Israeli army’s failure revealed in Be’eri October 7 probe is only part of the picture
A destroyed house in Kibbutz Be’eri, November 2023
Amos Harel writes in Haaretz on 11 July 2024:
The investigation into the battle at Kibbutz Be’eri, which the Israel Defense Forces presented on Thursday to the members of the kibbutz and afterward to the general public, is the first in a painful series of revelations about the massacre on October 7 and what led to it.
Be’eri, the largest kibbutz in the western Negev – the area directly across from the Gaza Strip – suffered an extraordinarily harsh blow: 101 civilians were murdered there that day, together with another 31 security personnel, among them members of the kibbutz’s emergency security squad. In addition, 30 residents were abducted, of whom 11 remain in Hamas captivity.
The results of the investigation, which was presented by Maj. Gen. (res.) Mickey Edelstein, reveals the unbelievable chaos that reigned in the kibbutz from the morning hours of that Saturday until the evening of the following day. Some 340 armed terrorists assaulted the kibbutz in the first hours. The adjacent military outpost, Magen Be’eri (Paga), was attacked at the same time by a large Hamas force. The soldiers of the Golani infantry brigade inside were pinned down, unable to assist the kibbutz. The headquarters of the Gaza Division and its northern brigade also did not function and did not provide any aid.
Be’eri was defended initially by 13 members of its own security squad, and with them Maj. Gen. (res.) Yossi Bachar, a kibbutz member. They had at their disposal six M-16 rifles and a few pistols. The rest of the rifles were locked in the armory, as instructed by the Home Front Command, out of fear of theft. But the security coordinator of the kibbutz and his deputy were killed in the first minutes, and no one else had the keys to the armory.
In addition to their numerical superiority, the terrorists had the advantage of absolute surprise (in the absence of an intelligence warning or appropriate defensive deployment by the IDF) and of vast superiority in combat equipment. The police forces and afterward the IDF units that arrived in Be’eri did not have anti-tank missiles or hand grenades. In most cases, the soldiers and civilians fought with considerable courage, but were in an inferior position in terms of firepower.
It wasn’t until around 2 P.M. that the balance of forces began to shift, when the IDF started to gather additional troops and some of the terrorists headed back to the Gaza Strip with their booty – hostages and bodies. Even then, the first troops that arrived in the kibbutz were General Staff back-up forces, some of which landed nearby in helicopters. No reinforcements at all arrived from the Gaza Division, which was under attack. Many more hours were needed to rid the kibbutz of terrorists and to free the besieged families. It’s estimated that about 100 terrorists were killed in the battle of Kibbutz Be’eri.
The heart of the failure, in Be’eri and in the other communities, lies in the slow and late response of the IDF after it was taken by surprise. Too much time passed before the forces were gathered, an improvised chain of command was put in place (instead of the divisional command, which collapsed) and the sectors were divided in the kibbutz among the units. Outside, in the parking lot, at times dozens more soldiers and police officers waited for instructions and in the meantime did not enter the kibbutz in order to engage the enemy and rescue civilians. Yet inside, the security squad was fighting for its life and saving lives.
The investigation found serious errors by commanders in two elite commando units, Sayeret Matkal and Shaldag. A small force of Shaldag, which reached the kibbutz in the morning, backed away from the first line of contact with the terrorists after one of its men was killed and another wounded.
In the evening, the commander of Sayeret Matkal decided to evacuate his men from the kibbutz, apparently due to a shortage of ammunition, without receiving authorization from above or being allotted alternative troops. It’s important to note that these commanders and the commanders of other units and their troops fought heroically in the kibbutz and sustained large numbers of casualties.
The IDF hopes that the transparency and openness with which it is making the results of the investigations available to the public, and especially to the inhabitants of the communities that were attacked, will help rebuild some of the trust that was lost in the shadow of the massacre. That will be difficult and it will take time. Diagnosing and admitting the flaws will also not fully dissipate the anger and the grief over what happened in Be’eri and in many other communities in the area. Families bled or burned to death in their safe rooms – and the IDF wasn’t there.
For the investigation, the kibbutz members gave Edelstein’s team all that day’s WhatsApp exchanges. Many of the people who wrote those messages are no longer among the living. The last message they sent their friends was: Where the hell is the IDF?
Overall, the investigation frequently turns up a flawed order of priorities, in which units deal with rescuing and extracting security personnel, displaying insensitivity to the need to prioritize the rescue and handling of civilians. The media addressed at length the episode of Pessi Cohen’s house, where terrorists had barricaded themselves with hostages, most of whom were killed after a failed rescue attempt by the IDF and Yamam, the Police Special Anti-Terror Unit.
The bulk of the criticism was leveled at the officer who assumed responsibility for the Be’eri sector in the afternoon of October 7, Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram, the commander of the 99th Division. He is scheduled to succeed Brig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld this summer as commander of the Gaza Division, after Rosenfeld decided to resign from the IDF in the light of the failure to stop the massacre. In the media, it was alleged that Hiram decided to fire tank shells, which according to some accounts caused the death of a number of abductees.
The army’s investigation strives to reduce the criticism of Hiram, and continues to refrain from adopting final conclusions, claiming that there are more things left to examine. From the investigation, doubts arise about the degree of Hiram’s involvement in the tank fire and about the connection between him and the death of the abductees (which appears to have been more the consequence of directives that were transmitted mainly in the channel between the Shin Bet security service and Yamam to their personnel on the ground).
Some of the anger that was leveled at Hiram in the wake of interviews he gave to Channel 12’s “Uvda” (“Fact”) program and to the New York Times was exaggerated and stemmed in part from his ideological identity: a settler who is admired by many on the right. It was Hiram who took the initiative and assumed command of the kibbutz area. That said, Edelstein did not go into the question of Hiram’s suitability for the post of Gaza Division commander. To begin with, the battle that took place during the hours in which Hiram took command was also rife with setbacks and difficulties (after starting from a drastically inferior position). And second, much depends on the ability to establish renewed trust between Hiram and the Kibbutz Be’eri community.
The intense, and justified, preoccupation of the public with the military investigations should not divert all attention from the blunders of the political decision makers in the Gaza affair, especially in the years leading up to the massacre. The coalition has a special incentive to direct public ire at the IDF, amid increasing calls for the resignation of the army’s ranking officers. A report in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth on Wednesday provided a glimpse at the gravity of what is still waiting to be uncovered.
According to the report, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s outgoing military secretary, Maj. Gen. Avi Gil, recently submitted a complaint to Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara in which he expressed concern that some in the Prime Minister’s Bureau tried to revise protocols documenting the war (Netanyahu’s bureau maintains that this is a “total lie.”)
The bottom line of all these tangled and worrisome affairs is clear: In the end, there will be no choice but to establish a state commission of inquiry.
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