Three years after Hamas attacked on October 7, Israel has yet to start reckoning with its failures
Amos Harel writes in Haaretz on 7 October 2026:
Three years since that Saturday, Hamas’ attack on the communities and military installations near the Gaza border largely remains unfathomable. The attack itself was extremely unusual in its scale, and its catastrophic results highlighted the extent of failure by the defense establishment, state institutions and the government at the top. In response, Israel waged war across multiple fronts, none of which have seen victory or even an end to the fighting. Even the heavy blows Israel dealt its enemies failed to extricate it from the strategic quagmire trapping it, nor did they heal the scars from that day.
The name that Hamas chose for its attack plan, “Al-Aqsa Flood,” was unfortunately fitting. Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and a handful of military senior officials that planned it in secret envisioned the attack as a kind of tsunami that would breach the barriers Israel had constructed around the Gaza Strip – the fence and underground wall it had constructed on the border – and inundate the border communities.
The basic concept began to take shape a few years after Sinwar was released from an Israeli prison in 2011 and returned to the Gaza Strip. Between 2016 and 2021, that small cadre drafted a few different versions of the operational plan, some of which became known to Israeli intelligence. The army dubbed it “Jericho Wall” but very little was done to thwart it or prepare for the case it was implemented.
The appalling neglect was largely due to the phenomenon described, perhaps too generously, as a failure of imagination. The majority of intelligence personnel that dealt with it failed to appreciate that Hamas was serious about putting the plan into action and would do so when it thought the opportunity arose. The defense establishment clung to its arrogant view of Hamas as nothing but a terrorist group with limited operational capabilities. Israel’s intelligence and technological superiority would ensure enough time to prepare.
The thousands joined in the slaughter – Defense Minister Israel Katz recently said that 4,000 of 6,000 terrorists and civilians that took part in it had been killed by Israel – realized the planners’ vision for an invasion. Within 15 to 30 minutes, the border fence had been breached in more than a hundred places and the attackers entered communities and army camps (which had not been built to be defended from attack). The too-few defenders found themselves facing overwhelming numerical odds of 1:7 or 1:8 in many locations. Despite fighting heroically, they often struggled to halt the massacre.
Because they had been completely taken by surprise, most of these units spent hours trying to repel the invaders from their camps and therefore failed to come to the aid of civilian communities they were charged with protecting. When the Israel Defense Forces began to regroup and send reinforcements to the south, other problems emerged. Hamas, which was well-prepared, had analyzed vulnerabilities along the main roads and laid ambushes that caught the reinforcing troops off guard, inflicting heavy casualties. The immense chaos prevailing in the area near the border, compounded at times by command hesitation, caused significant delays in troops reaching the communities themselves, giving rise to the most widespread and painful question of October 7: Where was the IDF?
This question was asked thousands of times, in desperate phone calls and in WhatsApp groups. More than once mothers typed it out with bleeding fingers while struggling to keep their house’s safe room door shut, in the hopes of saving their children.
Only recently, over two years after the attack, did I read the best and most concise explanation of the chaos and fog of war that morning in a short academic paper written by a Golani officer, Maj. A. While studying at university at the time, he was summoned to the area that day. His brigade’s 51st and 13th battalions, which were deployed along the line, were enduring the hardest day in Golani’s history: a full 73 were killed and hundreds were wounded. With A.’s permission, I present his account here.
“I experienced the events on a tactical level,” he writes. “I am not writing as an external researcher but as someone who was taken by the surprise in real time. From that position, though, one could see a konceptzia” – the Hebrew term often used to described preconceived notions on regional security shattered by the Yom Kippur War – “come apart on the ground before it comes apart for the entire system. In the first hours of October 7, I found myself on the move, armed, trying to understand what I was seeing. I wasn’t in shock in the emotional sense; the fear comes later. The initial moment was something else entirely – a sense of incongruity. The events unfolding around me didn’t conform to any pattern I could have recognized. It wasn’t just an unusual occurrence, or another local infiltration. It was clear that something much bigger was happening, but the words and thoughts available to me were not enough to conceptualize it.
“As a combat officer, I developed professionally within a system that drills scenarios: infiltration, engagement, escalation, rocket fire. Everything is familiar, categorized and subject to procedures. But that morning the templates collapsed in real time. Not because there were no procedures, but because the reality exceeded any framework of plausibility we were working with. That moment of disbelief is not merely a personal experience; it is a key to understanding the surprise. October 7 wasn’t only an intelligence and operational failure; it was a cognitive failure. The accumulating data was not translated into a paradigm shift. Even when the event began, it took time until the system, throughout different levels, moved on from the ‘unusual but recognizable’ assumption and accepted that it was a large-scale campaign.”
Hindsight
Looking back, to the east, the emplacement that the IDF built recently on Tell Ali Muntar east of Gaza City beyond the nearby border with Israel, it’s easier to understand what occurred here and what has changed since. To the left, you can see the antennas of the Nahal Oz base, which came under Hamas attack the morning of October 7,2023. Fifty-three soldiers were killed in the fighting in the camp, and 10 were abducted, of whom seven eventually came back alive.
The operation planned by Hamas to capture the base was executed with precision.
“I was a naval commando for 18 years,” says Col. Ido Kass, the officer who conducted the investigation into the battle that was fought there. “Perhaps only once did I encounter an operational dossier similar to the depth and breadth of the one Hamas prepared for the attack on the base. They prepared a special intelligence operation against us. It was impressive and painful.”
To the right of the base, you can see homes in Kibbutz Nahal Oz. On the morning of the massacre, only a small number of soldiers and kibbutz security squad members fought to defend it; the battle at the adjacent base made it barely possible for the kibbutz to get help during the first hours. Fifteen Israelis were killed and murdered at the kibbutz and eight were kidnapped to Gaza, and six returned alive. Most of the residents have returned in the past year, but rehabilitation is in full swing. Like other communities on the front line along the Gaza border, fields continued to be worked throughout the war, right up to the last dunam adjacent to the fence.
A chain of more than 40 IDF outposts now stands as a buffer between the Israeli residents of the Gaza border region and Hamas terrorists, an outcome of the war. Most of the outposts were built a kilometer inside the Gaza Strip, along the hills known as the “70 Ridge.” The war continues, albeit on a low simmer relative to the past, but today it occurs mainly inside the Strip. The extensive reconstruction that has occurred on the Israeli side of the border stands in sharp contrast to what happens on the Palestinian side. The Shujaiyeh neighborhood was completely destroyed and the great majority of its residents were forced to abandon it, except for a few hundred militiamen and their families, collaborators with Israel.
In Israel, however, the local regional councils say that close to 90 percent of locals have returned to their homes to date. Most of those who still have reservations about coming back probably never will. There are also many families who have chosen to make a new home there after the massacre. They hope that the IDF has learned its lesson and, in addition to deploying forces inside the Gaza Strip, has also improved its preparedness in a way that will make it difficult for Hamas to try and repeat its success. But doubts and questions abound. Anyone who waited in their safe room once for too many hours is unlikely to blindly trust the army again.
The Habima Theater drama “Simple Actions” returns to what happened before that morning. It focuses on a family in a kibbutz in the area during the judicial overhaul protests over the nine months before October 7. Habima’s young resident playwright, Yotam Gotal, wisely chose to end the story on the night before the massacre. The audience leaves the theater without knowing what will happen to the characters in the hours that would follow.
Yet a lump forms in the throat as the play progresses, and by the time the date October 6 appears on the screen, sobs can already be heard in the audience. With elections less than three weeks away, that same ominous feeling that pervades the play’s final scenes seems to be with us today.
Warning signs
To Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dismay, over the past few weeks there have been several reports, citing Palestinian and Arab sources, about warnings he received prior to the massacre from the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. Netanyahu vehemently denies them and has even threatened libel suits. But those reports have in the meantime been corroborated by others in Western media outlets that add new details.
In no way do these revelations diminish the responsibility of the IDF and Shin Bet security service officials who discounted the threat posed by Hamas in the years leading up to the surprise attack and failed to see the warning signs that had accumulated in the final days and hours before it began. But Netanyahu’s responsibility for the failure is sweeping. This is due both to the fact that he was prime minister for 13 of the 14 1/2 years leading up to October 7 and to the divide and conquer policy he pursued vis-a-vis the West Bank and Gaza. He also ignored the warning signs on how domestic rifts over the judicial overhaul were perceived by Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.
Netanyahu’s pre-October 7 warnings:
Emirati warning: First reported by Haaretz and later confirmed by The New York Times, UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed warned Netanyahu about 10 days before October 7 that Hamas was planning a major attack and urged him to take it seriously.
First Egyptian warning: First reported by The Atlantic, Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel secretly visited Israel on September 26, 2023, and warned that Hamas appeared to be preparing a major assault.
Additional Egyptian warnings: Reported by Yedioth Ahronoth and The Wall Street Journal, Kamel called Netanyahu days before October 7 to warn of signs of an imminent attack from Gaza.
Netanyahu’s version of events isn’t consistent. He insists that Emirati President Mohamed bin Zayed and Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel’s warnings didn’t reach him directly. This implies that he does not rule out claims that other warnings did reach the Israeli establishment. The IDF and the Shin Bet suspect that he deliberately withheld information he had heard from them. The dispute over how the warnings were handled only underscores the need to establish a state commission of inquiry, following three years of foot-dragging and deliberate obstruction by the government.
The reports raise another question. The sources issuing the warnings are said to have highlighted Sinwar’s desperation, hinted at an impending development that would impact the release of security prisoners and urged Israel to make economic gestures toward Hamas – specifically, resuming transfers the delayed Qatari fund transfers and increasing the number of permits issued to Gazans to work in Israel. Meanwhile, protests along the fence resumed. The crisis was seemingly resolved in late September when Israel acceded to the demands, and the protests came to an end.
These reports supposedly strengthen suspicions that the Hamas leadership was engaged in deception aimed at lulling Israel into a false sense of security. While the organization had issued warnings, it gave Israeli leadership the impression that the situation was relatively manageable and that situation along the border had returned to normal. As the protests subsided, the IDF allowed more soldiers to go on leave for the Simhat Torah holiday. Meanwhile, an escalation of incidents in Samaria led to the redeployment of two reserve companies from the Egoz Unit from the Southern Command to the West Bank.
Pieces of the puzzle are missing: How much of a role was played by the Hamas leadership’s (and Iran’s) desire to thwart the emerging normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia in the organization’s calculations? After all, in Hamas’ view, the agreement threatened to relegate the Palestinian issue to the bottom of the international agenda. Was Qatar, Saudi Arabia’s rival and an opponent of normalization, not privy to Hamas’ plans? Did they spur the group’s leaders to act?
Justice
At a time when the government has delayed any and all investigation, the IDF at least is trying to learn, and implement, the lessons about its role in the disaster. Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir appointed Maj. Gen. Ori Gordin, who was the head of the Northern Command during the first two years of the war, to coordinate the implementation of the conclusions from the army’s October 7 investigations and investigate the events from October 8 onwards. On Sunday, 68 key lessons were presented at a conference for IDF senior command.
A significant part of them deal with revised operational plans, scenarios relating to the borders and the structure and organization of various units. Among other things, rapid-response units staffed by local reservists are being established (the Northern Command already set up one called the Dvora Squadron earlier this decade, and it is slated to soon be expanded). But a more fundamental policy was also formulated, which is in line with the government’s approach. The army will strive, where it is possible, to create wider security strips that will protect civilian communities from inside enemy territory. Netanyahu has leveraged the IDF’s professional case on this into a sort of overarching strategy. The prime minister now advocates for the military to hold buffer zones inside Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, regardless of the international repercussions or the burden it places on reservists.
Beyond official ceremonies and the endless television reports on the heroism of individual combat soldiers and units – it seems the IDF reverted to some of the superlatives and imagery it had vowed to abandon after the massacre – one important gesture stood out. Zamir awarded a certificate of commendation for “intellectual courage and professionalism” to V., the female career soldier from Unit 8200 whose commanders had ignored her warnings on the eve of the war that Hamas was rehearsing for what she recognized as the Jericho Wall plan.
Coincidentally, but certainly symbolically, the certificate was given a day after the affair involving Lt. Col. Aryeh Amidror, the IDF’s Gaza Division’s intelligence officer and among those who discounted V. warnings. Amidror had fought unsuccessfully in court to prevent his name from being revealed and the end of his army career. However, the media and public outrage directed at him somewhat misses the bigger picture: The problems that enabled the greatest military disaster in the state’s history are far too extensive to be pinned on a single lieutenant colonel, no matter how infuriating his conduct may have been.
While the entire affair requires a thorough and authoritative investigation, the IDF took a step in the right direction when Zamir did right by V. and made it clear to commanders that they cannot suppress dissenting views or interpretations simply because they come from relatively junior officers.
This article is reproduced in its entirety