According to the New York Times, Israeli officials became aware of an unprecedented Hamas attack plan more than a year ago
Based on secret documents, the American newspaper New York Times claimed on Thursday that 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.
According to the American daily newspaper, Israeli military intelligence got its hands on a forty-page document from the Palestinian Islamist movement, which describes point by point a major attack like the one carried out by commandos on October 7th, in which around 1,200 people were killed in Israel came .
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. 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,” writes this analyst in encrypted emails consulted by the newspaper . “We had a similar experience fifty years ago on the southern front with a seemingly imaginary scenario. 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, although 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.