Chilling new details are emerging about how Hamas managed to surprise and defeat the Middle East’s strongest army last Saturday, the deadliest day for Israel in its 75-year history. Hamas planning documents, videos of the attack and interviews with security officials obtained by The New York Times show that the fundamentalist group had a keen understanding of the Israeli army’s workings, its secrets and weaknesses.
Hamas terrorists went into action that night. Using drones, they destroyed key surveillance and communications towers along the Gaza border, creating huge blind spots for the Israeli army, which was still sleeping when it came under attack.
The reason for the failure of the Shin Bet and Mossad was an overreliance on border surveillance tools, which, however, was easily neutralized by Hamas. Some Israeli officials stated that the border control system relies almost entirely on cameras, sensors and remote-controlled machine guns: they felt that this was enough to make mass infiltration unlikely and that it was not necessary to deploy significant numbers of soldiers along the border line to use. But this remote control system was always neutralized remotely. Hamas took advantage of this weakness and disabled the surveillance system in the early stages of the attack.
Shortly after dawn, they used explosives and tractors to open gaps in the border barriers to allow immediate passage for a first wave of 200 attackers and later another 1,800, officials say. The attackers entered Israel on motorcycles and pickup trucks, overwhelmed at least eight military bases and carried out terrorist attacks against civilians in more than 15 villages and towns.
The first target was the Israeli intelligence center. The command that attacked him consisted of ten militiamen: they knew exactly where to go and how to enter the base. After crossing the border, they rode east on five motorcycles, shooting at all civilian cars they encountered. Ten miles later they turned off the road and onto a path in the woods. When they arrived at a gate, they blew it down with a small explosive charge and entered the base. A success that was celebrated with a group selfie. For a moment the attackers seemed unsure where to go. Then one of them pulled something out of his pocket: it was a colored map of the base.
So they made their way purposefully to the military intelligence center: the open door of a fortified building was open, access to the computer room, the heart of the base, was child’s play. The two Israeli soldiers guarding the building hid under a bed: they were riddled with bullets. This scene was captured by a camera mounted on the head of a commando militiaman who was later killed. The New York Times reviewed the footage and then verified the events by interviewing Israeli officials and also reviewing Israeli military videos of the attack.
It was only late in the morning that soldiers and reservists from various units reached the base and destroyed the ten Gaza militiamen who had filmed their deadly attack.
But several Israeli military leaders have now been killed, wounded or taken hostage. Another Israeli strategic mistake was to concentrate all army commanders in a single base along the border. So the soldiers found themselves in chaos, with no one able to give precise instructions to contain the attack.
Footage from the attackers’ head-mounted cameras, including video of the raid on the intelligence center, showed Hamas gunmen from its well-trained Nukhba Brigade breaking through the barriers of several bases in the early morning light. After the breakthrough, they acted ruthlessly and shot some soldiers in their beds and underwear. According to a senior Israeli army officer, they knew exactly where communications servers were located at several bases and destroyed them. With many of their communications and surveillance systems down, the Israelis often couldn’t see the commandos coming.
While some Hamas men stormed military bases, others attacked residential areas and ruthlessly kidnapped and killed civilians. It was 7:20 a.m. when hundreds armed with pistols, shoulder-mounted rocket launchers and wearing Hamas green belts set fire to Kibbutz Nahal Oz, a rural village of about 500 people where the Cherry family lives. At about 10 a.m. they broke down the door, entered with shooting and ransacked our house, said Ms. Cherry, who managed to escape with her husband and son by silently barricading themselves in a room using a wardrobe: They managed it To make people believe that there were no attackers inside.
It was a coordinated attack in which teams of attackers were assigned to specific targets, documents and videos show. A Hamas planning document – found by Israeli rescuers in a village – showed that the attackers were organized into clearly defined units with specific objectives and battle plans. The document was dated 2022 and suggested it was an attack that had been planned for at least a year. A plan that very few people knew about. Nothing was leaked and Hamas effectively misled the Jerusalem 007: knowing they were being intercepted, the militiamen gave the impression in their telephone conversations that they wanted to focus on the administration of Gaza and to unite at all costs avoid further war with Israel. A trap that led Israel to underestimate the threat from Gaza.
The speed, precision and scale of the Hamas attack sent the Israeli army into a tailspin, and civilians were left to fend for themselves for hours. General Goldfus, 46 years old, commander of the paratroopers, says: He was on vacation at home north of Tel Aviv when he saw a video of terrorists crossing a city unhindered. Without waiting for orders, he headed south. He called friends and colleagues to find out what was going on. Only a few collected. Ultimately, “there was no one who really understood the bigger picture,” he said in an interview.