On Friday, the New York Times published a report establishing conclusively that Israel was fully informed, in detail, of plans by Hamas to attack its border that were executed on October 7. These revelations make clear that Israeli officials, knowing full well where and how Hamas would strike, made a deliberate decision to stand down in order to facilitate the attack.
These revelations mean that the Israeli government allowed and abetted the killing of their own citizens and that the Israeli government is responsible for the deaths that took place that day. This criminal conspiracy was aimed at establishing a pretext for a long-planned genocide against the people of Gaza.
Moreover, it is impossible to believe that the United States was uninformed of Hamas’s plans, under conditions where not only Israeli intelligence, but also Egypt had advance warnings of the attack. Everything points to a plot that involved Israel, the Biden administration and likely British and European intelligence agencies.
The Times published this report Monday as Israel launched a new wave of attacks on Gaza during a visit by Antony Blinken. The presence of the US secretary of state was meant not only to express the United States’ support for the renewed onslaught, but to manage the response to the exposure of this conspiracy.
The Times reported that
The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.
The document obtained by Israeli intelligence forces “meticulously described the attack method, mirroring the actual events,” the Times reported. “It outlined an intense assault aimed to breach Gaza Strip fortifications, seize Israeli cities, and target key military bases. This plan was implemented with alarming accuracy, involving a coordinated use of rockets, drones, and ground forces.”
The Times reports:
Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot—all of which happened on Oct. 7.
Moreover, the Times reported, Israeli military and intelligence officials knew Hamas carried out an exhaustive, day-long training mission to practice the plan in detail just three months before the attack. The Times states:
The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan.
Even while acknowledging that Israel was fully informed of Hamas’s plans, the Times seeks to package the revelations with an alibi, asserting, without any substantiation, that Israeli officials simply made a mistake. The Times writes:
Underpinning all these failures was a single, fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so ingrained in the Israeli government, officials said, that they disregarded growing evidence to the contrary…
The failures to connect the dots echoed another analytical failure more than two decades ago, when the American authorities also had multiple indications that the terrorist group Al Qaeda was preparing an assault.
No, Israel’s stand-down on October 7 was not a failure to “connect the dots,” because there were no dots to connect. The Israeli intelligence forces had obtained the entire operational plan of the October 7 attack, then witnessed Hamas carry out a major, high-level training exercise for that plan. They knew exactly what was planned and decided to let it go ahead.
The Times writes: “Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.” It adds, “It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document.”
This presentation is absurd. It is impossible to believe that information of this character could come into the possession of the intelligence agencies without provoking the most intense analysis. The idea that, after 9/11, such high-level plans would be kept from the prime minister is not believable.
Such a document would have come from a source at the highest levels of Hamas. Once this valuable information was obtained, it would have been vital to take action to protect the source, including countermeasures to make Hamas believe Israel did not possess the information. The stand-down could have been a means to send a signal that Hamas’s plan had not been exposed.
Ultimately, a choice was made to allow Hamas’s operation to go ahead, in order to provide Israel with a pretext for a massive, long-planned military assault on Gaza. Only Netanyahu could make such a decision. The United States, meanwhile, instantly sent a massive military force to the region, announcing the deployment of its largest aircraft carrier and escort ship to the region within 24 hours of the attack.
The Times’ claim that Israel’s stand-down was an “intelligence failure” makes no sense because it is a lie from beginning to end. No, the events of October 7 were not an intelligence failure: Israel was remarkably successful in exactly predicting Hamas’s military operation. Instead of acting on this intelligence, Israel orchestrated a stand-down of troops and intelligence-gathering at the precise moment when the attack took place.
Four days after the October 7 attack, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh reported that in the days preceding the attack, “local Israeli military authorities, with the approval of Netanyahu, ordered two of the three Army battalions, each with about 800 soldiers, that protected the border with Gaza to shift their focus to the Sukkot festival” taking place near the West Bank.
Hersh quoted a source who told him, “That left only eight hundred soldiers … to be responsible for guarding the 51-kilometer border between the Gaza Strip and southern Israel. That meant the Israeli citizens in the south were left without an Israeli military presence for ten to twelve hours. They were left to fend for themselves.”
The stand-down not only left the border vulnerable to attack, it created the conditions where military forces had to be transferred to intercept Hamas attackers in civilian areas, creating conditions in which Israeli tank and helicopter forces shot indiscriminately into civilian areas, further swelling the Israeli death toll.
In addition to the military stand-down, Israel made a decision to put its vaunted 8200 signals intelligence unit off duty on weekends, meaning that the signals intelligence unit that detected the training exercise three months before was not on duty at the time of the Saturday, October 7 attack.
The exposure of Israel’s foreknowledge of the attack likewise exposes the US media and political establishment, which have fully embraced Israel’s claims to have been caught by surprise by the attack, and that the events of October 7 justify the genocide now being unleashed in Gaza.
These revelations expose the Gaza genocide to be a criminal conspiracy by the Netanyahu regime and its imperialist backers, whose victims include not only 20,000 slaughtered Palestinians, but the Israeli population itself.
