Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s plan to carry out unprecedented attack on Israel more than a year in advance but deemed the scenario unrealistic, New York Times says, based on secret documents, in investigation published Thursday, November 30.
Israeli military intelligence had got its hands on a document of around forty pages from the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas detailing, point by point, a vast attack like the one perpetrated by commandos on October 7 which left around 1,200 dead in Israel, according to the major American daily.
This document, which circulated in intelligence circles under the code name “Jericho Wall”, did not give a date for a possible attack but defined precise points to saturate the Israeli security system and then attack cities. and military bases.
More specifically, the document reports a barrage of rockets, drones destroying security cameras and automated defense systems, then fighters crossing to the Israeli side by paraglider, by car and on foot, elements at the heart of the October 7 attack.
“This is a plan for war.”
But it was “not possible to determine” whether this plan had been approved “completely” by the Hamas leadership and how it might translate into reality, insists an internal Israeli army document obtained by the Times.
However, in July, an analyst from the elite intelligence unit 8200 warned that a military exercise that Hamas had just conducted resembled in several points the attack plan planned in the “Jericho Wall” document. But a colonel in the military division responsible for Gaza dismissed this scenario, calling it “totally imaginary.”
“I categorically refute the idea that this scenario is imaginary (…) it is a plan for a war”, not simply for an attack “against a village”, writes this analyst in encrypted e-mails consulted by the newspaper. “We already had a similar experience fifty years ago on the Southern Front about 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, although the “Jericho Wall” document was circulated within the Israeli military hierarchy, it is unknown whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet consulted it.
According to Ha’Aretz, the Israeli army turned a deaf ear to repeated warnings from observers stationed on the border with Gaza in the days leading up to the October 7 Hamas attack. These young women are responsible for studying surveillance camera images in search of suspicious activity. “There is no doubt that if the men had been sitting in front of these screens, things would have been different,” one of the female soldiers who survived the attack told the Israeli daily.