On October 7, 2023 – two years ago – the Hamas-led offensive was portrayed as “Israel’s 9/11” that came out of the blue. This assumption is not supported by the facts. The attack was avoidable.
New York (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – After the Hamas-led assault, the Netanyahu cabinet and other high-level Israeli political, military and security authorities vehemently condemned what they called “our September 11” as a “surprise attack.”
For a presumably astounding shock, it was a remarkably uniform, orchestrated response.
Yet, the hard questions remain ignored. Why were the Israeli hostages abandoned? Why were the strategic border communities neglected? And why was the abundant intelligence on the Hamas attack shunned?
Abandoned hostages
On October 7, 2023, as part of the overall Hamas-led offense, 251 people were abducted from Israel to the Gaza Strip. The next day, Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed ex-military commander Gal Hirsch to coordinate the cross-governmental response to abducted civilians and soldiers.
Internationally, the appointment was portrayed as the PM’s proactive move to ensure the timely release of the Israeli hostages. But it was a farce.
As brigadier general, Hirsch had commanded an IDF division during the 2006 Lebanon War, which saw the first test of The Obliteration Doctrine, premised on the destruction of civilian infrastructure and genocidal atrocities. Yet, Hirsch was responsible for the blunder resulting in an abduction by Hezbollah militants and two failed battles, despite heavy casualties.
Following a barrage of criticism, Hirsch was forced to resign. Later, he joined the right-wing Likud party at the behest of Netanyahu himself and became the favorite for the role of the national police chief in 2021. Until he and his business partners were indicted for tax evasion of $1.9 million in a case of arms sales to Georgia.
If Netanyahu was serious about saving lives, why did he appoint as his hostage tsar a general who had already blundered one high-profile abduction, failed to protect his soldiers and had been indicted for corruption?
Soon, the families of the hostages concluded that, to the Netanyahu government, the fate of the hostages was secondary to Gaza’s destruction.
And then, there was the odd issue of the Israeli communities surrounding the Gaza Strip. Why were they left vulnerable for years before October 7?
Neglected Israeli communities around Gaza
When Israel was established, its founding fathers considered its border areas strategic. Adjacent to the Gaza Strip, these are the so-called “Gaza envelope”; the populated Israeli settlements within 7 km of the Gaza border and thus within the range of mortar shells and Qassam rockets.
Over time many of these localities were neglected by the government. Following Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and increased cross-border shelling and rocket attacks, the parliament enacted a law to assist the “confrontation-line communities.”
But when these measures expired in 2014, the IDF cut the associated budgets, especially after the 2014 Gaza War which sparked rocket and mortar attacks, tunnels, intrusions, even incendiary kites. Moreover, these Gaza Envelope communities were “slated for abandonment following the November 2022 elections.” Subsequent per capita budgets were a third lower. (It was only after the mass killings that the Netanyahu government approved a 5-year $4.9 billion plan to rehabilitate and develop the Gaza envelope area.)
Israeli authorities did construct a high-tech underground border wall. On October 7, the IDF over-relied on remote-controlled surveillance systems and weapons that were swiftly disabled by drones and snipers, enabling infiltration and onslaught. In fact, the builder of the barrier warned already in 2018 that it was not designed to prevent a mass assault. Although the “Iron Wall” was considered impenetrable, on October 7 Hamas operatives breached the border barrier at 44 different points.
Worse, Israeli intelligence authorities had been aware of the threat for more than a year yet ignored it.
Shunned intelligence
Just days after October 7, testimonies from members of the mainly female lookout units bolstered accusations that Netanyahu’s leadership fatally misread the dangers from Gaza. In an Israeli TV segment, two soldiers, Yael Rotenberg and Maya Desiatnik, recounted their experiences in the months before the attack.
Rotenberg frequently saw many Palestinians dressed in civilian clothing near the border fence with maps, scrutinizing the ground around it and digging holes. “It’s infuriating,” said Desiatnik who served in Nahal Oz, where 20 other female surveillance soldiers were killed by Hamas. “We saw what was happening, we told them about it, and we were the ones who were murdered.”
The fatal mistakes went back to the aftermath of the Gaza war in 2021, when it was decided to cease intelligence-gathering on Hamas’ tactical array and the intermediate ranks of its military arm, to focus only on few individuals. Opposing views to this intelligence concept were marginalized.
Yet, based on more than 1 year of evidence, Hamas militants had trained for the blitz attacks in at least six sites across Gaza in plain sight and less than 1.5 km from Israel’s heavily fortified and monitored border.
Code-named Jericho Wall, a 40-page blueprint outlined a lethal invasion. It had been circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders who determined an attack of that scale was beyond Hamas’s capabilities.
Right after October 7, several Israeli media released several reports indicating that many intelligence analysts’ warnings were ignored. Subsequently, in November 2023, this was reported even by the mainstream CNN and the New York Times.
Discounted (buried?) evidence
After October 7, a high-level Egyptian intelligence official said Israel had ignored repeated warnings that “an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big.” Netanyahu denied receiving any such advance warning. Yet, the Egyptian confirmed that the Israeli PM had received direct notice from Cairo’s intelligence minister. Similarly, Michael McCaul, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told reporters of the alleged warning.
Worse, many testimonies by Israeli witnesses to the Hamas attack indicate that the Israeli military killed its own citizens struggling to neutralize Palestinian gunmen, in accordance with the Hannibal Directive. As one witness said to Israel Radio: “[Israeli special forces] eliminated everyone, including the hostages.”
Introduced in 1986, this is a controversial doctrine intended to prevent enemy capture of Israeli soldiers by neutralizing the hostages themselves. The goal is to avoid their kidnapping and the consequent prisoner exchanges. In 2016, the Directive was revoked by then-IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot; ironically, the architect of the obliteration doctrine behind Gaza’s devastation today. But the directive did not disappear into history.
Amid the Hamas offensive, the IDF was ordered to prevent “at all costs” the abduction of Israeli civilians or soldiers. Israeli soldiers knew the meaning of the code words. Indeed, the Hamas-led offensive was compounded by what some Israeli soldiers subsequently called a “mass Hannibal.”
The uses of October
By May 2024, new evidence indicated that Israel’s intelligence failure was the net effect of a “chain of failures” that pervaded the entire security sector, both in the Shin Bet and the IDF.
In March 2025, the Israeli Defense Forces’ landmark investigations into the October 7 attack disclosed severe, deep-rooted intelligence miscalculations and fundamental misconceptions on the nature of Hamas and its intentions by both the Israeli government and military.
Probing the same attack, Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, has pointed fingers at Prime Minister Netanyahu. Just as 9/11 was used by the Bush administration as a pretext for the misguided war against Iraq and war on terror, Netanyahu used the Hamas offensive to legitimize the subsequent ground assault and mass atrocities, which was hoped to result in ethnic expulsions that would open Gaza for Jewish resettlement and facilitate the annexation of the West Bank to Israel.
Through his U.S. neoconservative friends, Netanyahu knew that a “Pearl Harbor-like” mass tragedy was vital to legitimize rearmament and foster unity.
The leading neoconservatives, who gathered around the Project for the New American Century long before 9/11, were commissioned by Netanyahu to prepare a separate policy document A Clean Break (1996) for Israel.
“It was no surprise”
A day after October 7, 2023, CNBC, the global financial news giant, interviewed myself and Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer. Echoing the official Israeli narrative, Bremmer said that the “massive attacks by Hamas leadership into Israel … is no less than Israel’s 9/11.” By contrast, I said that the attack “certainly did not come out of the blue.”
Weeks after October 7, Israeli media investigations suggested that the IDF had detailed knowledge of the Hamas offensive three weeks before the attack, based on information from military intelligence’s 8200 Unit. Highlighting the extent to which the IDF’s Gaza Division was aware of a potential attack on Israel’s southern border communities, the document disclosed a series of exercises conducted by Hamas’ elite Nukhba units in the prior weeks.
One of the most shocking sections of the IDF report featured instructions relating to the taking of hostages, the number of which was estimated to be between 200-250, coming close to the actual 251 captives.
The writing was on the wall. So, why was it ignored?
October 7 was avoidable.
This is an updated and abbreviated version of the section “Was October 7 Avoidable?” in The Fall of Israel (Oct 2024)
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