CNN –
When Hamas militants breached the Gaza fence in this month’s unprecedented attack on Israel, Kibbutz Mefalsim – less than two miles from the border – was on the front line. According to security videos and local residents, a group of militants with AK-47 rifles and grenade launchers headed straight for the community’s gates, while another group wanted to destroy the generator.
This precision was no coincidence, say local Israeli security forces: the fighters seemed to have known exactly where they were going.
CNN has reviewed documents that Israeli officials said were Hamas attack plans, indicating the group has collected remarkably detailed details about its targets. But none of the attacks went according to plan – thanks in part to a handful of volunteer guards who defended their neighbors in dramatic firefights.
Photos of the plan to attack Mefalsim were posted online by an Israeli first responder group, saying it was recovered from the body of a slain Hamas fighter. Two local Israeli security officials told CNN they had independently seen photos of the plan and that it closely matched the tactics used by Hamas militants during the attack.
The color-coded document contains detailed information about the kibbutz’s guards and security. It said a group of militants would break through the community’s fence while others were ordered to “capture soldiers and civilians and hold hostages” to negotiate.
Yarden Reskin, a member of Mefalsim’s volunteer security forces who engaged in hours of gun battles with militants and helped prevent deaths within the community, said he was shocked at the level of detail.
“They knew everything,” Reskin said. “They knew where the gates were, they knew where the generators were, they knew where the armory was, they knew basically how many of us on the security team… they had very, very good information.”
Even more frightening was another alleged Hamas document outlining plans to attack nearby Kibbutz Sa’ad, which CNN obtained from a senior Israeli government official. The attackers’ goal was listed as “causing the greatest possible number of human casualties.”
As in Mefalsim, the plans did not come to fruition as a first responder group and a resident told CNN that no residents had died in Sa’ad.
The difference between the detailed plans and what happened on the ground is a sign of the chaos that unfolded during the attack, as Hamas fighters encountered far less resistance from the Israeli military than they expected. Despite the billions of dollars Israel has spent securing its border and developing one of the world’s most prestigious intelligence operations, its armed forces have been caught by surprise.
CNN translated the documents but did not independently verify their origins. Several spokespeople for Hamas, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization, did not respond to messages seeking comment or confirmation about the plans.
Experts said the planning documents suggested Hamas carefully gathered intelligence on targeted communities to prepare for the weekend attack – even if those plans did not all come to fruition. Matthew Levitt, who directs a counterterrorism and intelligence program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and reviewed the documents for CNN, said that “the granularity of this information is very surprising.”
“There has been an enormous effort,” he said. “This was a very carefully planned operation that involved a type of information processing and dissemination that I think not many people thought Hamas had.”
Hamas officials have claimed that their fighters had been ordered not to kill women and children – and that such killings were the result of other independent militants pouring across the Gaza border during the chaos of the attack. However, Israeli officials and experts have argued that planning documents show that causing civilian casualties was a central part of the group’s mission.
“The execution wasn’t just by a villain,” Levitt said. The documents, he said, suggested that killing civilians was “exactly what they intended to do.”
Outnumbered and outgunned
Mefalsim, a community of about 1,000 residents, has long been a target of Hamas rockets due to its proximity to the Gaza Strip. When locals received the warning of rocket fire around 6:30 a.m. Saturday morning, they knew they had to head to their bomb shelters.
But the kibbutz residents soon realized that this attack was different from all previous ones. Reskin, who has lived in Mefalsim his entire life, huddled with his family in the shelter of their home when he heard a volley of gunfire nearby. “I kissed my wife, kissed my two little girls and walked out the door to see what I could do,” he said.
Reskin said he was shocked to see black-clad fighters with AK-47s just outside the gates of the kibbutz. He and a handful of other guards engaged in multiple skirmishes with the attackers for hours, often facing greater numbers and firepower.
Surveillance camera videos from Mefalsim posted by a group of Israeli first responders on Telegram show militants approaching the kibbutz’s main gate and shooting a man running towards it before an exchange of gunfire with guards. At one point, there were only three security guards “fighting a force of about 15 or 16 terrorists,” another volunteer guard, Eli Levi, told CNN. Details of the battle were previously reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Israeli forces later arrived and defeated additional militants who approached the community, Reskin and Levi said. While the attackers killed at least one civilian and possibly others outside the gates of the kibbutz, and injured a handful of residents, no one was killed within the community, according to Reskin and Levi.
Reskin said he later saw photos of the Hamas planning document, which detailed details of security forces and estimates of how long it would take for Israeli military reinforcements to arrive.
The document’s cover lists the date as 2022, perhaps indicating that the attack had been planned for a year or more – although another page lists the date as June 15, 2023.
When he saw the document, he became convinced the attack was “something they’ve been planning for years,” Reskin said. “This is not something you plan in weeks or months.”
Levi, who also saw a copy of the plan, said the attack strategy appeared to have been followed by Hamas militants. Some fighters attacked a power generator, the location of which was shown on a map, while others tried to take control of the main gate.
“Most things actually happened the way they were written down,” Levi said.
Colin P. Clarke, a senior research fellow at the Soufan Center, a nonprofit security organization, who reviewed suspected Hamas documents for CNN, said the detailed information the group collected on individual kibbutzim suggested the possibility that the terror group was over human sources in Israel.
“The level of detail is exceptional,” Clarke said. The level of planning “just shows long-term thinking in a way that most terrorist groups don’t have the organization to do,” he said.
Clarke said that the fact that the group was able to collect this amount of information shows not only that “Hamas has significantly improved its operational capabilities, but that Israel was asleep at the wheel.”
A document provided to CNN by a senior Israeli official describes plans for an attack on Sa’ad, a community of about 850 people a few miles south of Mefalsim.
The document, first reported by NBC News, said the Hamas militants’ mission was “to control the kibbutz, inflict as many lives as possible and hold hostages.” CNN has not independently verified the authenticity of the document.
Similar to the Mefalsim Plan, the document lists information about the kibbutz and its security, including detailed information about the number of guards protecting the community.
A group of militants was ordered to breach the kibbut fence and destroy the guard room before “gathering hostages in the dining room and preparing to take some of them to the Strip.” A second group was instructed to “collect hostages and hand them over to the first group.”
The document also states that the groups were to “control” and “inspect” two schools and search a “youth movement area.” Detailed satellite maps of the kibbutz and the surrounding area are also included.
But as in Mefalsim, Hamas failed to successfully attack Sa’ad – no one was killed, according to the first responder group. It’s unclear why: According to Israeli officials, several other nearby communities – some identified on a map in the plan – were attacked by Hamas militants, killing civilians.
Sarah Pollack, a Sa’ad resident who spent Saturday holed up in her family’s bomb shelter, said the kibbutz was hit by a rocket from Gaza and some residents who were outside the community during the attack were killed. But no militants entered the kibbutz and no one was killed inside the gates, she said.
“We don’t know how to explain it,” she said in an interview from her hotel near Arad, Israel, where she and her family were evacuated after the attack. “That’s a huge, huge question for us. It’s a miracle.”
Pollack said it was frightening to see the extensive details Hamas had in the planning documents about Sa’ad. “Shockingly, the details are very precise…terribly precise,” she said.
Although Sa’ad escaped with far less death and destruction than neighboring kibbutzim, Pollack said the attack deeply shook residents’ sense of security in what she described as “beautiful, lush, beautiful green space with gardens and trees that we are.” so proud of.”
“We thought there was a physical barrier between Gaza and Israel to protect us, we thought we were safe,” she said. “We were very wrong.”