a significant number of the Israeli casualties on October 7th were perpetrated by the Israeli army.

At first glance it may seem hard to swallow that the IDF killed a large number of Israelis during the Hamas attack, but Israeli media has confirmed that the IDF had invoked a version of the “Hannibal procedure” by noon on October 7th. The Hannibal procedure is a directive for Israeli forces to stop the taking of hostages at any cost, up to and including the deaths of abductees (its historical namesake, Hannibal of Carthage, committed suicide to evade capture by the Romans). In one prototypical example of the protocol’s implementation, the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers near the Lebanon border in the year 2000 (on October 7th, in fact!) resulted in IDF attack helicopters indiscriminately firing on 26 vehicles in hopes of killing the soldiers and their abductors. But the scale of events in 2023 completely dwarfed any previous invocation of the directive, as described in this Electronic Intifada translation of an interview given by retired Israeli air force general Nof Erez:

“The Hannibal Directive was apparently applied at a certain stage, because at the moment they understand there is a kidnapping, they immediately say, ‘Guys, this is Hannibal.’ But the Hannibal we trained for all of the last twenty years, is for a vehicle we know at what point of the fence it enters, on what side it drives, and maybe even on which road it drives. This was a mass Hannibal. There were tons and tons of openings in the fence, and thousands of people in every type of vehicle, some with hostages and some without. It was an impossible mission to identify and to do what they did. I know that whoever had weapons at hand, the attack helicopters and the drones, did everything they could – without control, without coordination with ground forces, because there were none in the first stage.”

Mass Hannibal…provocative wording. The scale of death caused by the IDF’s adherence to the Hannibal Procedure on October 7th remains hazy, but Israeli media has dribbled out enough information to suggest it was not negligible. At least dozens of vehicles, some full of hostages, were reported to have been destroyed by the IDF before returning to Gaza:

“It is not clear at this point how many of the abductees were killed due to the activation of this order on October 7. In the week after Black Shabbat, soldiers of elite units, at the initiative of the Southern Command, checked about 70 vehicles that remained in the area between the Otaf settlements and the Gaza Strip. These are vehicles that did not reach Gaza, because on the way they were shot by a combat helicopter, an anti-tank missile or a tank, and at least in some cases everyone in the vehicle was killed.”

The above quote suggests that many of the striking images of bombed-out cars and burnt, twisted corpses (←the video in that link is horrifying) that circulated in the days after the attack may have been the result of Israeli efforts to kill hostages. A total of at least 280 cars were reportedly “burnt to a crisp” on October 7th. Those burnt cars were disassembled, cleaned of human remains, and as of January 2024, were in the process of being sent to the Israeli government’s Heritage Ministry, ensuring no independent forensic analysis will ever be carried out to determine how many were destroyed by the IDF.

“Damaged vehicles in the camp of the Israeli music festival that was overrun by Hamas terrorists. Sergey Ponomarev for the New York Times” (Source)

Adding to the likelihood that large numbers of vehicles full of hostages were attacked by the IDF, the Israeli government has admitted to burning hundreds of (Palestinian) people to death on October 7th. In an interview with Mehdi Hasan, Israeli spokesperson Mark Regev explained that this was why the initial death count of 1400 Israelis was revised downward by over 200 people (as reported by Electronic Intifada):

“We originally said, in the atrocious Hamas attack upon our people on October 7th, we had the number at 1,400 casualties and now we’ve revised that down to 1,200 because we understood that we’d overestimated, we made a mistake. There were actually bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours, in the end apparently they were Hamas terrorists.”

The most plausible way for more than 200 Palestinian corpses to be misidentified as Israeli corpses would be if burnt remains from both groups were intermingled. The only conceivable way to generate mixed-up masses of unidentifiably charred Israelis and Palestinians would be for the IDF to blow them up together in groups. I’m comfortable saying that that’s obviously what happened, and if they killed hundreds of Palestinians like that, they may well have killed a similar number of Israelis. In fact, a United Nations report on allegations of sexual assault during the attack noted that their investigative team “was able to determine that at least 100 [Israeli] bodies had destructive burn damage” that was extensive enough to preclude detailed forensic analysis of the corpses. Some of those burn victims were certainly killed by Hamas or other Gazans, but most of the large scale firepower and explosives deployed on that day came from the Israeli side, suggesting many of them were casualties of the “mass Hannibal” order.

Moreover, in a report about the widespread IDF friendly fire in the Gaza strip since the start of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign, Ynet News indicated that an IDF official admitted the army’s responsibility for a large amount of friendly fire on October 7th as well, while heading off any suggestions of further investigation:

“Casualties fell as a result of friendly fire on October 7, but the IDF believes that beyond the operational investigations of the events, it would not be morally sound to investigate these incidents due to the immense and complex quantity of them that took place in the kibbutzim and southern Israeli communities due to the challenging situations the soldiers were in at the time.”

Consistent with this, multiple Israeli civilians have publicly stated that they witnessed the IDF kill other Israelis that day. Upon her return to Israel, Shani Goren, one of the hostages taken to Gaza on October 7th, expressed her gratitude to the IDF helicopter pilot that fired on the car that was abducting her, killing fellow kibbutz resident Efrat Katz. Another Israeli, Yasmin Porat, who had managed to escape from the Nova festival and flee to Kibbutz Be’eri, described how an IDF tank shelled the house where she and several other Israelis were being held by Hamas captors during the fighting on October 7th. Thirteen captives were killed in that instance of IDF shelling, including a 12-year-old girl, Liel Hatsroni, who was “burned completely.” Barak Hiram, the IDF Brigadier General who ordered the shelling, lied about it to Israeli media. Continuing to fulfill his passion for blowing up civilian buildings, Hiram went on to order the demolition of Israa University in Gaza, and in March—despite receiving an official reprimand from the government—he was rewarded with an interview for promotion to the position of Netanyahu’s military secretary. It is as yet unclear if he will receive the promotion, but in April, the IDF released the findings from a whitewash investigation clearing Hiram of all wrongdoing in the Kibbutz Be’eri incident.

I think all of the above is enough to establish a reasonable case for the occurrence of intentional personnel sacrifice by the Israeli army during the October 7th attack. Having already discussed potential cross-border lures (i.e. unusually weak border defenses and a loud, sitting-duck music festival), we can move onto the seventh criterion presented by JD Maddox for identifying strategic provocation operations: atrocity allegations.

(7) Atrocity Allegations

It’s hard to convey the frenetic energy that crackled around Israel’s atrocity propaganda in the aftermath of October 7th. It felt more like psychological blitzkrieg than psychological warfare. Zionist individuals and organizations at all levels spewed story after story of unspeakably grotesque depravities supposedly committed by Hamas, all of which were dutifully circulated by compliant media outlets and gullible social media users. Many of these claims were endorsed by US and Israeli government officials. They laid it on thick. Hamas beheaded forty babies! (False.) Hamas tied twenty children and babies together and set them aflame! (False.) Hamas cut an expecting mother’s baby from her belly and stabbed it to death before her very eyes! (False.) Hamas hung babies on clotheslines! (False.) Hamas threw a dead baby in a trash can! (False.) Hamas systematically mass raped women, children, the elderly, and corpses! (False.) Hamas militants carried written orders from their leadership to rape specific soldiers! (False.) THEY BAKED A BABY IN AN OVEN!!!! (False.) Say ceasefire one more time, you fucking baby-murdering-loving ghouls.

Spine-chillingly talentless neoconservative nepo-baby salivates while fantasizing about a fresh, oven-baked baby (Source, archived here)

As a protoypical example, within hours of the first report of beheaded babies on October 10th by a journalist for Israel’s Netanyahu-aligned i24 news outlet, Israeli government spokespeople were repeating the claim on social media, with the story snowballing from there. US President Joe Biden subsequently spent months pretending that he had personally seen photos of decapitated babies, even after the White House attempted to walk back his assertions. Nonetheless, Israeli social security data confirms that exactly one baby was murdered during the Hamas attack: ten-month-old Mila Cohen, who was tragically shot to death in her mother’s arms. Another baby, a newborn, died some hours or days after a posthumous delivery from a pregnant woman that was killed in the assault. In all, 36 children under the age of 18 died on October 7th. Those (extremely sad) facts are enough to completely debunk all of the claims of baby-related atrocities. Yet as recently as April 24th, 2024, US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson used a speech at Columbia University to reiterate the falsehood that “infants were cooked in ovens.”

The situation is similar regarding allegations of “systematic mass rape” by Hamas on October 7th. Hundreds of news articles and many reports from NGOs and investigative bodies in the months since October 7th have drawn on testimony from a handful of weak, sometimes self-contradictory witnesses to assert that Hamas intentionally deployed rape as a weapon of terror during the attack. As described in YES! magazine’s excellent March 2024 investigation of these rape claims, only two individuals — ex-IDF special forces soldier / private military contractor Raz Cohen and a woman identified as Witness “S” or Sapir — have publicly claimed that they personally witnessed rape on October 7th. Both of these ostensible eyewitnesses completely changed their stories between media appearances and were later contradicted by companions that hid with them during the attack.

The questionable witnesses that form the backbone of Israel’s “Hamas mass rape” claims (Source)

The rest of the publicly-available evidence for mass rape on October 7th consists essentially of descriptions of partially disrobed or mutilated corpses from untrained civilians, volunteers for the scandal-ridden Israeli disaster clean-up group ZAKA, and IDF employees. Most of the corpse claims have also been called into question or conclusively debunked, and the majority of the corpse “witnesses” also helped launder fabricated “dead baby” stories like those touched upon previously in this post. Forensic or photographic corroboration for the rape claims is also notably lacking. A Hebrew-to-English Google translation of a January Haaretz report suggests that Israeli police have failed to turn up victims or credible witnesses:

“The police are having difficulty locating victims of sexual assault from the Hamas attack, or people who witnessed such attacks, and decided to appeal to the public to encourage those who have information on the matter to come forward and give testimony. Even in the few cases in which the organization collected testimony about sexual offenses committed on October 7, it failed to connect the acts with the victims who were harmed by them.”

In all, the case for mass rape by Hamas on October 7th appears to be just as threadbare as the case for mass infant beheadings, but I have by no means provided a complete analysis of these claims. I recommend Oct7FactCheck.com for a useful compilation of documents and journalism chronicling, analyzing, and debunking some of the more absurd atrocity allegations propagated by Israel and its boosters. These asinine stories have continued to play a key role in the media and political narratives surrounding Al-Aqsa Flood, convincing millions of people that Israel has a moral imperative to obliterate the baby-cooking, corpse-raping demons of Gaza.

(8) Rapid Condemnation

The eighth criterion to identify strategic provocation operations presented in Maddox’s article is rapid condemnation. Around 11 am on October 7th, while battles continued to rage across Israel’s Gaza border area, Prime Minister Netanyahu released a statement condemning the assault and foreshadowing the scale of the impending Israeli response:

“Citizens of Israel, we are at war. Not an operation, not a round [of fighting,] at war! This morning Hamas initiated a murderous surprise attack against the state of Israel and its citizens…We have been in this since the early morning hours. I have convened the heads of the defense establishment. I’ve given directives, first and foremost, to clear the [affected] urban areas of the terrorists who penetrated them… This is happening right now.”

(9) Pre-Positioned Response Forces and (10) Rapid Post-Condemnation Violence

The ninth and tenth of Maddox’s criteria suggesting strategic provocation are pre-positioned response forces and rapid post-condemnation violence. Regarding pre-positioned response forces, I would argue that part of the operation actually involved moving IDF units away from Gaza to make the border a more attractive target for Hamas (as documented earlier in the post). On the other hand, given the geography of the area, with Gaza and Israel nuzzled up right next to one another, and given the extreme militarization of the Israeli state, with bases sprinkled liberally across the entire country, in a sense Israel always has forces in place to attack Gaza with short notice.

And this perpetual readiness to deploy violence was reflected in the rapid initiation of attacks on Gaza — at 10:50 am on October 7th, before any sites within Israel had even been resecured and around the time Netanyahu declared war against Hamas, the IDF announced that it was bombing the Strip. The intense bombardment was augmented by a ground invasion starting on October 27th.

Conclusion

To sum up, Israel’s actions before, during, and after Hamas’s October 7th assault neatly aligned with the template presented in JD Maddox’s article “How to Start a War: Eight Cases of Strategic Provocation,” where strategic provocation is defined as “the use of deceptive tactics to instigate violence against one’s own state.” Israeli political officials engaged in an escalating sequence of inflammatory statements and acts toward Gaza while the state’s security apparatus hoovered up a large body of intelligence pointing to an impending Hamas attack. As the attack approached, IDF officials weakened the defense of the Gaza envelope and inexplicably forced the approval of a music festival near the border without notifying any local military units or providing security to the site. During the attack, the IDF killed a large but uncertain number of Israelis, all of whom are included in the official kill count ascribed to Hamas of 695 civilians, 373 security forces, and 71 foreigners. And now they are using the violence they courted — as well as a torrent of fabrications that paint Palestinians as inhuman monsters — to justify the most intense and indiscriminate destruction of human life since the last century.

This is not to pretend that Israel is some invincible juggernaut destined to triumph in its effort to eliminate the Palestinians. This attempt at out-in-the-open genocide is a gambit with extreme risks. The movement to end Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories has likely never possessed as much global salience as it does at this moment, and worldwide unrest in opposition to Israel’s onslaught only seems to be growing. The instant the costs of supporting Israel begin to outweigh the benefits for the United States and its elites, the calculus will fundamentally change. Despite all its bluster and imposing weaponry, Israel is a fragile entity that acts at the convenience of external benefactors, and if those benefactors can be made to suffer enough for their support, millions of lives may be spared. Free Palestine.

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Timeline of Israeli Foreknowledge

2014 – 9 years before Al-Aqsa Flood

• “In 2014, Netanyahu Forewarned of a Hamas Massacre Plot. Nine Years Later, Oct. 7 Happened” – Haaretz – Jan 26, 2024 (Archived link)
  • “People with access to the complete State Comptroller’s report on Protective Edge have told Haaretz that the confidential section of the report includes a detailed description of a similar plan to that carried out by Hamas on October 7.”
  • “Many hundreds of terrorists would infiltrate into Israel through underground tunnels, ‘armed from head to toe, on jeeps and motorcycles,’ said in describing the 2014 plan. The goal was to commit a massacre in Israeli army positions and residential communities adjacent to the Gaza border, and to abduct soldiers and civilians as bargaining chips.”
  • “The prime minister at the time, and now, Benjamin Netanyahu, was well-aware of the danger. At a security cabinet meeting in June 2014, just prior to Operation Protective Edge, he characterized the Hamas plan as ‘a concrete threat to the State of Israel’ and explained: ‘[The scenario] is different because abductions or infiltrations into our territory would change the balance between us and them, … a force of up to a battalion that enters and also kidnaps and also kills. It’s hugely demoralizing. It wouldn’t defeat the State of Israel. Even missiles still haven’t defeated the State of Israel, but it would deal us a terrible blow.’”
  • “A source who worked with Netanyahu told Haaretz that the head of the Shin Bet at the time, Yoram Cohen, met with the prime minister and presented him with the details of the plan. According to the source, ‘Cohen thought if Hamas tried to carry it out, it would necessarily lead to war, and Netanyahu himself took the information seriously.’”
  • “The security cabinet was only brought into the picture in July of that year, several days after Operation Protective Edge was under way. Shin Bet chief Yoram Cohen, who presented the members of the security cabinet with the details of the Hamas plan, described it as dramatic. For his part, Gantz added: ‘There’s a complete understanding’ that if it were to be carried out, it would bring about ‘a very widescale [military] campaign.’ Netanyahu summed it up: ‘At the moment, the goal is to prevent the [Hamas] operation.’”
  • “‘Their way was blocked through the tunnels, so they went with breaking through the [border] fence,’ a former senior security official told Haaretz. ‘There’s no doubt about one thing – political officials and military officials had already known about Hamas’ intentions for a decade, and they were obligated to look after defending against such a possibility.’”
  • “The state commission of inquiry that will investigate the failures of October 7, the greatest failure in the country’s history, will need to look back 10 years to understand how the country’s political and military leadership, which was well-aware of Hamas’ ‘grand plan’ allowed it to be carried out. The failures come into even sharper relief in light of the fact that over the past year, there were those in the IDF Intelligence Corps who were warning that Hamas had not abandoned its plan and that it was still clandestinely working on it.”
• “IDF confirms Hamas planned massive tunnel attack” – Times of Israel – Oct. 21 2014 (Archived link)
  • “IDF officials confirmed Tuesday that Hamas had planned to carry out a massive assault by penetrating Israeli communities via tunnels under the border from the Gaza Strip, and then killing or kidnapping as many people as possible.”
  • “‘They planned to send 200 terrorists armed to the teeth toward civilian populations,’ Lerner said. ‘This was going to be a coordinated attack. The concept of operations involved 14 offensive tunnels into Israel. With at least 10 men in each tunnel, they would infiltrate and inflict mass casualties.’”
• “Captured Hamas operative reveals paragliding attack plan” – Times of Israel – Jul. 30 2014 (Archived link)
  • “A highly trained Hamas operative captured by the IDF during the ongoing military campaign in the Gaza Strip told investigators that he had prepared to carry out a terror attack against Israeli civilians using a paraglider, the Shin Bet security service said Wednesday.”
  • “The Hamas detainee, who was recruited to the Islamist terror group in 2007 and joined one of the group’s special units in 2010, had taken part in a weeklong military-style exercise in Malaysia, along with 10 other members of the group, the Shin Bet said in a statement. During the exercise, which included paragliding training, the Hamas squad focused on perfecting raids from the air. The squad conducted a second training session in the Gaza Strip earlier this year, the statement said.”
  • “During searches in the Strip, Israeli troops also uncovered booklets with information on various IDF units, military commanders, and the Gaza border area in general. One of the booklets contained images of IDF Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Benny Gantz and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, Channel 10 reported.”

2021 – 2 years before Al-Aqsa Flood

• “Hamas militants trained for its deadly attack in plain sight and less than a mile from Israel’s heavily fortified border” – CNN – Oct. 12, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “The footage is from the last two years, but it is chillingly prescient. In a December 2022 video, Hamas fighters can be seen flooding a training area, shooting rockets and capturing pretend prisoners as they surround mock Israeli buildings. […] Another video taken more than a year ago, shows Hamas fighters practicing take-offs, landings and assaults with paragliders – the same unusual assault mode that Hamas deployed with lethal effect in the same Oct. 7 attack.”
  • “A CNN investigation has analysed almost two years of training and propaganda video released by Hamas and its affiliates to reveal the months of preparations that went into last week’s attack, finding that militants trained for the onslaught in at least six sites across Gaza.”
  • “Two of those sites, including the arid training site shown in the December video, were a little more than a mile from the most fortified and patrolled section of the Gaza-Israel border. Of the remaining sites: one is located in central Gaza, and the other three in far south Gaza.”
  • “Not only was there activity in the last several months at the camps, but some camps also absorbed surrounding farmland, converting it from agriculture to barren area for training in the last two years, according to satellite imagery.”
  • “Senior Hamas official Ali Baraka, the head of the Lebanon-based Hamas National Relations Abroad, told RT Arabic following Saturday’s attack that the terror organization has been preparing for the attack for two years.”
  • “ Metadata analyzed by CNN indicates that Hamas conducted the trainings for months, sometimes over a year, before releasing the propaganda montages on their social media channels.”
• “The IDF Took Away Weapons From Gaza Border Communities in Recent Years, and Armed West Bank Settlers in the Thousands” – Haaretz – Oct. 20, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “In recent years the IDF decided to change priorities in handing out weapons to local security details – the northern and southern border locales had many weapons taken away, while the settlements and illegal outposts were armed with thousands of weapons. Thus, the number of weapons in the south, from Ashdod to Eilat, dropped to 800, including the 57 locales close to the Gaza Border.”
  • “The main turning point indicated by the sources Haaretz has spoken with is the erection of the fence along the border with the Gaza Strip. Since it was completed two years ago, and in fact even after only segments were completed, the IDF changed its attitude toward the defense of the locales – and toward who was supposed to be their first line of defense. The locales closest to the fence had the weapons taken from the homes of the members of the security details and put in a vault.”
  • “The reason given was fear of theft, but this claim failed a reality check – in the past seven years, six firearms have been lost or stolen in all locales subject to the Southern Command. In comparison, the IDF over the same period saw hundreds of firearms and large quantities of munitions stolen from its bases. Either way, locales at a distance of four to seven kilometers from the fence had their weapons taken, leaving the locales with only two rifles apiece.”
  • “An old friend in one of the security details in a border area local also attests that military officers insisted to them that ‘the chance of terrorist incursions is non-existent.’ He says that they explained to the members of the security details that ‘they would no longer deal with terrorists, that we are being trained to fight agricultural crime.’”

2022 – 1 year before Al-Aqsa Flood

• “Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago” – New York Times – Nov. 30, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.”
  • “The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.”
  • “The plan also included details about the location and size of Israeli military forces, communication hubs and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks inside the Israeli 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’s capabilities, according to documents and officials. It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document, as well.”
  • “Last year, shortly after the document was obtained, officials in the Israeli military’s Gaza division, which is responsible for defending the border with Gaza, said that Hamas’s intentions were unclear.”
• “The Hamas-produced TV Series That May Have Revealed October 7 Plans” – Haaretz – Jan. 3, 2024 (Archived link)
  • “In May 2022, the Hamas-produced TV series ‘Fist of the Free’ (‘Qabdat al-Ahrar’ in Arabic) was honored at a ceremony a month after it had debuted in the Gaza Strip. Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was present and personally handed out prizes to the directors, actors and production team.”
  • “‘I commend the efforts of everyone who created and worked on this series,’ he said. ‘Your work brings us closer to liberation. This series is an integral part of what we’re preparing in the Iz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades,’ he added, referring to Hamas’ military wing: ‘From the weapons being produced in their laboratories, to their plans and intelligence-gathering abilities for our liberation and return.’”
  • “Episode after 40-minute episode, his plan is revealed to the viewer: intensive training exercises for the Hamas militants, commanded personally by Abu Anas, followed by training in how to abduct soldiers from tanks and, finally, face-to-face battles in a mock-up of an Israeli military base. ‘From the inside, the building is very similar to the Re’im army base, but from the outside we deliberately built it differently in order to avoid suspicion,’ the commander says.”
  • “‘How do you defeat the enemy?’ he asks the Hamas members who work with him at the facility. ‘It’s important to gather intelligence about the military bases, to damage the surveillance devices and infiltration alarms in the enemy’s systems – and we’re waiting for new weaponry that we should receive soon.’”
  • “‘We’ll attack the military bases and we’ll switch from defense to offense – whatever the cost,’ the Abu Anas character says… ‘This is the most violent attack the enemy will experience: the weapons are ready and you’re ready. On the day of the attack, we’ll paralyze the enemy’s entire aerial surveillance for 30 minutes and they won’t be able to detect us infiltrating the border. Our operation is going to harm Israel and create unity around us for the liberation of Palestine.’”
• “How Years of Israeli Failures on Hamas Led to a Devastating Attack” – New York Times – Oct. 29, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “Their judgment that night might have been different had they been listening to traffic on the hand-held radios of Hamas militants. But Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, had stopped eavesdropping on those networks a year earlier because they saw it as a waste of effort.”
• “More details unveiled of IDF intel on Oct. 7 plans, consults hours before Hamas attack” – Times of Israel – Dec. 5, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “In the latest evidence of information and assessments that should have enabled the Israeli military leadership to prevent the mass invasion, Channel 12 reported Monday evening that the intelligence officer of the Gaza Division prepared a presentation in July 2022 setting out ‘The Mass Invasion Plan of Hamas.’”
  • “One diagram from the presentation showed some 20 elite Nukhba Hamas terror squads invading southern Israel from Gaza. The presentation said the terror squads would be accompanied by engineering teams to breach the border fence and defenses in multiple places. The document reportedly included the sentence: ‘This invasion constitutes the gravest threat that IDF forces are facing in the defense [of Israel].’”

2023 – The year of Al-Aqsa Flood

April 2023

• “Hamas onslaught was originally planned for first night of Passover – report” – Times of Israel – Nov. 26, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “Military intelligence caught the early signs of an attack on Passover, which this year fell on April 5, and raised the alert, leading Hamas to cancel and the IDF to consider the incident a false alarm, Channel 12 reported, citing unnamed soldiers in the IDF’s 8200 signal intelligence unit.”
• “Israel’s Deadly Complacency Wasn’t Just an Intelligence Failure” – Haaretz – Nov. 11, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “What was seen is also what was heard. Menachem Gida and 26 of his friends living in the communities in the area, who established a WhatsApp group called Field Security Operational Monitor, listened in to the wireless traffic of Hamas over a period of years. Time after time they heard how the organization’s combat personnel were practicing the breaching of the fence and arriving from the sea, conquering kibbutzim such as Zikim, Netiv Ha’asara and Nir Oz, seizing hostages and destroying everything in their path.”
  • “The group grasped the significance of the daily training exercises as being preparations for real operations, and they passed on all the information to the IDF. The army personnel they were in contact with were less worried – ‘fantasies’ was their term for the talk about preparations to capture territory in Israel. Finally, last April the army restricted the group’s ability to monitor Hamas’ wireless traffic. Despite this, the group discerned an intensification of the training, and that information was reported by Kan 11, the public broadcaster, a few days before the attack.”

July 2023

• “Shin Bet Source in Gaza Reportedly Warned of Major Hamas Attack on Israel Set for Early October” – Haaretz – Dec. 27, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “A source in Israel’s Shin Bet security service that operated within the Gaza Strip relayed specific information that Hamas is planning a significant attack at the beginning of October, according to Channel 12 News.”
  • “The information was reportedly received by the Shin Bet during the summer from an agent whose identity remains undisclosed, who in turn received it from someone who knew that ‘Hamas was planning a major move in the week following Yom Kippur.’”

August 2023

• “As it planned for Oct. 7, Hamas lulled Israel into a false sense of calm” – Washington Post – Dec. 6, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “In August, weeks before the attack, new intelligence pointed to an imminent attack, the security officer said.”
  • “‘The IDF increased its readiness and believed they stopped it,’ he said.‘They now see it was part of Hamas’s deception.’”
  • “Warnings were again dismissed. Communities on the Israeli side of the border were never notified.”
• “The West Bank Occupation Outweighed Israel’s Defense of the Gaza Border on the Eve of October 7” – Haaretz – Feb. 21, 2024 (Archived link)
  • “In an interview in late August, senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri (now deceased) said that most of Israel’s regular forces – 30 battalions – were in the West Bank, while only a small number were stationed along the Gaza border. ‘That’s an operational consideration for acting now,’ he added (according to Dr. Matti Steinberg’s Hebrew translation of the original Arabic).”

September 2023

• “IDF Balloons Monitoring Israel-Gaza Border Broke Down Weeks Before Hamas Attack” – Haaretz – Oct. 13, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “Three observation balloons that are used by the Israel Defense Forces to monitor the Gaza border broke down in the past few weeks but were not replaced with alternative measures.”
  • “Some of the balloons fell inside Israeli territory, but the IDF failed to fix them last week. It did not beef up its early warning systems with alternative measures, or with additional forces. IDF spotters and commanders in the border units asked for the observation balloons to be returned to action, but a technician who was dispatched last week was unable to fix them, and the repair was postponed until this week.”
• “Israeli intelligence ‘dismissed’ detailed warning of Hamas raid” – Financial Times – Nov. 23, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “A senior Israeli military intelligence officer dismissed a detailed warning predicting Hamas’s raid of October 7, calling it an ‘imaginary scenario’, said two people familiar with the discussions.”
  • “Sentries on Israel’s border with Gaza, many of them female soldiers who watch and analyse a constant feed of video and other data gathered near the electronic fence surrounding the enclave, sent a detailed report weeks before the attack to the highest-ranking intelligence officer in the southern command, both people said.”
  • “The report was sent using a secure communications system and contained specific warnings, including that Hamas was training to blow up border posts at several locations, enter Israeli territory and take over kibbutzim, the person with direct knowledge of the contents of the warning said.”
  • “The lower-ranking soldiers also warned their analysis of several videos showed Hamas was rehearsing taking hostages, and that they felt an attack was imminent, the person said. The memo was triggered by the sighting of a high-ranking Hamas military commander overseeing the training, who was identified by the sentries against a database of faces and identities maintained by Unit 8200, a part of the Israeli intelligence corps.”
  • “‘This is an imaginary scenario’ the high-ranking intelligence officer replied, according to a description of the communications shared with the Financial Times.”
• “Reports: Senior IDF officer dismissed pre-Oct. 7 intel on Hamas invasion as ‘fantasy’” – Times of Israel – Nov. 24, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “Soldiers in the IDF’s prestigious 8200 signal intelligence unit reportedly warned senior officers before the October 7 atrocities that Hamas was preparing a highly organized and meticulously planned mass invasion of Israel but were told their concerns were ‘fantasies.’”
  • “A senior and experienced non-commissioned officer as well as a junior officer in 8200 alerted senior IDF officers well in advance that a major operation was being planned by Hamas, but their warnings went unheeded, according to Thursday reports on Channel 12 and the Kan public broadcaster.”
  • “According to Channel 12’s report on Thursday, the NCO in Unit 8200 put together a report from an array of raw intelligence data detailing a scenario that essentially predicted the October 7 invasion.”
  • “She, together with the junior officer, also pointed to a Hamas drill a month before the Hamas attack, noting that it included preparations for a mass invasion with multiple entry points into Israel.”
  • “‘They were told in real-time. There were so many things that should have set off red lights,’ an unnamed source from Unit 8200 told the network.”
• “Egypt intelligence official says Israel ignored repeated warnings of ‘something big’” – Times of Israel – Oct. 9, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “The Egyptian official said Egypt, which often serves as a mediator between Israel and Hamas, had spoken repeatedly with the Israelis about ‘something big,’ without elaborating.”
  • “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.”
  • “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.”
• “Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PFLP Announce Intention to Escalate Conflict With Israel” – Haaretz – Sep. 24, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “The Palestinian organizations Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine have agreed to continue escalating security tensions and violent action against Israel, they announced Sunday.”
  • “Several hours after the announcement, two fires broke out near Israeli towns along the Gaza border, which were suspected to have been sparked by incendiary balloons launched from the Strip. Following a security assessment, the Israeli army decided to boost its forces on the Gaza border for Yom Kippur.”
  • “The groups agreed to increase coordination between them to ‘deal with Israel’s aggression,’ they said in a joint statement. The decision was made at a meeting in Beirut attended by senior officials in the organizations, including the head of the Hamas political bureau, Saleh al-Arouri; Islamic Jihad’s deputy general secretary, Ziad al-Nakhla; and the PFLP’s deputy secretary general, Jamil Mazhar.”
  • “The statement said that Israeli settlers’ demand for forces to enter the Al-Aqsa Mosque were ‘a declaration of war against the Palestinian people’ and called on ‘the masses, especially the Palestinian youth, to respond with full force.’ They also condemned Saudi Arabia’s negotiations to normalize relations with Israel, calling it ‘a clear betrayal of the blood of the martyrs and the Arab people.’”
  • “Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ spokesperson, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, condemned on Sunday the ‘Israeli escalation against the Palestinian people, its land and its holy places, and the ongoing daily killings.’ Abbas’ spokesperson said ‘the occupation government strives to drag the region into escalation by continuing the aggression.’”
• “Head of IDF Devil’s Advocate Unit tried repeatedly in September to warn of possible Hamas attack” – Times of Israel – Jan. 6, 2024 (Archived link)
  • “The head of the IDF intelligence unit that is charged with questioning IDF assessments and conceptions warned four times in the three weeks before Hamas’s October 7 onslaught that the Gaza ruling terror group could soon launch a confrontation, Channel 12 reports.”
  • “The head of Ipcha Mistabra — the Devil’s Advocate Unit — wrote twice in late September to all senior decision-makers in the army and the political echelon, to challenge the widespread assessment that Hamas was deterred, the TV report says, and presented the same argument twice more during IDF discussions.”
  • “The report quotes from a letter the unnamed officer wrote on December 3 in which he recalled trying to draw his superiors’ attention to the possibility of an imminent attack in the three weeks before the October 7 Hamas onslaught.”
  • “The officer continued that he twice ‘presented this thesis’ in writing, on September 21 and 26, and that these two notes ‘were widely distributed among all decision-makers in the military and the political echelon.’”
  • “He also set out the thesis in a speech at an annual Intelligence Branch strategic assessment session on September 26 and again, the next day, at a weekly debate before the head of military intelligence.”
• “Were there warning signs ahead of Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel?” – Israel National News – Oct. 10, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “Channel 12 News has reported that the leaders of communities in southern Israel received WhatsApp notifications over the past several weeks warning of an impending disaster.”
  • “According to the report, the messages warned that, ‘The coming holidays will be black holidays,’ and that on Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles) the communities around Gaza will be conquered.”
  • “The community leaders contacted the IDF and asked if, in light of these threats, the planned festivals and holiday events should be held.”
  • “Military sources responded that the events should take place, explaining, ‘Everything is fine. On the contrary – we are headed towards the area becoming quieter. Money is flowing into Gaza and workers are coming into Israel.’”

October 2023

“IDF heard about Hamas invasion a week before October 7th, security head reveals” – World Israel News – Feb. 6, 2023 (Archived link)

• “The head of security at the Nova dance rave received a warning a week before the Hamas attack that there could be a major invasion but had been brushed off when he passed it on to IDF authorities, he revealed to Channel 14 Monday evening.”
• “Elkana Federman told the journalists in the studio, ‘I had a guard at the festival who had served in the Re’im Division [near Gaza border], and a week before the festival he sent me a voice message … basically warning me, saying, ‘Elkana, something is going to happen over Sukkot. I just wanted to let you know, there are a lot of warnings. As the whole country knows, the situation in the Gaza envelope isn’t the greatest, so I said I’d warn you so you could be ready. I don’t know what will happen, maybe something will happen, and maybe not.’ He spoke with me like that, in codes.’”
• “‘I passed the voice message on [to the IDF], and they told me everything was all right, that the army would be able to handle whatever needed to be handled and that there were always alerts and that everything was fine. I did my part,’ he said with a grimace. ‘I’m just a security officer, not a high army guy who can change something in my purview.’”
• “Lying in the hospital, he said he called the guard, who served in the IDF as a driver along the Gaza border, to ask about the voice message…‘You were speaking in codes. Tell me exactly what they showed you,’ Federman said he asked the guard. ‘He told me ‘Elkana, they told me there was going to be an invasion, and that they were planning to take over settlements. I just wasn’t allowed to tell you that.’ And that’s what happened.’”
• “‘If he knew what he knew, a driver on the Gaza border,’ Federman pointed out, ‘what did those above him know? Because he’s a small screw in the system.’”

“Hamas attack: October 7, a day of hell on earth in Israel” – Le Monde – Oct. 30, 2023 (Archived link)

• “Ben Shoshan, in addition to living next to the strip, was a guide for the ‘Gaza envelope,’ the Israeli region surrounding the Palestinian territory. She knew everyone from Sderot, a town also adjacent to the enclave, to Beeri, a prosperous kibbutz that boasts one of the largest printing plants in the Middle East and even organizes tours of the Erez terminal, the main land crossing point between Gaza and Israel.”
• “It’s a concrete fortress with immense walls, a maze of security checks, through which transit those authorized to enter and leave Gaza – Palestinian workers, humanitarian aid workers, diplomats and journalists. A few days before the terrorist attack on October 7, the 50-something was a guest on Kan 11 radio, where she said: ‘I hope Hamas isn’t planning a second Yom Kippur,’ in allusion to the 1973 war when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel by surprise.”
• “‘And they’d been training for weeks right up against the border, sometimes in massive numbers. I tried to warn the officers, but they told me I didn’t know anything about it and that I was safe,’ said Ben Shoshan.”

“Egyptian Mediators: Continued Jewish Ascent to Temple Mount Will Lead to Escalation” – Haaretz – Oct. 3, 2023 (Archived link)

• “Egyptian mediators working to reduce tensions between Israel and Hamas have warned that if Jewish worshippers continue to go up to the Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa compound, the security situation is likely to deteriorate.”
• “A source familiar with the talks told Haaretz that the events in Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as stricter conditions imposed on Palestinian security prisoners in Israel, could have a direct impact on events along the Gaza border.”

“US intelligence warned of the potential for violence days before Hamas attack” – CNN – Oct. 13, 2023 (Archived link)

• “The US intelligence community produced at least two assessments based in part on intelligence provided by Israel warning the Biden administration of an increased risk for Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the weeks ahead of Saturday’s seismic attack on southern Israel, according to sources familiar with the intelligence.”
• “One update from September 28 warned, based on multiple streams of intelligence, that the terror group Hamas was poised to escalate rocket-attacks across the border. An October 5 wire from the CIA warned generally of the increasing possibility of violence by Hamas. Then, on October 6, the day before the attack, US officials circulated reporting from Israel indicating unusual activity by Hamas — indications that are now clear: an attack was imminent.”
• “None of the American assessments offered any tactical details or indications of the overwhelming scope, scale and sheer brutality of the operation that Hamas carried out on October 7, sources say. It is unclear if any of these US assessments were shared with Israel, which provides much of the intelligence that the US bases its reports on.”

“Despite Israeli Intelligence Warnings About a Hamas Attack, the Army Didn’t Evacuate the Nova Festival” – Haaretz – Dec. 13, 2023 (Archived link)

• “Hours before Hamas’ October 7 terror attack, Israel’s security forces had enough warning signs to prepare – at least partially – for the possibility that terrorists would seek to infiltrate from Gaza into Israel.”
• “Despite the fact that the Gaza Division’s Northern Brigade approved the Nova music festival’s staging in the Kibbutz Re’im parking lot, was responsible for its security, and its commander was aware of the warnings, no one in the IDF notified the thousands of party-goers or the party’s organizers of their concerns, or demanded that the event be shut down.”
• “Moreover, it turned out that army units that were on alert in the area at the start of the Hamas attack had no knowledge of the party.”
• “The commander of the Gaza Division’s Northern Brigade, Col. Haim Cohen, who signed the papers on October 5 authorizing the Nova party, was aware of the warnings, and knew about the urgent meetings that were taking place that night.”

“IDF Allowed Rave Later Attacked by Hamas Despite Key Officer’s Concern” – Haaretz – Dec. 25, 2023 (Archived link)

• “The Gaza Division’s operations officer, Lt. Col. Sahar Fogel, opposed the Nova rave taking place on October 7 near the border with Gaza, arguing that it was a needless security risk.”
• “Furthermore, his objection was seconded by other officers, both at the Gaza Division and at the Southern Command headquarters. But in a conversation with the IDF’s operations division, he was instructed to approve the event.”
• “In private conversations, some officers in the Gaza Division told of irregular conduct and pressure surrounding the approval of the party, which was held at the Re’im camping ground, and where 364 people were murdered, with some 40 others kidnapped to the Gaza Strip.”
• “The producer of the ‘Unity’ party is a man named Rami Shmuel. Early in the week of the rave, he filed another request to the IDF (which is in charge of the area between Route 232 and the Gaza Strip border) to extend the permit by another day, and to remain in effect until October 7.”
• “This extension was opposed by Lt. Col. Fogel. He argued in real time that extending the event would lead to needless danger, which should be reduced. Fogel also noted that the IDF would struggle to secure the ongoing party throughout the weekend, as it was the holiday of Simchat Torah and many troops were on leave.”
• “Fogel raised his reservations and warning to operations division officers at Southern Command, and also to other commanders at the Gaza Division, who seconded his position. With this wind in his sails, Fogel approached the IDF headquarters’ operations division, which was also involved in the approval process.”
• “But in a phone call held by Fogel with Col. Nimrod Cibolski, head of the operations department at the operations division, Fogel was instructed to approve the party’s extension, so that after the Unity revelers left the Re’im camping ground on Friday morning, the Nova crowd would replace them, staying until the next day.”
• “As far as Haaretz has been able to ascertain, the operations division did not provide Fogel with answers about the difficulties in providing security for the rave on Friday and Saturday.”

“2 commando companies said diverted from Gaza border to West Bank days before Oct. 7” – Times of Israel – Dec. 5, 2023 (Archived link)

• “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.”
• “The 100 or so soldiers were deployed to the West Bank’s Huwara, the Kan public broadcaster reported, amid heightened tensions there. A shooting attack in the Palestinian town took place against an Israeli family later that day. There were no injuries in the shooting.”
• “On October 1, furthermore, the commander of the Gaza Division ordered a situational assessment, which found a ‘sharp increase in drills by Nukhba forces.’ Six Hamas battalions were drilling once or twice a week, the report on that assessment said.”

“Who made millions trading the October 7th attacks?” – The Economist – Dec. 5, 2023 (Archived link)

• “The authors’ most striking finding is a surge in short sales—bets that a security’s price will fall—of an exchange-traded fund (etf) listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker eis, which tracks an index of Israeli shares. In September an average of 1,581 shares a day of EIS were sold short, representing 17% of the daily total trading volume. On October 2nd, five days before the attacks, a whopping 227,820 shares were shorted, representing 99% of total volume. Rather than reflecting a souring of market sentiment, the increase in activity seems to have come from just two trades. Then, on the first trading day after the attack, standard “long” transactions outnumbered short sales by a similar number of shares (248,009). If these trades were made by the same investor, they would correspond to a $1m profit.”
• “Other securities also showed suspicious patterns. During the three weeks before the attacks, the number of outstanding options contracts expiring on October 13th on American-traded shares of Israeli firms—the derivatives that would yield the greatest returns if prices moved sharply in the direction a trader expected—rose eightfold.”
• “The paper’s authors examined other periods of turmoil in Israel, such as that prompted by the government’s attempted judicial reform earlier this year, and did not detect similar behaviour. The only match was in April—two days before Passover, which according to reporting by an Israeli tv station was the date originally scheduled for the attack.”
• “Critics of the paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, suggest that the activity could reflect investors closing positions on the first day of a quarter, or have been a market-maker’s response to a trader buying up shares in the fund. Yet no surge has occurred at the start of any other quarter since 2009. The authors say that had any large purchases of eis been made to offset the shorts, such transactions would appear in their data. Another objection is that although a big short sale should in theory drive down prices, eis actually rose in value. In response, the authors note that the fund’s value is tied to the prices of the shares it contains, and that the shorts of EIS were tiny in comparison with the market capitalisation of the firms the fund tracks.”

Tweet from Israeli reporter about escalating border incursion training exercises days before 10/7 – Kan 11 – Oct. 3, 2023 (Archived link)

• “The Islamic Jihad organization started a noisy exercise very close to the border of missile launches, breaking into Israel and kidnapping soldiers. Dedi Fuld, a resident of Netiv HaTara: `It was significantly closer than previous times. The children wake up during the holiday break and ask what’s going on, there are explosions, booms. It is not similar to previous exercises.’”

• “Where Was the Israeli Military?” – TheNew York Times – Dec. 30, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “Making matters worse, the military has acknowledged that it moved two commando companies — more than 100 soldiers — to the West Bank just two days before the attack, a reflection of Israel’s mistaken belief that a Hamas attack was not an imminent threat.”
  • “That left three infantry battalions and one tank battalion along Gaza’s border. But Oct. 7 was the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, and the Sabbath. One senior military officer estimated that about half the 1,500 soldiers in the area were away. He said that another infantry battalion had been reassigned years earlier after Israel finished building a security wall around Gaza.”
• “Israel had intel on Hamas activity but didn’t put Gaza border on high alert” – Axios – Oct. 13, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “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.”
  • “The official said that after consultations on Friday night, the director of Shin Bet and the IDF chief of staff decided to send a small Shin Bet special force team and a team from the police counterterrorism special unit to southern Israel for a scenario of an attempt to infiltrate across the border and conduct a limited kidnapping operation.”
  • “The Prime Minister’s Office said Netanyahu wasn’t updated about the Friday night consultations and the first time he received an update was at 6:29am local time when Hamas started firing mortar fire on the Israeli villages near the border.”
• “Shortly Before the Hamas Attack This Warning Arrived. What Happened at the Paga Outpost?” – Haaretz – Dec. 27, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “On the night before the attack, platoon Sgt. R. exited the Paga outpost, located close to Kibbutz Nahal Oz, to patrol along the border with Gaza. The patrol began at 2 A.M. and was supposed to last 12 hours. The main challenge R. expected while on patrol was demonstrations by Gazans, as had occurred in the weeks preceding October 7. Before 5 A.M., a warning was received from one of the observation posts, indicating a significant interference with the border fence. The patrol was then supposed to go that spot and ascertain whether an infiltration had occurred.”
  • “According to R., his commander forbade him from moving toward the border fence. ‘I didn’t delve into the matter and continued with the patrol,’ he recalled. The worry was that Israeli forces might be vulnerable to an anti-tank missile if they approached the fence. R. was then prohibited from traveling along the fence before 9 A.M., which was later changed to 7 A.M.”
  • “R. continued on his patrol. No one checked what had touched the fence. No one updated the soldiers at the outpost. No one updated friends of theirs either. They were on routine alert a few hundred meters from the border fence together with an armored force and a Namer armored personnel carrier.”
• “How Israel’s Feared Security Services Failed to Stop Hamas’s Attack” – New York Times – Oct. 10, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “Shortly before attackers from Gaza poured into Israel at dawn on Saturday, Israeli intelligence detected a surge in activity on some of the Gazan militant networks it monitors. Realizing something unusual was happening, agents sent an alert to the Israeli soldiers guarding the Gazan border, according to two senior Israeli security officials.”
  • “But the warning wasn’t acted upon, either because the soldiers didn’t get it or the soldiers didn’t read it.”
• “Report: Top brass saw ‘telltale signs’ of smaller attack 2 hours before Hamas struck” – Times of Israel – Oct. 20, 2023 (Archived link)
  • “Israel’s security chiefs had ‘telltale signs’ more than two hours before Hamas’s devastating assault on the morning of Saturday, October 7 that an attack was looming, but believed the danger to be on a much smaller scale than that of the devastating onslaught that occurred, Channel 12 reported Friday.”
  • “Without citing sources, the report said the ‘concrete’ indications pointed to a likely coming ‘day of battle’ in which a limited force of terrorists would attempt to infiltrate the border, seize control of one or two communities and attempt kidnappings.”
  • “But the officials allegedly decided the matter could wait till morning, and no alert was issued. The security chiefs did not pass on word of the signs of an imminent attack, did not alert IDF troops at the border, many of whom were killed at their bases and positions, did not move up tanks deployed in the area, and did not alert the local civil defense squads at nearby communities who fought the rampaging terrorists hours later, the report said.”
• “The critical war signal IDF high command missed on October 7” – Ynet News – Jan. 12, 2024 (Archived link)
  • “On the night of October 6, a major incident unfolded in the Gaza Strip. It is common in intelligence circles to refer to ‘indicative signs’ signaling the onset of an attack or war. That night, an early warning was received, stemming from a Shin Bet operation. This warning raised suspicions of an imminent ground assault on Israeli soil.”
  • “IDF sources told Ynet that as the night progressed, the level of concern heightened with more and more signs emerging from the Gaza Strip. It’s estimated that signals were transmitted through communication channels, indicating a potential imminent attack on Israel.”
  • “Senior IDF officials only learned of this information days after the attack, and were astonished. A former high-ranking Military Intelligence official commented, ‘Receiving such a signal should awaken every intelligence officer; it ought to lead to alarms.’”
• “Israeli Intelligence Agencies Detected Israeli SIM Cards Activated by Hamas Hours Before Oct 7 Assault” – Haaretz – Feb. 26, 2024 (Archived link)
  • “Israeli intelligence agencies identified that cellphones with Israeli SIM cards were activated by Hamas operatives in the Gaza Strip on the morning of October 7.”
  • “This was a sign of unusual activity, which triggered a meeting of the defense establishment during those early hours. The prevailing assessment during the discussions was that it was an exercise by Hamas or, in an extreme scenario, preparation for a limited-scale hostage-taking attempt.”
  • “Even though the defense establishment did not anticipate the extent of the infiltration by Hamas militants, an alert was issued among security agencies about the possibility of the organization attempting an attack within Israeli territory on the eve of October 7.”
  • “The information was based on several sources that noticed alarming preparations by Hamas operatives on the other side of the border. This alert was preceded by intelligence information that further heightened concerns among various officials within the security establishment.”
• “Netanyahu Admits Knowing of Only ‘Few’ Israeli SIM Cards Activated by Hamas on Oct. 7, Contrary to Earlier Denial” – Haaretz – Feb. 26, 2024 (Archived link)
  • “The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office claimed on Monday that Benjamin Netanyahu was not informed of the surge in Israeli SIM-card usage in Gaza on the eve of the October 7 attack, but according to two top defense officials who spoke with Haaretz, he participated in several discussions on the topic over the first few days of the war that followed.”
  • “The sources, who were present at the discussions in which the prime minister took part, said the issue had been raised more than once in meetings that dealt with telltale signs that emerged just prior to the Hamas attack. According to one source, the SIM cards were one of several indicators, and one that was not assigned much importance, because the cards had already been activated in the past without Hamas taking any action.”
  • “The use of the SIM cards was disclosed by a guest on Shimon Riklin’s news show on Channel 14, and the issue was discussed on-air despite violating a broad ban by the censors on the subject due to fear of intelligence leaks.”
  • “One of the senior defense sources who spoke to Haaretz was critical of Channel 14 and said the leak had done considerable damage. ‘There is no reason to do it. It is not clear why anyone needed to reveal we have such capabilities. The very existence of that telltale sign had already been reported,’ he said.”
  • “The source was referring to Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal’s report in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, which was had been cleared by military censors, and said the army had seen telltale signs of the October 7 attack, without mentioning the technological capabilities to locate SIM cards or other classified details.”
  • “The Prime Minister’s office asserted on Monday that Netanyahu learned about the SIM cards from Riklin’s show. However, another top security source confirmed that Netanyahu knew the details. ‘His claim as if he learned it yesterday for the first time is not true,’ the defense official insisted.”

The above paragraph was added on 5/12/2024 (after publication) because I realized I had forgotten to include the information about community leaders receiving specific WhatsApp warnings about Al-Aqsa Flood and passing them along to the IDF.

Nuts & Boltzmann

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