Hamas has been preparing for the attack on Saturday, October 7, for two years. A few hours before the operation, Israeli military leaders evaluated intelligence information without raising the alarm. The two backgrounds intertwine as the news reports, hour after hour, the dramatic picture of the total siege of Gaza.
Hamas and the top secret plan
It took Hamas two years to develop the top-secret plan for the attack. This was revealed by a senior leader of the Palestinian military organization, Ali Baraka, in an interview he gave to Russia Today TV on October 8, which has now been rebroadcast by various media outlets. “The zero hour of the attack was kept completely secret,” Baraka said, “only a small group of Hamas leaders knew about it. The number of people who knew about the attack and its timing could be counted on one hand.”
For this reason, Baraka continued, Hamas “did not go to war in recent years and did not join Islamic Jihad in its most recent battle.” “It was all part of the strategy to prepare for the attack,” he continued, “to give people the impression that Hamas was determined to rule Gaza, focus on its 2.5 million residents and abandon resistance .”
“In order to keep the attack secret, the various factions and our allies were unaware of Zero Hour,” he said again, “but within half an hour of its start, all Palestinian resistance factions were contacted, such as our allies Hezbollah and Iran. The Turks had also been informed, he concluded, and a three-hour meeting had taken place with them, with about nine hours having passed. The Russians also sent a message and were informed about the situation and the goals of the war.
Israel and information about the attack
Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi and other military leaders discussed intelligence on Friday night that suggested the possibility that something extraordinary could happen. This is Channel 12’s revelation, which was picked up by other Israeli media outlets, which concluded at the end of the consultations that it was “probably an exercise.”
As The Times of Israel reports, discussion of the issue was postponed until the next morning without raising the alarm or sending more troops to the Gaza border, where the horrific Hamas attack would begin a few hours later.
In response to these revelations, Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that the prime minister “was informed only at 6:29 a.m., when the attack began, and not before.”
USA: “We knew nothing”
The United States announced in the same hours that it had no advance warning of the terrible attack launched by Hamas against Israel. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin made this clear at the press conference in Brussels following the meeting of NATO defense ministers. “If we had had this information,” he added, “we would have shared it with Israel. But to my knowledge we don’t have them.”
Austin will be in Israel in the next few hours and will meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the defense minister and the entire war cabinet of the new emergency government. The Pentagon chief intends to discuss Israeli operational plans and objectives in the conflict in response to the brutal ISIS-style attack, recalling that Israel has asked the United States for “precision munitions” and interceptor missiles for the Iron Dome missile defense system .
“Israel has the right to protect its people,” Austin said, emphasizing that the United States has not placed “conditions” on the military aid it sends to Israel that are aimed at minimizing civilian involvement: “It is a professional army with professional leadership.” We hope and expect that they will do the right thing in conducting their election campaign. We’ll let them decide what their course of action will be, but we have no reason to believe they will do anything different.”
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