From Le Figaro with AFP
Published 1 hour ago, updated 59 minutes ago
After the massacre on October 7th, the Israeli army intervened in Kibbutz Kfar Aza. Ronen Zvulun / Portal
Israeli military intelligence had gotten its hands on a document about forty pages long, which described point by point an attack like the one on October 7th, in which around 1,200 people died in Israel.
Could the bloody attacks of October 7th have been thwarted? A New York Times investigation shows that while intelligence gathering was unsuccessful, a biased analysis of Hamas’ capabilities led to the failure of the security services. According to the New York daily, based on classified documents, Israeli officials had received Hamas’s plan to carry out an unprecedented attack against Israel more than a year in advance, but considered this scenario unrealistic. Israeli military intelligence got its hands on a forty-page document from the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which describes point by point a massive attack like the one carried out by commandos on October 7th, in which around 1,200 people died in Israel. said the major American daily newspaper.
This document, which circulated in intelligence circles under the code name “Jericho Wall,” did not specify a date for a possible attack, but rather defined precise points to saturate the Israeli security system and then attack targets, cities and military bases. More specifically, the document reports rocket fire, drones that destroyed security cameras and automated defense systems, and militants advancing on the Israeli side by paraglider, car and on foot, elements at the center of the October 7 attack stood.
A “completely imaginary” scenario
However, it is “not possible to determine” whether this plan was “fully” approved by the Hamas leadership and how it could be translated into reality, according to an internal Israeli army document obtained by the Times. However, an analyst with the elite intelligence unit 8200 warned in July that a military exercise Hamas had just conducted was similar in several ways to the attack plan outlined in the Jericho Wall document. But a colonel in the military department responsible for Gaza dismissed this scenario, calling it “completely imaginary.”
“I categorically reject the idea that this scenario is imaginary (…) it is a plan for a war” and not just an attack “against a village,” this analyst writes in encrypted emails were consulted by the newspaper. “We had a similar experience 50 years ago on the southern front with a scenario that seemed imaginary. History could repeat itself if we are not careful,” the analyst wrote almost prophetically to his colleagues, referring to the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
According to the Times, while the Jericho Wall document was circulated within the Israeli military hierarchy, it is not known whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet consulted it.