Chilling warnings picked up by Israeli intelligence months before October 7 massacre

The Military Intelligence non-commissioned officer (NCO) who provided a warning that Hamas intends to carry out a massacre in the Gaza border communities told her commanders that Hamas had ended a drill with the words, “we have completed the murder of all the residents of the kibbutz.”

The NCO, who we can only identify by her initial V, wrote three documents in the six months prior to the October 7 attack in which she warned that Hamas had completed a series of training exercises simulating a raid on kibbutzim and IDF outposts on the Israeli side of the border. Sources who viewed the warnings said that “in retrospect, reading the documents is chilling.”

In July, the NCO, who specializes in enemy military doctrine, reported that Hamas had completed a further set of military exercises. One of the documents contained a shocking statement that was included in the intelligence and exposed Hamas’ intention to grievously harm the residents of the kibbutzim.

V concluded that Hamas had completed its preparations, because senior Hamas commanders had turned out to view the exercises – something that was also reported by IDF spotters based on the border. Just like the spotters, her warnings were brushed off dismissively. While they were distributed to senior officers, to her own unit and to field intelligence, a senior intelligence officer wrote to her in response, praising her work, but adding, “It sounds imaginary to me.”

V stood her ground, and replied that the scenario was not an imaginary one and that the exercises were not mere presentations, but rather a practical show of capabilities before the launch of an operation. She added that this was backed up by the level of detail of the cases and responses in the scenarios drilled by Hamas.

Her direct commander, another veteran NCO backed up her position. I’ve been in the field for 30 years, he said. This is a real exercise, not a display. V noted in her warning: we are marking the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. You can't say that it's imaginary.

V’s last warning came in August in a document circulated to a number of senior officers in her unit and in field intelligence – the relevant reference group from her perspective. She detailed the plan as she understood it and the exercises conducted by Hamas.

Her conclusions coincided to a great degree with what happened in practice less than two months later. She also warned that Israeli intelligence would be unable to provide a warning and that the attack could happen at any moment.

A third NCO also backed her warnings. A few weeks before the October 7 attack, a senior officer visited their base in the south and the intelligence was presented to him. However, it appears that insufficient importance was attributed to the warnings both at the senior levels in her unit and at senior echelons in Military Intelligence. The veterans, with junior status, gained the impression that senior command was not taking their warnings seriously.

It is patently clear that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is trying to employ “Hunger Games”-style psychological warfare: using various excuses to separate parents and children, and brothers and sisters, and allowing only some of them to return to Israel. The hours-long delay Monday resulted from Hamas’ attempt to return children without their mothers, contrary to agreements, and lying about supposed difficulties in locating the mothers, even though one of the girls who was freed on Saturday described how she had been separated from her mother two days before being released.

Alongside the understandable excitement created by the videos of the hostages being reunited with their relatives, who fought for their release for 50 days, we should remember that the vast majority of the returnees have undergone terrible trauma. Many of them lost family members in the October 7 terrorist attacks. Others only found out what happened to their loved ones when they returned to Israel.

We should not draw overly broad conclusions from the accounts of some of the returnees, heard through their family members, that they were generally treated reasonably while they were held in captivity. They had already experienced atrocities before their captivity, when Hamas death squads infiltrated their communities during the attack. It is also worth mentioning the increasing evidence, including a report by the international NGO Physicians for Human Rights, regarding widespread sexual assault of women in the attack.

Physicians for Human Rights published a detailed report on Monday, and its findings were consistent with the conclusions of similar research conducted in Israel. “[W]e reiterate the urgency – including within this context – of releasing the hostages currently held in Gaza. Those who experienced or witnessed sexual violence require urgent medical and mental health care – which they are likely presently being denied,” a statement from the NGO read.

The agreement between Israel and Hamas stipulates that following the fourth stage of the hostage release, which was reached on Monday night, the cease-fire can be extended by a day at a time in exchange for every 10 hostages released by Hamas. Hamas seems to have a clear interest in this. First, the continuation of the cease-fire gives it time to recover at least somewhat after the loss of thousands of its men in battles in the northern Gaza Strip and after dozens of its commanders, from the rank of brigade commander down to company commanders, were killed. Second, the organization aspires to a lengthy cease-fire that will allow it to consolidate gains from the offensive that started the war and begin negotiations for the release of more than 100 Israeli hostages – soldiers and civilians – that it still holds in exchange for the release of thousands of Palestinian security prisoners held in Israel.

Assisting Hamas in its attempt to achieve this goal is Qatar, which, despite the financial and political aid it has provided to Hamas over the past 16 years, is now basking in the international limelight thanks to its success in mediating the hostage deal. Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said in a series of interviews this week that eradicating Hamas’ rule was not a realistic goal and that the only solution to the crisis was the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu enlisted the support of the ministers of the Religious Zionism party for the vote on the hostage deal, he gave a commitment that the cease-fire would not be extended beyond the initial four days by any longer than 10 days. The next few days may well see growing tension within the Israeli public between those who wish to maximize every opportunity to release more hostages (and fear that the resumption of combat may endanger their lives) and those who warn of a loss of momentum in the IDF offensive and believe that repeated hiatuses in the fighting will assist the Hamas regime in its effort to stay in power.

Preliminary polling has shown that there are already divisions among the public and that despite the joy felt over the return of hostages, many Israelis believe the focus should be on renewing the military offensive. Psychological warfare employed by Hamas during the negotiations may further strengthen support for a more decisive military move.

If the fighting is resumed, the IDF will have to complete the above-ground conquest of the northern Gaza Strip where around 20 percent of the territory has yet to be cleared of enemies, primarily in the Jabalya refugee camp and in the Zeitun and Shujaiyeh neighborhoods in northeastern Gaza City. Israel has also hinted very clearly that it is considering a major military maneuver in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, where there is a concentration of Hamas battalions that has yet to be hit and where the organization’s leadership also appears to be situated.

The greatest difficulty the IDF will encounter, as already mentioned, will be the need to maneuver amidst a particularly crowded civilian population: some 2 million people are currently concentrated in southern Gaza after most of the north’s population moved south under Israeli pressure. Israel is currently in communications with the United States, the UN, and international NGOs about creating tent cities for the refugees along the Gaza coastline. These talks have yet to come to fruition, although the functioning of the humanitarian corridor has improved significantly during the lull in the fighting.

The stuttering Israeli response to the humanitarian implications of an operation in southern Gaza has only exacerbated tensions between the Netanyahu government and the Biden administration. The president, who has shown continued strong support for Israel, hinted on Sunday that Arab leaders want to see Israel topple the Hamas regime in Gaza.

“We’re looking for a way to end this so the hostages are all released, and Hamas is completely – how can I say it? – no longer in control of any portion of Gaza,” he said. But the Americans are concerned about a series of Israeli moves, including Jerusalem’s insistence on a broad maneuver in the south, violent conduct by extremist settlers in the West Bank, repeated threats by ministers and military officers to launch a war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the refusal to discuss arrangements for Gaza after the war.

The defense establishment has put out feelers about plans to chart a different future in the Gaza Strip, if and when Hamas is defeated militarily. It is unclear what the chances of implementation are, but these arrangements could include economic support from the Gulf states in close coordination with Egypt, the possible presence of a multinational Arab force, and perhaps a certain presence of the Palestinian Authority, through a civilian committee composed of Gaza residents who manage urgent civil and municipal issues in the interim stage.

It is that last part that worries Netanyahu. He is locked in by the extreme right and the settlers, who are fighting an all-out war against the idea of any involvement of the PA in Gaza, mainly out of fear that the United States and Saudi Arabia will exploit such a move to restart the political process and push for a two-state solution in a way that will require Israel to make concessions in the West Bank.

Defense sources have told Haaretz that Netanyahu, under pressure from his political partners, has banned any discussion of this option, and that “the war cabinet operates like a combat cabinet and deals only with tactical and operative aspects, with retired generals around the table contributing operational advice.” The sources said that the political echelon needs to wake up and realize that in order to maintain American support, which will become more and more critical if fighting resumes at high intensity, the government needs to begin discussing with the U.S. issues that are important to the administration.

Iranian damage
Gaza and Lebanon are relatively quiet right now, but in the meantime, Israel and perhaps the entire region are facing growing problem in the Red Sea. The Houthis in Yemen, Tehran’s relatively independent partner, have been making good on their threats and stepped up their attacks on maritime traffic in the area as a response to the war in Gaza. Over the past week, the Houthis have hijacked two ships that are partially owned by Israelis and launched a suicide drone against a ship in the Arabian Sea.

In the second hijacking incident, on Sunday, an American destroyer intervened, and its crew arrested the Houthi hijackers and released the crew, none of whom were Israeli. The Houthis responded by firing two missiles at the destroyer, which did not sustain any damage. These incidents come on top of a series of attempts by the Houthis to launch cruise missiles, drones, and ballistic missiles at Eilat.

For the moment, Israel, with close assistance from the United States, is coping well with these attacks, but we are witnessing the development of a more serious problem, one with region-wide ramifications. The Houthis are deliberately harassing maritime traffic and selecting ships with minimal connection to Israel. Over time, these attacks may significantly increase insurance rates for ships sailing from East Asia to Israel or force them to choose a longer and more expensive route, circumnavigating Africa and taking the Mediterranean route to the Middle East via the Straits of Gibraltar.

Israel is dependent on maritime trade to receive goods from overseas, and a deterioration of the security situation in the Red Sea could have problematic implications in general, and especially for the port of Eilat. From Iran’s perspective, this would constitute an accomplishment in inflicting indirect damage on Israel, once again without paying any price for its contribution to the regional escalation.

Hamas leader Yehya Sinwar met with some of the kidnapped Israelis the day after they were abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz. Sinwar and his brother Mohammed, a senior figure in the group’s armed wing, visited the hostages in the underground tunnels where Hamas was keeping them captive, telling them that they would not be harmed and would be returned to Israel as part of an exchange deal.

Thus far, 50 Israelis have been freed by Hamas, including 11 on Monday evening. A senior Israeli official said earlier that an agreement has been reached to extend the four-day truce by two additional days in exchange for the release of 20 more hostages. A senior Hamas official said that the organization hopes to reach a deal with Israel which would see the release of more hostages, including men over the age of 18.

Sinwar has manage to ensure that all the Palestinian factions in Gaza adhere to the cease-fire, which began on Friday, including in the north of the Strip, and to carry out an exchange of hostages for prisoners. At the same time, it seems that he is having difficulty locating all the Israeli hostages included in this stage of the deal and others who might be included in later stages.

Writing on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) on Monday, the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesman, Avichay Adraee, accused Hamas of treating Israeli children and babies “like the spoils of war… handing them over to other terror groups in the Gaza Strip. Like, for example, the Bibas family, the red-headed infants who were kidnapped from Nir Oz by a Hamas terrorist (photographed) and are now being held near Khan Yunis by one of the Palestinian factions.”

According to a statement by Hamas's Al-Qassam Brigades, Abu Khaled, who came from the Al-Rashidya Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, "supported and aided the resistance inside and outside [the Palestinian territories] and had an impact in the field… He had been active in all the battlefields of jihad for several decades."

According to the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Abu Khaled was responsible for the Al-Qassam Brigades' missile unit in southern Lebanon.

Hamas: The Turkish Operatives Were Killed "Helping Our Palestinian People"; Reports: They Were Killed Along With The Al-Qassam Brigades Commander In Lebanon.

Hamas' statement announcing the death of the four operatives begins with the Quranic verse (3:169): "Do not think of those martyred in the cause of Allah as dead, for in fact they are alive, by their Lord sustained." It goes on to say that Hamas is proud to announce to the Palestinian people and the Arab and Islamic nation, and to "the two fraternal nations – the Lebanese and the Turkish people," that four martyrs "from Lebanon and Turkey" were killed a November 21 "Zionist" airstrike in southern Lebanon "while carrying out their duty of solidarity and of aiding our Palestinian people."

"The brave martyrs," the statement continues, "expressed their love for Al-Aqsa, Jerusalem, and Palestine, and their esteem for their brothers in the Gaza Strip," and adds the "Nazi Zionist" airstrike in which they were killed will not deter the youth of the nation or the "free people of the world" from continuing to aid and support the Palestinian people "until the Nazi occupation is expelled from our land and from our holy sites."

The Hamas statement does not provide any additional details about the Turkish operatives or about the location of the airstrike, but the Turkish news website Haksoz Haber reported that the two men "came from Turkey to support their Palestinian brothers" and were killed in a vehicle with Abu Khaled, the commander of the Lebanese branch of Hamas's military wing.

Father Of One Of The Slain Turkish Operatives: I Am Proud Of Him, I Too Waged Jihad, In Afghanistan And Chechnya

Ömer Öztürk, the father of Seyfullah Bilal Öztürk, said: "His mother and I raised our children exactly for days such as there. We are proud to receive the news of his martyrdom. I myself waged jihad against the enemies of Islam in Afghanistan and Chechnya for years. [My son] has attained what I did not attain. I hope that we too die as martyrs."

The Haksoz Haber report also said that Öztürk, originally from Edirne in northwestern Turkey, will be buried in Lebanon, and called on readers to recite the Islamic burial prayer for the two Turkish Hamas operatives and for "all the martyrs in Gaza.

Arab Media Reports: Lebanon's Security Agencies Were Unaware Of The Presence Of Turkish Nationals In The Border Area

According to the Lebanese Al-Mudun daily, the Lebanese security services had no knowledge about the presence of Turkish nationals among the fighters on the border with Israel. The daily said that, according to assessments, the fighters in the vehicle were gathering intelligence ahead of a missile attack against Israel, or perhaps were on their way to meet other Hamas fighters in southern Lebanon and assist them.[7]

A "Lebanese security source" told Al-Sharq Al-Awsat that "the justification given for their presence in Lebanon was that they were bringing aid to the Palestinian refugee camps," although the airstrike took place near the Lebanese border with Israel, far from any refugee camp.

Israel gears up to resume Gaza fighting as time runs out for IDF, Hamas

After the cease-fire, the fighting will resume, it appears. Even though the pause has been extended another 48 hours, until Thursday morning, in an attempt to free more hostages through negotiations with Hamas, the time left isn’t unlimited. The cease-fire may be extended to the weekend, if Hamas can convince Israel that it'll release another few hostages.

On Tuesday, reports surfaced of an unusual meeting in Doha, the Qatari capital, that included the heads of the CIA, Mossad and Egyptian intelligence along with top officials of the host country. It appears it was an attempt, at least, to reach a bigger hostage deal.

With the arrival of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s in the region, the resumption of Israeli ground operations in Gaza could also be briefly delayed. But within a few days, if nothing changes, the IDF plans to resume operations in full, in north and south Gaza.

In Israel, a debate has gotten underway in view of the display of control Hamas has demonstrated in the hostage release. The organization made sure to dispatch dozens of armed fighters, even in northern Gaza, to show the world that the IDF operation had not defeated it.

In reality, it was a one-off operation by a Potemkin force. The cease-fire has given Hamas some breathing room and time to reorganize, but the organization has lost civilian control of the north and maintains only a limited military presence there.

The two poles in the debate – the elimination of Hamas versus continued Hamas control – don't represent the true situation. There are Hamas companies and battalions in the north that effectively are no longer under the control of the leadership since their commanders and hundreds of fighters were killed. In areas where there's a massive IDF presence, Hamas retreated, put up little resistance and focused on rearguard actions. The destruction of homes, infrastructure and military and governmental facilities is enormous.

However, its leader, Yahya Sinwar, who is believed to be in southern Gaza now, hasn't lost control of what's happening. His chain of command is still functioning in the south and to some extent in the north, too. The fact is that he managed to ensure an almost complete cease-fire (several incidents occurred, which each side rarely reported). Sinwar controls the management of the Hamas side of the hostage negotiations and the release process.

It is not believed that Sinwar will be content with the release of a small number of Palestinian women, elderly and juvenile prisoners, once he has released the current crop of hostages that was agreed upon (which still includes close to 30 Israelis – mothers, children and a few sick and wounded people).

In the next stage, he'll demand the release of many more security prisoners in exchange for the Israeli soldiers he now holds captive as well as the remaining civilians. But it's hard to predict whether the Israeli public would support a prolonged cease-fire, during which negotiations stretch on for months and the cost will be the freeing of thousands of Palestinian security prisoners.

It appears that public opinion continues to strongly back completion of the military operation and the destruction of Hamas’ capabilities. The images of the October 7 massacre remain very much alive in the Israeli consciousness; it can be assumed that the majority believe that the only solution is to bring an end to Hamas rule in Gaza.

There's a political element to this as well: If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decides to call an end to the military operation, his government may collapse. It's also likely to signal the start of public protests against him, which stopped with the outbreak of the war, in spite of the prime minister’s central role in the debacle.

On the other hand, Israel will have an increasingly difficult time making its case to the international community. In the eyes of European leaders, an opening to end the war has been created by a cease-fire that is constantly being extended and by hostage negotiations. According to this way of thinking, Israel should recognize that it suffered a severe blow at the start of the war, minimize the fall-out and not try to defeat Hamas in a long war that could lead to a severe humanitarian disaster, with the spread of disease, hunger and hundreds of thousands lacking shelter.

The release of women and children shows that with Hamas, there's someone to talk to. Also, the time that has passed since the massacre has gradually reduced the shock once felt, especially since in the meantime the extent of the destruction and killing caused by the fighting in Gaza has been revealed.

This isn't the view taken by U.S. President Joe Biden, who for now continues to support a renewal of Israel’s military campaign the moment Hamas stops freeing hostages. However, the president continues to emphasize his conditions – caution with regard to civilians (especially in the south, which is crowded with refugees from the north), avoiding a complete occupation of Gaza, and prevention of a second front with Hezbollah.

Washington has the means to pressure Israel, whether it's in the United Nations Security Council, slowing down delivery of urgently needed military aid or a further delay in Congressional approval of the war-induced $14 billion aid package.

In the background lurks the question of Lebanon. The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah is at its fiercest since the last full-fledged war in 2006. At a time when tens of thousands of Israelis have been evacuated from settlements near the border fence in the north, the Shi’ites living in south Lebanon have been returning to their homes. This suggests that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah faces a dilemma of whether or not to resume the fighting on the border when the IDF renews its Gaza offensive.

In the longer term, Israel is also faced with a major strategic question of how to keep Hezbollah’s Radwan force away from the border fence, and how to convince the residents of the northern border communities that it is safe to return home.

Fateful decision
Israel will have to decide about the character and extent of a military operation in southern Gaza, where the civilian population has doubled since the IDF forced them to take refuge there. A decision, which will probably be made in the next few days, is going to be one of the most critical of the war.

The army believes a concentrated operation in the south, over many weeks, will bring the desired result, namely severe damage to Hamas’ military capabilities and the killing of its senior leadership.

As usual, the question is over the time and cost – the number of Israeli casualties, the Palestinian humanitarian crisis and international complications. Sinwar may continue to exploit the raw Israeli nerves over the hostages. However, the military capabilities retained by Hamas are mainly defensive ones and are pointed to attacks against attacking forces. Its ability to launch rockets has been severely harmed – the number that can reach central Israel constitute little more than a nuisance.

The IDF has made use of the cease-fire to refresh its forces and reorganize. There's a huge effort underway to repair and restore tanks, armored personnel carriers and bulldozers that had been working nonstop over the past few weeks. A lot of equipment was hit by RPGs, although most of the damage was light. The Trophy system provided an excellent defense (the one exception being the Givati Brigade Namir APC, which was hit by a rocket at a cost of 11 lives).

Meanwhile, supplies and armaments are being distributed to the units. The psychological fortitude of the soldiers, most of whom have gone through war experiences of an intensity not seen in the IDF for decades, is also being attended to as well.

The initial assessments of the fighting to date, which were undertaken by the IDF's Southern Command and on a division level this week, have raised some important points.

First, the main work of hitting Hamas terrorists and infrastructure was not accomplished in initial attacks, but during the operations undertaken afterwards to clear the areas of all remaining resistance. Second, brigade and battalion commanders are not particularly worried about the risk of battlefield progress slowing as they need time to act, find more weapons and gather more field intelligence. Another conclusion concerns ground forces operating with close air support. The clear improvement in this allowed for better protection of the soldiers and also better intelligence.

The IDF has praised the work of the special forces, which this time were deployed in the heart of the action rather than the margins, as often happened in past wars. An additional point is that the infantry works better in close proximity to the tanks, enabling it to operate outside of its protected APCs and act more freely. And while the pressure on Hamas has so far not yielded a mass surrender of its fighters, there are many cases of terrorists being arrested and then providing vital intelligence for units on the ground.

As to deficiencies, a critical point that was a cause for concern from the start of the ground operation was noted: The heavy concentration of ground forces operating in a built-up area led to a large number of friendly-fire attacks between different units or between auxiliary forces within brigade combat teams. Other soldiers were killed from operational and other accidents.

This is connected to another problem that developed as the fighting continued, namely a decline in discipline, mainly further behind the front line (including inside Gaza) where the soldiers are in fortified facilities and camps and the logistical work is done. The level of vigilance and discipline there is not high enough, thus Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi instructed commanders to take advantage of the truce to enforce discipline.

Another widespread phenomenon, related to this, concerns the flood of civilian visitors unconnected to the fighting who used connections to get themselves into Gaza and steal public attention away from the troops.

The national psyche
Preparations for further military operations are being done side by side with the hostage negotiations. Tuesday night marked the fifth installment of the hostage deal, in which another 10 Israeli and two foreign abductees were returned in exchange for 30 Palestinian prisoners. The IDF announced that three soldiers who were abducted by Hamas on October 7 have been declared dead.

Dealing with abductees is a nerve-racking job involving thousands of members of the intelligence community. They work with equal amounts of hope and faith for a purpose that can only be called sacred. Those who are now conducting the difficult negotiations with the Hamas terrorists are doing nothing less than rescuing children from the clutches of murderers.

There's no way of denying it: The longer the hostages remain in captivity, the greater the risk to their lives becomes, certainly when fighting resumes in the south. We have been witness to this in recent weeks.

For Israeli society, it’s a second trauma that joins the first one of October 7. Right now we are united in the shared joy of seeing children returning to their relatives who survived the attack. But in practice, it’s an emotional roller coaster, accompanied by a daily dose of enormous stress and a feeling of national humiliation.

Over time, beyond the happiness of seeing each and every hostage freed, we cannot ignore the other effects. Tremendous anger and frustration are accumulating in the wake of the massacre. They will likely translate into increased pressure on the government and army to defeat Hamas on the ground when the negotiations reach an impasse. And they may also reflect on the situation of Netanyahu, who continues to sell the illusions that he can rescue Israel from the predicament that he in the main is responsible for.

Nov. 29, 2023
Updated 12:05 p.m. ET

The two cousins spotted each other on the bus leaving the prison, as shocked to see the other as they were by their sudden freedom. “Pinch me,” Anwar Atta, 18, told his younger cousin. “I need to know if this is a dream.”

Then, early Sunday morning, the bus pulled out of Ofer Prison in the West Bank and into a throng of cheering Palestinians. Before the cousins’ feet could touch the ground, they were hoisted into the air and carried through the streets of Ramallah, surrounded by people waving Palestinian and Hamas flags, revving their motorcycle engines and whistling in excitement.

“This is thanks to the resistance in Gaza,” Anwar said hours later from his family’s home on the outskirts of the city.

Anwar and his cousin, Mourad Atta, 17, are among the 180 Palestinian teenagers and women freed from Israeli prisons in recent days, the largest such release of prisoners and detainees in more than a decade. Their freedom is part of a deal in which the Palestinians were traded for 81 hostages, many of them children, captured during the Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7. The deal also included a temporary cease-fire in the war in Gaza, which has killed more than 13,000 people, according to Gazan officials.

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the elation over the prisoners’ release have deepened support for Hamas in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority has administered cities and towns for more than two decades. Gaza, the other Palestinian enclave, has by contrast been controlled since 2007 by Hamas, a militant group.

Now, as many in the West Bank fear the war could spread to the occupied territory, some believe Hamas and other armed groups are the only ones they can trust to protect them.

The Palestinian Authority — which is controlled by the Fatah political faction — is deeply unpopular and widely seen as a subcontractor to the Israeli occupation. Long-simmering frustrations with the authority’s leadership and accusations of corruption have been exacerbated in the past year by an uptick in violence by Israeli settlers.

For some Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank, the freed prisoners have become a potent symbol of Hamas’s ability to achieve tangible results and its willingness to fight for the Palestinian cause. Each night in Ramallah, as new batches of prisoners were released, one refrain echoed across the crowds: “The people want Hamas! The people want Hamas!”

Pollsters and analysts caution that support for the group is limited to a minority of residents and tends to rise temporarily during conflicts in Gaza. But with fears that a wider war could break out in the West Bank, many say the growing support for Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organization by the United States, Israel and other countries, has taken on a new dimension.

There is a growing sense that people need protection and they “don’t have any alternative,” said Ghassan Khatib, director of the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, which specializes in research and opinion polling. “The only game in town is Hamas.”

Hours after his release, Anwar Atta and his cousin Mourad sat outside their families’ homes in Deir Abu Masha’al, a village of around 4,000 people on the outskirts of Ramallah. A steady stream of neighbors and relatives came to welcome them home, smoking cigarettes and drinking small cups of coffee.

“Where have you been, it’s been a while,” Anwar’s aunt, Halima Atta, chided him as she held him in her arms. “Are you going to keep making trouble?”

“I’m done, OK? I’m done,” he replied.

“No, you have a beard now — you’re a man,” Halima joked.

The reunion was years in the making. Anwar was arrested in June 2021, which he says was for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers — an act of resistance spurred by an Israeli military offensive in Gaza a month earlier. The Israeli authorities say he threw an “incendiary device.”

Over the more than two years he spent awaiting trial, Anwar had come to accept that most of his early adulthood would be spent behind bars — a price he was willing to pay to defend his land, he said.

After the Oct. 7 attack, which Israeli officials say killed an estimated 1,200 people, news of Hamas taking hostages spread between the cells at Ofer Prison — sparking hope that a prisoner release could follow. Inmates clapped and cheered, crying “God is great” and praising the armed resistance, Anwar recalled.

The weeks that followed, he said, were the harshest of his time in prison. Anwar, other recently released prisoners and human rights groups say that prison officials rationed water and electricity. They confiscated TVs and radios, and barred relatives from visiting — effectively creating an information blackout. And as prison officials stepped up their searches for contraband, they forced inmates to kneel on the floor and beat them, released prisoners and rights groups said.

The Israeli prison service has said that it has imposed tighter restrictions in prisons in recent weeks — including confiscating electronics, canceling family visits and carrying out hundreds of searches — in connection with the war effort. Officials say that prisoners are able to file complaints that would be examined by the authorities.

Hundreds of new inmates also flooded into the prison — some of the more than 2,000 Palestinians arrested since Oct. 7 — and shared news of the war in hushed whispers, Anwar said. The inmates devoured each morsel of new information, both stunned at the sheer devastation in Gaza and wondering if the war could also bring their freedom.

Then last week, the moment Anwar had been praying for arrived.

Early Sunday morning, Mourad’s mother was sitting on the sagging couch in their living room, watching the news on TV and agonizing over whether her son would be among those released. When she saw Mourad and Anwar’s faces flash across the screen waving from the bus of prisoners, she leaped from her seat.

“We were screaming and jumping and crying — we couldn’t believe it,” his mother, Amal Atta, 35, said.

Mourad was arrested after throwing stones at Israeli soldiers in August 2022, prompted by a days-long military offensive in Gaza by Israel earlier that month, he said. Israeli authorities accused him of throwing an explosive device. Like his cousin, he, too, was never tried.

The teenagers’ return to the village has been celebrated for days; young children have run around their houses devouring sweets while older relatives have pulled Anwar and Mourad in for hugs.

“Why do you think he was in prison? It’s because of everything he’s seen here, everything he’s exposed to — it made him want to go out and fight back,” Anwar’s uncle, Omar Atta, 45, said, sitting among their relatives Sunday evening.

As his relatives hugged nearby, Omar looked out over the hillside, a crisp breeze rattling the branches of the olive trees below. Since the war began, Israeli soldiers have erected a new barricade blocking the only paved road leading to their village. Israeli security forces have raided homes in the village and arrested around a dozen of his neighbors, he said. Frustration and anger has swelled.

“Israel thinks they are suppressing or destroying the resistance,” Omar explained. “But look at what they are doing. They are only making it stronger.”

In the midst of the cease-fire, a new front in the Gaza war opened on Monday. It’s not against Hezbollah but against the terror group’s financial arm, a part of the Hamas organization that has been largely ignored until now. Yet a complete financial victory may prove to be as elusive as a complete military one.

On the surface, a new task force comprising the United States, Israel and 11 other countries doesn’t sound like a major development. Its stated job is to “enhance financial intelligence on terrorist-financing related matters,” “discuss … best practices, lessons learned and opportunities for additional actions” and the like.

The fact is that going after the people and institutions that handle the terrorists’ money isn’t as dramatic as going after the terrorists themselves. It explains why there aren’t movies like “Band of Bean-Counters” or “They Were Expensable.” But it is a critical front in the war against Hamas and its peers.

A decisive victory over Hamas, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is promising, will help disrupt the flow of funds to the organization. But the odds remain good that Hamas or some kind of Hamas 2.0 will survive. You can prevent it from governing Gaza, destroy the tunnels, kill lots of fighters and even much of its leadership, but eliminating the socioeconomic conditions that give rise to violent groups is much more difficult.

That is why derailing the Hamas money train is important in its own right: Whether they are inspired by religion, nationalism, hatred or economic distress, terrorists have to eat like everyone else and must be paid, and they need money for arms.

The easiest part of Hamas’ revenue stream to eliminate is its domestic one – the money it collects on goods entering the Gaza Strip through the border crossings and from local businesses. This money (call it tax revenues, if you want to be generous; extortion, if not) added up to about $300 million to $400 million a year, according to Matthew Levitt, a counter-terrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. But, no longer in control of the enclave, Hamas won’t be in any position to collect that money any longer.

External sources constitute an even bigger source of funds. They include money skimmed off of international aid coming into Gaza, Iranian financial assistance that has been variously estimated at between $70 million and $100 million annually, Qatari funds that were famously delivered in suitcases full of cash until more conventional means were adopted, and finally payments made by the Palestinian Authority to cover the salaries of thousands of Gaza civil servants.

Even if Hamas survives in some shrunken form, these revenue streams will shrink a lot and some may disappear altogether. There will be no big fighting force for the Iranians to subsidize and no means of extorting commissions on foreign assistance. If the Qataris continue to send money to Gaza, it won’t go to Hamas.

That leaves Hamas with one remaining revenue stream, and that is its global business empire.

Needless to say, its exact parameters are secret. What is known is that there is a Hamas Finance Committee and an Investment Office that oversees the operation. Its assets comprise everything from mining companies in Sudan to real estate developers in the Gulf, Africa and Turkey. Hamas companies built Sudan’s first shopping mall and skyscrapers in the United Arab Emirates.

Their Hamas affiliations, however, as a rule only surface when the U.S. Treasury imposes sanctions on their shareholders, such as the Turkish company Trend GYO or the Zawaya Group in recent weeks.

Suspect investment portfolios

Israeli sources told The Economist that all these businesses bring in some $500 million annually. It’s a large sum of money for any terrorist group and may well factor enormously in the finances of a post-war Hamas that no longer has the financial burden of governing Gaza and can devote itself entirely to terror.

That is where this week’s task force comes in. Hamas’ business empire had been largely ignored, which Levitt says was mainly because the U.S. was preoccupied with sanctions against Russia and Iran.

“The investment portfolios are going to become increasingly important as the conflict unfolds,” Jessica Davis, president and principal consultant with Insight Threat Intelligence, told a roundtable on Hamas finances sponsored by the Royal United Services Institute. “A diversified network is going to be important for Hamas sustaining itself, which means it’s going to be really important for us from a counter-terrorism financing perspective to make sure they are identifying and disrupting their investments and the facilitation networks that allow Hamas to profit from them.”

Even before the task force was unveiled, a tougher line had begun to emerge after October 7. The U.S. treasury has announced three actions since then. Last week, German police searched the properties of Hamas members and followers following a ban on any activity by or in support of the militant group.

The road ahead is long. Hamas constructed its business empire precisely in order to circumvent Western sanctions. The great majority of its assets are located in countries like Turkey, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan and Algeria that are unlikely to cooperate with any Western crackdown. Hamas has developed sophisticated means for getting the money into Gaza without using the formal banking system – or at least, it has learned to make use of banks prepared to look the other way. Despite reports to the contrary little of its money comes in the form of cryptocurrencies, which is relatively easy to trace.

There are enough friends of Hamas, like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with the means to undermine the crackdown effort. Turkish officials have given Hamas free rein, if not actual support, for the organization to do business in the country. New domiciles, like Russia, which has taken a friendly line toward Hamas, may emerge. A lot of countries have become fed up with having to observe a growing list of Western sanctions.

On the other hand, some host countries, like Qatar and the UAE, may now be having second thoughts about playing home to Hamas businesses. After October 7, it has become harder to defend Hamas as a liberation movement that employs justifiable violence against an occupier and oppressor.

Why Hezbollah isn't joining Hamas in total war against Israel

In two recent appearances Hassan Nasrallah, who leads the powerful Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon, stressed its support for “the resistance” in Gaza, but also its complete noninvolvement in the October 7 assault on Israel by Hamas.

Earlier this month, for example, Nasrallah implausibly alleged Hezbollah had actively entered the ongoing war “without any foreknowledge, truthfully and honestly, learning [about its outbreak] on [that] Saturday like everyone else.”

This ostensible distancing does not mark the end of the Resistance Axis (Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and other groups) “unifying the fronts” against Israel. Rather, Hezbollah – at Iran’s behest – is trying to preserve its physical strength and potency of its ideology to fight the Jewish state from a more advantageous position in the future.

Several factors suggest Hezbollah – and Iran’s – involvement in approving, planning and preparing Al-Aqsa Flood, including helping develop its operational blueprint. It is hardly coincidental that Al-Aqsa Flood unfolded exactly like Hezbollah’s threat to “liberate the Galilee” would have: a territorially limited incursion targeting border military installations and towns to kidnap and kill as many Israelis as possible, and create a perception of victory – rather than conquer territory.

Credible reports indicate much of Iranian approval, assistance, training and oversight for the October 7 assault occurred in Lebanon – where Hezbollah is dominant and has long acted as Iran’s conduit to Palestinian factions.

That Hamas likely knew of and then concealed the attack’s zero hour from its own fighters does not undermine this conclusion. It’s natural that Iran and Hezbollah left their Gazan partners to decide such operational details. Such compartmentalization, common in warfare, is standard operational security, intended to deceive Israel about the attack’s timing rather than conceal the plan’s existence from Iran or Hezbollah.

Neither Tehran nor the Shiite group joined the October 7 attack was therefore a strategic decision, one borne of their desire to preserve their strength and capabilities for their promised future regional conflict against Israel, under more advantageous conditions – while Al-Aqsa Flood was launched when it was as an emergency measure, to hinder the looming threat of Saudi-Israeli normalization.

Further diminishing the likelihood of complete Iranian and Hezbollah ignorance, Al-Aqsa Flood’s attack plans were finalized by October 2022, involving extensive intelligence gathering and at least two years of training. It was envisioned, and unfolded, as a coordinated and disciplined assault involving not only Hamas but – as training videos and shoulder patches worn by the October 7 assailants demonstrate – an undertaking by the entire Joint Operations Room of the Palestinian Resistance Factions.

October 7 videos demonstrate the militant attackers from these other factions also executed familiar plans and implemented their training, rather than acting as frenzied raiders tagging on to Hamas’ disciplined assault.

Critically, the inclusion of groups deeply loyal to deeply loyal to Iran – including Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a Sunni group which nevertheless subscribes to Tehran’s ordering principle of Wilayat al-Faqih – makes the notion of total Iranian ignorance even less conceivable.

Simply put, such a massive and complex undertaking could not have plausibly been kept a total secret from intimate partners like Iran and Hezbollah. While it is plausible that the operation’s zero hour remained the purview of a few Hamas commanders, the methodical nature according to which the attack unfolded strongly suggests that the plans must have been shared with the leadership of Hamas’ partner groups in Gaza, and that their fighters would have received extensive training in executing their respective tasks.

In other words, knowledge that something was afoot must have been relatively widespread. At the very least, someone – from within Hamas, or certainly PIJ – would have leaked the plan’s existence, especially if they believed its execution would harm Iran and its regional or Gaza-based interests.

Indeed, to the contrary, Al Aqsa Flood served converging Palestinian and Iranian interests, by derailing Israeli-Saudi normalization, recentering the Palestinian cause in Arab and Islamic consciousness, and hampering Israeli regional integration by, as Nasrallah stated in his November 3 speech, “reinforcing anew the savage and barbaric nature of this entity, Israel.” Torpedoing these efforts preserves the “Palestinian cause,” quite possibly Tehran’s last avenue of establishing its desired preeminence over the majority non-Persian and non-Shiite “Muslim world.”

But this war, critical as it may be to the Resistance Axis, is not their planned “big regional war” against Israel. That conflict remains years off, awaiting the improvement of the Resistance Axis’ collective and individual positions, ideally protected by an Iranian nuclear umbrella – an aspirational condition to which Nasrallah hinted when he said the Resistance Axis was still incapable of “victory by fatal blow” against Israel. For that, he said, “We still need time… but we are winning in increments… our battle is one of resilience and patience.”

Hezbollah, in particular, would prefer not to go to war against Israel amidst Lebanon’s economic collapse. The battering Hezbollah will take in the war itself, coupled with post-bellum Lebanese ire at the group for compounding the country’s economic misery with a war and the likely absence of foreign recovery aid, will leave the organization in a position of unprecedented vulnerability against domestic adversaries. Hezbollah is therefore only harassing Israel from the north – impacting Israel’s advance in Gaza while attempting to minimize the risk of igniting a full war that could threaten Hezbollah with destruction.

But, in doing so, Hezbollah, and Iran, aren’t abandoning Hamas. This is how Resistance Axis wages war. Hamas and its Gazan partners – deemed more capable of paying the price to halt the imminent threat posed by Saudi-Israeli normalization – took the point position. Meanwhile Hezbollah, constrained by Lebanon’s domestic conditions, has receded into the background to conserve its strength and resources for a future conflict or until it becomes absolutely necessary to assume a primary role in this one. Hezbollah is thus trying to preserve its assets and fighters for the future by minimizing Israel’s justification for targeting them now.

But this same sense of self-preservation is leading Hezbollah to distance itself not from Hamas per se, but to attempt to distance the concept of “resistance” from the very real possibility of an Israeli victory in Gaza. Such a setback would undermine not only their claim that “resistance” is the sole means of regaining Arab honor and land stolen by the Zionists – but their carefully crafted narrative, built over decades, that “resistance” has unfailingly resulted in consistent, gradual victories on the inexorable and inevitable path of eventually destroying Israel.

Hence Nasrallah’s insistent denials of “any Israeli military accomplishment” in the current war – but eventually those claims will become increasingly untenable. A demonstrably decisive Israeli victory over “the Resistance” – rather than a faction that executed an independent, even rogue, action – would undermine this narrative and, with it, the basis of Hezbollah’s utility to its supporters. The group’s dissociation should therefore not be taken at face value, but as an attempt preserve itself – ideologically as much as physically – and its popular appeal for the time when the conditions for the big war against Israel ripen.

David Daoud is a Senior Fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies focusing on Hezbollah, Lebanon, and Israel. Follow him on Twitter @DavidADaoud

The shooting attack took place at a busy bus stop in Jerusalem's main entrance. The terrorists were from East Jerusalem, one of them had been imprisoned in Israel previously.

Three Israelis, a 24-year-old woman, a 60-year-old woman, and a 73-year-old man, were killed in a shooting attack on Thursday at the entrance to Jerusalem.

Six other people were injured, two of them seriously, three moderately, and one lightly. The assailants, two Palestinian brothers from the neighborhood of Tzur Baher in East Jerusalem, were shot dead.

In a separate incident, two IDF reserve soldiers were lightly injured in an attack at an IDF checkpoint near Beka'ot in the northern West Bank. Other soldiers at the scene shot and killed the driver.

In Jerusalem, The attackers arrived by car at the Givat Shaul junction, which serves as the main entrance to Jerusalem, at around 7:40 A.M. and fired gunshots towards civilians waiting at a bus station. Both were armed with a handgun and an M-16 rifle. Two soldiers and a civilian in the area fired back at them, killing the attackers. Inside their car, cartridges with hundreds of rounds of ammunition were found.

The Shin Bet stated that the two attackers were Murad and Ibrahim Namer, aged 38 and 30. According to the Shin Bet, they are affiliated with Hamas and have previously served prison sentences for involvement in terrorist activities. Murad was imprisoned between 2010 and 2020 due to his intention to carry out terrorist activities linked to the Gaza Strip, while Ibrahim was incarcerated in 2014 for terrorist-related actions.

Murad was convicted in 2010 for offenses including aiding the enemy during wartime, contact with a foreign agent, and membership in a terrorist organization.

During his sentencing, his lawyer stated: "My client is a normal person, was a student, and is now in prison. He will be released at a much older age, and I have no doubt that the lesson has been learned."

One of the victims of the attack in Jerusalem is 73-year-old Rabbi Elimelech Wasserman, who was a judge in the rabbinical court in Ashdod, and was eulogized by the Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef.

67-year-old Hanna Ifergan and 24-year-old Libiya Dickman were also idenitifed as victims killed in the attack.

While in prison, the Shin Bet considered Namer to be dangerous, and he was held in isolation for part of his imprisonment. His family members were not allowed to visit him, after the Shin Bet received information that the visits could be exploited to harm state security.

Security camera footage aired by Israel's Channel 12 television showed the moments of the attack. A white car is seen stopped beside a crowded bus stop. Two men then step out, guns drawn, and run at the crowd as people scatter. Shortly afterward, the Palestinian attackers are gunned down.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was visiting Tel Aviv, said Thursday's shooting was a reminder "of the threat from terrorism that Israel and Israelis face every single day… My heart goes out to the victims of this attack."

"This attack is further proof of our commitment to continue fighting with strength and determination against the murderous terrorism that threatens our citizens," cabinet minister Benny Gantz wrote on social media platform X.

The Israel-Hamas cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, which was supposed to end Thursday morning, is now expected to be extended for a few more days due to understandings reached between the parties.

On Wednesday night, Hamas was slated to release a sixth group of hostages, and it promised the Qatari mediators that it would release additional Israelis held in Gaza in the coming days. It has also released two Russian women kidnapped to Gaza, in a step it portrayed as a gesture to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But because the organization seeks to retain the hostages whom it deems to be more valuable bargaining chips – around 100 Israeli soldiers and younger adult civilians – negotiations over continuing the deals may well hit an impasse early next week.

Under those circumstances, the chances of the Israeli offensive in Gaza resuming, at high intensity, would grow significantly. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday, “There is no situation in which we won’t resume fighting to the end.”

Over the past few days, there have been reports, mainly speculative, about a deal of “everyone for everyone” being put on the table – that is, a Qatari proposal to free all the Israelis held by Hamas in exchange for all (or most) of the thousands of Palestinians jailed in Israel, together with a long-term cease-fire.

But even if feelers have been put out on this issue, it doesn’t appear to be practical at the moment, since it most likely wouldn’t receive broad public support in Israel.

It’s not inconceivable that the leaks about this proposal are actually meant to serve Netanyahu, who seeks to portray himself as standing up to external pressure. The prime minister, whose support has collapsed in the polls, is also portraying himself as the only person who can prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

A permanent cease-fire, without destroying Hamas as both a government and a military force, wouldn’t meet the war’s declared goals and likely seal Netanyahu’s political fate.

Hamas, and in fact Qatar as well, have other considerations. It’s reasonable to assume that from Hamas’ standpoint, it achieved its victory on October 7, when it perpetrated the most lethal terror attack in Israel’s history.

A mass release of Palestinian prisoners would entrench its position as a Palestinian and pan-Arab player, the only one that ever inflicted a double humiliation on Israel. This would also guarantee it massive support in the West Bank and Gaza, and throughout the Arab world.

The Qataris also have an interest in a deal that ultimately saves Hamas’ government. They have invested billions of dollars in the Hamas regime in Gaza, and a new order in destroyed Gaza that was achieved with their help would likely ensure them an even bigger foothold, both economic and political, on the Mediterranean coast.

There are two other actors in this movie whose interests are more complex. The United States wants to restrain Israel’s military moves, but at this stage it isn’t trying to force a deal on Israel or prevent it from continuing military operations in Gaza. And the region’s Sunni Arab states are speaking in two voices.

Publicly, some of them (like Egypt and Jordan) are falling in line with public opinion in their countries and condemning the civilian deaths caused by Israel’s military response. But behind the scenes, almost every leader in the region, including in most of the Gulf states, is urging Israel to end the war only after Hamas is defeated, since they view the organization as a dangerous domestic enemy.

The problem, according to Israeli defense officials, is that within a few days, Israel will find itself running into a wall. Hamas will finish returning the hostages included on the original list (mothers, children, the sick and the wounded), or else it will announce that it hasn’t been able to locate some of them. On Wednesday, the organization was already claiming that the Bibas family – mother Shiri and children Ariel and Kfir – were killed in captivity.

At this point, the delusion that Israel can both continue the fighting and further the release of more hostages is likely to be dispelled. Another deal will be needed, and it will be harder to achieve, due to the price Hamas will demand from Israel.

Yet without a deal, the Israel Defense Forces will resume intensive operations and thereby increase the risk to the hostages’ lives, whether due to the fighting itself and the difficult conditions it creates or due to the possibility that Hamas will kill them.

It’s also worth giving the fighting to date a sober look. Hamas suffered heavy losses and enormous damage in northern Gaza, and it has lost civilian control there. But it still seems far from being militarily defeated.

Its leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, may well prefer to take the risk of continuing to fight, on the assumption that Israel will only get itself into trouble during military operations in southern Gaza, where its forces will have to maneuver amid a denser civilian population.

Nor can we rule out the possibility that even if Hamas eventually finds itself with its back to the wall, Sinwar would prefer to go down fighting and thereby end with what he considers a holy death, in battle.

At Tuesday’s meeting among intelligence agency directors from Israel, the United States, Egypt and Qatar, a new Qatari proposal was reportedly discussed. It calls for sorting the hostages remaining in Gaza once the current stage ends into several categories, in preparation for future deals.

The Washington Post cited a “knowledgeable source,” who sounded like one of the Qatari hosts, as saying the hostages will be divided into five categories – men too old for army reserve duty (Hamas insists on treating all the male hostages as potential soldiers), female soldiers, male civilians who are also reservists, male soldiers (whether conscripts or career soldiers), and hostages who are already dead.

The source said the method of their release, the price Hamas will receive and the amount of humanitarian aid that would flow into Gaza have yet to be discussed.

In conversations between Biden administration officials and Israeli officials, various American proposals were discussed. Washington is interested in trying to continue the hostage deals in the coming days, while extending the cease-fire.

If the fighting resumes, the administration would prefer that Israel first focus on further operations in northern Gaza rather than beginning operations in the densely populated south. It is also asking the IDF to be careful to use precision weaponry and exercise great care when fighting in crowded areas.

Nevertheless, as noted, the moment of decision seems to be approaching. The IDF’s plans for an offensive in southern Gaza have already been presented to the war cabinet, including efforts to deal with the enormous challenge of relocating the Palestinian civilian population in an area where half the people now present have already been forced to move once, when Israel demanded last month that they move from Gaza’s north to its south.

WSJ News Exclusive | Israel Considers How to Remove Threat of Hamas Fighters in Gaza
TEL AVIV—As Israeli forces prepare for a renewed offensive targeting Hamas’s top leaders in the Gaza Strip, Israeli military and political leaders are confronting the challenge of what to do about the thousands of fighters that represent the group’s power base.

To address that challenge, some Israeli and U.S. officials are discussing the idea of expelling thousands of lower-level militants from the Palestinian enclave as a way to shorten the war. The idea is reminiscent of the U.S.-brokered deal that allowed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and thousands of fighters to flee Beirut during Israel’s 1982 siege of the Lebanese capital.

The prospect of expelling Hamas fighters is part of evolving Israeli and American talks about who will run Gaza when the war ends and what can be done to ensure that the territory can never be used to stage another attack on Israel like the one on Oct. 7, the worst in the nation’s history.

One proposal for how to govern a post-Hamas Gaza, developed by the Israeli military’s think tank and viewed by The Wall Street Journal, would start with the creation of what it calls “Hamas-free safe zones” that would be ruled by a new Gaza authority backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Separate U.S.-Israeli discussions about moving Hamas fighters and their families out of the Gaza Strip aim to provide some Hamas fighters with an exit strategy and make it easier to rebuild Gaza once the fighting ends.

As a temporary cease-fire that began Friday continues to hold, there is still no emerging consensus on the fundamental questions that could bring the war to an end. There is no agreement between Israel, the U.S. and Arab nations about who should run Gaza or who would provide daily security for the two million people living there.

Israel and the U.S. are at odds over what role, if any, the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority should play in running Gaza. And there is no road map for what should happen to thousands of Hamas fighters and their families.

One option being discussed by Israel and the U.S. is the proposal to force lower-level fighters to leave the Gaza Strip, to prevent the group—which the U.S. considers to be a terrorist organization—from regaining power.

Before the war started, Israel estimated that Hamas had about 30,000 fighters in the Gaza Strip. Israel has vowed to kill the top Hamas leaders and any members who took part in the Oct. 7 attacks.

The Israeli military estimates that it has killed thousands of militants since the war began. Determining how to address the large number of surviving Hamas fighters and their families has led officials to consider the Beirut model.

In 1982, Israeli military forces encircled Beirut in an effort to weaken the Palestine Liberation Organization’s power in Lebanon. The two-month siege and extensive Israeli bombing of Beirut created a rift between Israel and the U.S., which brokered a deal to end the fight with an agreement by Israel to allow Arafat and about 11,000 Palestinian fighters to leave Lebanon for Tunisia.

There has been no recent discussion of allowing top Hamas officials such as Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar and military commander Mohammed Deif to leave Gaza because of their role in planning the Oct. 7 attacks, which Israel says killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians.

Leaving Gaza would be fundamentally different for Palestinian fighters today than leaving Lebanon was in 1982. While the militants were visitors in Beirut, the Gaza Strip is home and part of a hoped-for independent Palestinian state.

One senior Israeli official said it isn’t clear that Hamas fighters would take the option of exile, if offered.

“I don’t see them as rational as the PLO was,” the official said. “It’s a more religious, jihadistic organization connected to the ideas of Iran.”

The official said there was no “practical discussion” of exiling Hamas fighters but said that if Israel left Hamas with no other choice, the option might become possible. Hamas officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Some Hamas fighters might be willing to consider the idea if their leadership is killed, said Randa Slim, director of the Conflict Resolution and Track II Dialogues Program at the Middle East Institute. But the idea faces many hurdles that could make it impractical, she said.

The proposal would require support from countries willing to accept the Hamas fighters, whose leaders have found safety in places such as Turkey, Qatar, Iran, Russia and Lebanon. It would have to address the question of whether the fighters would be able to leave with their families. And it would require Hamas to trust Israel to honor whatever commitments it makes in the deal, such as an agreement not to target the militants once they leave Gaza.

“I think it is unrealistic today given the current state of conflict,” Slim said. “But things might evolve in the future.”

The military, meanwhile, has developed the separate proposal that envisions the creation of a “Gaza Restoration Authority,” backed by Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., that would be charged with rebuilding a Hamas-free Gaza Strip.

That proposal is mostly a starting point for discussions that face huge obstacles, including the U.S. position, opposed by Israel, that any postwar government in Gaza should be linked to the Palestinian Authority. It would also require buy-in from Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. The Israeli military declined to comment on its proposal.

Write to Dion Nissenbaum at [email protected]

Some of the hostages were held in sweltering tunnels deep beneath Gaza, while others were squeezed into tight quarters with strangers or confined in isolation. There were children forced to appear in hostage videos, and others forced to watch gruesome footage of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack. They bore physical and psychological wounds.

As some hostages captured that day in the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel have been released, they have relayed these and other stories of their captivity to family members. While their individual experiences differ in some details, their accounts share features that corroborate one another and suggest that Hamas and its allies planned to take hostages.

The New York Times interviewed the family members of 10 freed hostages, who spoke on behalf of their relatives to relay sensitive information.

The relatives who spoke to The Times described how the freed hostages, many of them children, were deprived of adequate food while in Gaza. Many said they had received just a single piece of bread per day for weeks. Others were fed small portions of rice, or pieces of cheese. The Red Cross said it was denied access to the hostages.

Many of the hostages who have returned to Israel in the past week — part of a cease-fire deal between Israel and the armed group Hamas to trade hostages for Palestinian prisoners and detainees — have come home malnourished, infested with lice, ill, injured and deeply traumatized.

An aunt of Avigail Idan, a dual American Israeli citizen who was taken hostage after her parents were brutally killed, and who turned 4 a few days before being released, said her niece shared one piece of pita bread per day with four other captives and did not have a shower or bath during her 50 days in captivity.

According to the aunt, Tal Idan, the five hostages were kept in aboveground apartments, changing locations at least once. They were given a piece of pita with za’atar, a Middle Eastern spice mix, each day to share.

While Avigail was in captivity, her hair was shorn because she had developed a significant case of lice, Ms. Idan said. “She was covered in it. It took quite an effort to help her get rid of some of it the first night.”
The surprise of the terrorist attack on Oct. 7 and the abduction of so many people at once has been described as a national trauma for Israel, but it is also trauma borne by individuals.

In the attack, more than 1,200 people were killed and 240 were taken hostage, according to Israeli authorities. Since then, Israel has ordered a siege of Gaza, cutting off supplies of water, food and fuel to enclave. It has also launched air and ground campaigns that have killed more than 13,000 people, the Gazan health ministry estimates.

For the hostages, it has been a series of horrors — first the attack, then the abduction and then captivity itself.

Nurit Cooper, 79, was held in the warren of tunnels beneath Gaza with four older Israelis in the early days of the war. They were kept in a small room with little light or ventilation, according to Rotem Cooper, her son.
Ms. Cooper’s shoulder was broken “as part of the brutality of the kidnapping,” Mr. Cooper said. The group of hostages, all in their 70s and 80s, he added, struggled to walk in the dark, sandy tunnels.

Ms. Cooper and another hostage, Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, were released last month, but their husbands are still captive in Gaza. Ms. Cooper’s husband, Amiram Cooper, 84, is among the oldest of the remaining hostages. The captors took his glasses and have deprived him of needed medication, his son said.

Many of the family members interviewed, particularly the relatives of children whose parents or siblings remain in captivity, were reluctant to share the most incriminating details of their captivity lest the militants retaliate against the hostages still in their custody.

Others cautioned that they were reluctant to pry too much too soon, or to share publicly the most disturbing details in an effort to preserve their relatives’ privacy and to keep them from being retraumatized.

An aunt of Eitan Yahalomi, a 12-year-old kidnapped from the Nir Oz kibbutz and returned to his family on Monday, however, told a French television network that the boy had “lived through horrors” in Gaza.
The aunt, Devorah Cohen, said that when Eitan had arrived in Gaza he was set upon by a mob.

“When he arrived in Gaza, civilians hit him,” she told BFM TV, adding that the boy and other kidnapped children were forced to watch videos of the atrocities committed on Oct. 7. When he and others cried, she said, their captors threatened to shoot them.

Efrat Avsker, another of Eitan’s aunts, told The Times that the boy had “a long, long recovery, a long way to go.”

“But he is in good hands,” she added.

Ohad Yahalomi, Eitan’s father, was shot in the leg and arm trying to protect his family. He was kidnapped separately. Ms. Avsker said the family was very relieved to have Eitan home, but is deeply anxious about Mr. Yahalomi’s safety.

“We all must do everything we can, everything we can to get him and the others out,” she said.

By Thursday, 102 hostages had been released from Gaza, most of them women and children, ranging in age from 4 to 85. As part of the exchange, 210 Palestinians had been released from Israeli prisons, all of them women and teenagers.

On Wednesday, Hamas said the youngest of the hostages captured on Oct. 7, 10-month-old Kfir Bibas, had died with the other members of his family while in captivity. The Israeli military said it was assessing the accuracy of the Hamas statement, while a senior leader said the claims could be “psychological warfare.”

Survivors of kidnapping say the road ahead may be long for those released. But in the short term, some may feel uncomplicated relief. “The initial emotions after being rescued are joy and relief,” said Elizabeth Smart, a child safety activist who was kidnapped from her Salt Lake City bedroom in 2002 when she was 14 and held captive for nine months, during which she was raped. “It’s a miracle, and it’s an answer to prayer.”

For Noam and Alma Or, teenage siblings released this week, the joy of being freed was tempered by the news of a parent’s death.

Soon after embracing the newly freed teenagers, family members had to tell them that their mother had been killed and that their father was still missing.

“I know it was very difficult,” their uncle Ahal Besorai said in an interview, adding that the children asked that he not reveal too many details about their conditions in Gaza, beyond that it was “very unpleasant.”

The siblings, he said, survived their captivity in large part because they had each other.

“They said they actually supported each other, so if one of them had a bad day or a down day, the other would support him or her,” he said. “It created some kind of a bond.”

Families that were able to remain together, like the Or siblings, said they found solace in being together.

Three generations of the Munder family — Ruth, 78, Keren, 54, and her son Ohad, 9 — were held together in a room in Gaza with about 10 other hostages. The group slept on chairs and needed permission from their captors to use a toilet, which could sometimes take more than an hour to get, said Eyal Mor, a relative of the Munders.

It was in that room, Mr. Mor said, that the family learned that Ruth’s son, Keren’s brother, had died. They were listening to a report on Israeli radio, which they could occasionally hear.

“You know, you can never know what will be the long-term impact of this trauma,” Mr. Mor said.

In these early days, Israelis are trying to bolster the spirits of the returning hostages however possible.

Ohad’s doctors made an exception to the visitation rules and allowed him to invite his eight best friends to see him at the Tel Aviv hospital where he was monitored.

Eitan, an avid soccer fan and player, got to meet players from Hapoel Be’er Sheva, his favorite team.
He was thrilled by the meeting, said his aunt, Ms. Avsker. But mostly, he is relishing the simple pleasures.

“Eitan is happy to be home,” she said. “Happy to be hugged and loved by his mother and the whole family — and pretty much by the whole country.”

Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.

The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.

The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.

Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot — all of which happened on Oct. 7.

The plan also included details about the location and size of Israeli military forces, communication hubs and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks inside the Israeli security establishment.

The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities, according to documents and officials. It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document, as well.

Last year, shortly after the document was obtained, officials in the Israeli military’s Gaza division, which is responsible for defending the border with Gaza, said that Hamas’s intentions were unclear.

“It is not yet possible to determine whether the plan has been fully accepted and how it will be manifested,” read a military assessment reviewed by The Times.

Then, in July, just three months before the attacks, a veteran analyst with Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, warned that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint.

But a colonel in the Gaza division brushed off her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by The Times.

“I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, fully matched “the content of Jericho Wall.”

“It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”

Officials privately concede that, had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them.

Instead, the Israeli military was unprepared as terrorists streamed out of the Gaza Strip. It was the deadliest day in Israel’s history.

Israeli security officials have already acknowledged that they failed to protect the country, and the government is expected to assemble a commission to study the events leading up to the attacks. The Jericho Wall document lays bare a yearslong cascade of missteps that culminated in what officials now regard as the worst Israeli intelligence failure since the surprise attack that led to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.

Underpinning all these failures was a single, fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so ingrained in the Israeli government, officials said, that they disregarded growing evidence to the contrary.

The Israeli military and the Israeli Security Agency, which is in charge of counterterrorism in Gaza, declined to comment.

Officials would not say how they obtained the Jericho Wall document, but it was among several versions of attack plans collected over the years. A 2016 Defense Ministry memorandum viewed by The Times, for example, says, “Hamas intends to move the next confrontation into Israeli territory.”

Such an attack would most likely involve hostage-taking and “occupying an Israeli community (and perhaps even a number of communities),” the memo reads.

The Jericho Wall document, named for the ancient fortifications in the modern-day West Bank, was even more explicit. It detailed rocket attacks to distract Israeli soldiers and send them hurrying into bunkers, and drones to disable the elaborate security measures along the border fence separating Israel and Gaza.

Hamas fighters would then break through 60 points in the wall, storming across the border into Israel. The document begins with a quote from the Quran: “Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will certainly prevail.”

The same phrase has been widely used by Hamas in its videos and statements since Oct. 7.

One of the most important objectives outlined in the document was to overrun the Israeli military base in Re’im, which is home to the Gaza division responsible for protecting the region. Other bases that fell under the division’s command were also listed.

Hamas carried out that objective on Oct. 7, rampaging through Re’im and overrunning parts of the base.

The audacity of the blueprint, officials said, made it easy to underestimate. All militaries write plans that they never use, and Israeli officials assessed that, even if Hamas invaded, it might muster a force of a few dozen, not the hundreds who ultimately attacked.

Israel had also misread Hamas’s actions. The group had negotiated for permits to allow Palestinians to work in Israel, which Israeli officials took as a sign that Hamas was not looking for a war.

But Hamas had been drafting attack plans for many years, and Israeli officials had gotten hold of previous iterations of them. What could have been an intelligence coup turned into one of the worst miscalculations in Israel’s 75-year history.

In September 2016, the defense minister’s office compiled a top-secret memorandum based on a much earlier iteration of a Hamas attack plan. The memorandum, which was signed by the defense minister at the time, Avigdor Lieberman, said that an invasion and hostage-taking would “lead to severe damage to the consciousness and morale of the citizens of Israel.”

The memo, which was viewed by The Times, said that Hamas had purchased sophisticated weapons, GPS jammers and drones. It also said that Hamas had increased its fighting force to 27,000 people — having added 6,000 to its ranks in a two-year period. Hamas had hoped to reach 40,000 by 2020, the memo determined.

Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan.

Hamas had “decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope,” analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division.

But the Gaza division referred to the plan as a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go but had not arrived there yet.

On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing.

The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times.

The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out.

The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off.

“In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.

The back-and-forth continued, with some colleagues supporting the analyst’s original conclusion. Soon, she invoked the lessons of the 1973 war, in which Syrian and Egyptian armies overran Israeli defenses. Israeli forces regrouped and repelled the invasion, but the intelligence failure has long served as a lesson for Israeli security officials.

“We already underwent a similar experience 50 years ago on the southern front in connection with a scenario that seemed imaginary, and history may repeat itself if we are not careful,” the analyst wrote to her colleagues.

While ominous, none of the emails predicted that war was imminent. Nor did the analyst challenge the conventional wisdom among Israeli intelligence officials that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was not interested in war with Israel. But she correctly assessed that Hamas’s capabilities had drastically improved. The gap between the possible and the aspirational had narrowed significantly.

The failures to connect the dots echoed another analytical failure more than two decades ago, when the American authorities also had multiple indications that the terrorist group Al Qaeda was preparing an assault. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were largely a failure of analysis and imagination, a government commission concluded.

“The Israeli intelligence failure on Oct. 7 is sounding more and more like our 9/11,” said Ted Singer, a recently retired senior C.I.A. official who worked extensively in the Middle East. “The failure will be a gap in analysis to paint a convincing picture to military and political leadership that Hamas had the intention to launch the attack when it did.”

The Israel Defense Forces resumed its military offensive in the Gaza Strip on Friday after a week-long truce as the Hamas terror group broke the ceasefire, firing rockets into Israel and failing to provide a list of hostages it intended to release by 7 a.m.

In response, the IDF said it was renewing combat seven days after fighting ceased, during which time 105 civilians were released from Hamas captivity in Gaza, including 81 Israelis, 23 Thai nationals, and 1 Filipino, in exchange for 210 Palestinian prisoners, all of them women or minors. Israel also allowed an influx of humanitarian aid into the Strip.

Still held hostage by Gaza terror groups when the truce collapsed were 137 people — 115 men, 20 women and two children — government spokesperson Eylon Levy said. Ten of the hostages are 75 and older. The vast majority of the hostages, 126, are Israeli. Eleven are foreign nationals, including eight from Thailand.

The Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement that Hamas “violated the framework, did not meet its obligation to release all hostage women, and fired rockets at Israel.”

“Amid the return to combat, we stress the government of Israel is committed to achieving the goals of the war — releasing our hostages, eliminating Hamas, and ensuring that Gaza can never again threaten the people of Israel.”

The IDF did not immediately restart major ground operations, however — for what were believed to be both logistical reasons and in order to allow some time for the possibility of the truce being restored.

Despite the resumed fighting, CNN and BBC reported that efforts were continuing to try to restore a temporary ceasefire.

An unnamed Palestinian source told the BBC that talks were ongoing through mediators. while AFP’s Qatari office also cited an unidentified source who said the same.

The IDF said several rockets were fired from Gaza just before 7 a.m., setting off sirens in the southern community of Holit, following several launches at around 6 a.m.

One of the rockets was intercepted, around half an hour before the ceasefire was due to expire.

Rockets continued to be fired throughout the morning at Gaza border communities and the southern coastal city of Ashkelon.

A source close to Hamas told AFP that the terrorist group’s armed wing had received “the order to resume combat” and to “defend the Gaza Strip,” with heavy fighting reported in parts of Gaza City.

The IDF said its fighter jets began carrying out a wave of airstrikes against Hamas targets. Loud, continuous explosions were heard coming from the Gaza Strip, and black smoke billowed from the territory.

Hamas said the airstrikes hit southern Gaza, including the community of Abassan east of the town of Khan Younis. Another strike reportedly hit a home northwest of Gaza City.

The Palestinian Shehab media outlet, which is closely affiliated with Hamas, reported that gunfire and explosions were heard in northern Gaza.

The Hamas-run health ministry said three people were killed in Israeli air raids in Rafah, in the Strip’s south, but those claims were not independently verified.

In light of the resumption of fighting, the Home Front Command instructed that schools in much of central and southern Israel would open only if students could reach sheltered spaces in time in the event of rocket attacks.

Schools in the Gaza periphery remain closed.

On Thursday, US top diplomat Antony Blinken, meeting Israeli and Palestinian officials, called for the pause in hostilities to be extended and warned any resumption of combat must protect Palestinian civilians.

While expressing hope at the time that the ceasefire could be extended, Blinken said that if Israel resumed the war and moved against southern Gaza to pursue Hamas, it must do so in “compliance with international humanitarian law” and must have “a clear plan in place” to protect civilians. He said Israeli leaders understood that ”the massive levels of civilian life and displacement scale we saw in the north must not be repeated in the south.”

In an apparent effort to address those concerns, the IDF published a map splitting the Gaza Strip into hundreds of small zones, which it said it would use to notify Palestinian civilians of active combat zones.

It asked Palestinians to pay attention to their area’s number and follow the IDF’s future updates.

It is believed that the military may use this map to call on Palestinians from specific areas to evacuate when the IDF’s ground offensive expands to the Strip’s south, instead of demanding mass evacuations as it did in the northern part of Gaza.

Other world leaders and aid groups had also sought an extended pause.

Most of Gaza’s population is now crammed into the south with no exit, raising questions over how an Israeli offensive there can avoid heavy civilian casualties.

After the renewal of operations, Palestinians reported that the IDF dropped flyers in Khan Younis, a Hamas stronghold in southern Gaza, calling on residents to move south to Rafah, warning the area is dangerous.

The military took control of most of Gaza City in the north of the Strip before the ceasefire took effect on November 24. Hamas released some hostages in stage-managed ceremonies watched by large crowds in parts of Gaza City over the past week, including in areas where the IDF have previously said it had gained control, in an apparent show of strength.

War erupted on October 7, after Hamas’s devastating onslaught in which 3,000 terrorists infiltrated southern Israeli communities, massacring 1,200 people — mostly civilians murdered in their homes and at a music festival — and taking some 240 hostages.

Israel responded with an air and ground offensive aimed at eliminating Hamas. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza has said that more than 15,000 people have been killed since October 7, most of them civilians. The numbers cannot be verified, do not differentiate between civilians and Hamas operatives, and include those killed by the terrorists’ own failed rocket launches.

intelligence services are preparing to kill Hamas leaders around the world when the nation’s war in the Gaza Strip winds down, setting the stage for a yearslong campaign to hunt down militants responsible for the Oct. 7 massacres, Israeli officials said.

With orders from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s top spy agencies are working on plans to hunt down Hamas leaders living in Lebanon, Turkey and Qatar, the small Gulf nation that has allowed the group to run a political office in Doha for a decade, the officials said.

The assassination campaign would be an extension of Israel’s decadeslong clandestine operations that have become the subject of both Hollywood legend and worldwide condemnation. Israeli assassins have hunted Palestinian militants in Beirut while dressed as women, and killed a Hamas leader in Dubai while disguised as tourists. Israel has used a car bomb to assassinate a Hezbollah leader in Syria and a remote-controlled rifle to kill a nuclear scientist in Iran, according to former Israeli officials.

For years, countries such as Qatar, Lebanon, Iran, Russia and Turkey have provided Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, with a measure of protection. And Israel has at times refrained from targeting the Palestinian militants to avoid creating diplomatic crises.

The new plans would mark a second chance for Netanyahu, who ordered a botched 1997 attempt to poison Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Jordan. The well-documented attempt instead led to the release of Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

To the consternation of some Israeli officials who want the latest plans to remain a mystery, Netanyahu telegraphed his intentions in a nationwide address on Nov. 22.

“I have instructed the Mossad to act against the heads of Hamas wherever they are,” he said, referring to Israel’s foreign-intelligence service.

Some Israeli officials wanted to launch an immediate campaign to kill Meshaal and other Hamas leaders living abroad, the officials said. The officials were especially incensed by a video of Meshaal, and other Hamas leaders, including its top political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, celebrating and praying at one of their offices while watching live news coverage of the Oct. 7 attacks.

Israel isn’t known to have carried out any targeted-killing operations in Qatar, and doing so after Oct. 7 could have torpedoed continuing efforts to negotiate the release of those held hostage, the officials said. Those concerns helped temper efforts to immediately embark on the assassination campaign, but the planning continues, they said.

Qatar has become the central hub for the hostage talks, with the head of the Mossad, David Barnea, meeting CIA chief William Burns in Doha earlier this week for more discussions. Doha has helped to secure the release of dozens of Israeli hostages held by Gaza militants in return for the release of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. More than 130 hostages remain in Gaza, according to Israel’s account.

Netanyahu’s vow to hunt down Hamas leaders around the world has sparked a debate among former intelligence officials.

Efraim Halevy, a former Mossad director, called it ill-advised. Killing Hamas leaders won’t eliminate the threat, he said. It has the potential to instead inflame the group’s followers and accelerate creation of even worse threats.

“Pursuing Hamas on a worldwide scale and trying to systematically remove all its leaders from this world is a desire to exact revenge, not a desire to achieve a strategic aim,” said Halevy, who called the plan “far-fetched.”

Amos Yadlin, a retired Israeli general who once led the military’s intelligence agency, said the campaign “is what justice demands.”

“All the Hamas leaders, all those who participated in the attack, who planned the attack, who ordered the attack, should be brought to justice or eliminated,” Yadlin said. “It’s the right policy.”

Perhaps no other nation has Israel’s experience in carrying out worldwide assassination campaigns. Since World War II, Israel has conducted more than 2,700 such operations, according to the book “Rise and Kill First,” by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman.

Even before Israel was founded in 1948, Jewish militants killed European diplomats who were involved in the British administration of Mandatory Palestine. In the 1960s, Israeli spies used letter bombs to target former Nazi Germany scientists helping Egypt develop rockets.

The campaigns have sometimes backfired.

In 1997, Netanyahu, then serving his first term as prime minister, ordered Israeli spies to kill Meshaal, a Hamas founder who was then living in Jordan. The Israeli team entered Jordan posing as Canadian tourists and attacked Meshaal outside the Hamas political office in Amman. One Israeli assassin sprayed a toxin into Meshaal’s ear but he was captured along with another member of the team before they could escape.

Meshaal fell into a coma, and Jordan threatened to terminate its peace treaty with Israel. Then-President Bill Clinton pressed Netanyahu to end the crisis by sending his Mossad chief to Amman with the antidote that saved Meshaal’s life. Israel then secured the freedom of its operatives in Jordan by agreeing to release Yassin, the Hamas spiritual leader, and 70 other Palestinian prisoners.

Meshaal later described the failed assassination attempt as a “turning point” that helped empower Hamas.

Israel continued its assassination campaign against Hamas for years.

In 2010, a team of Israeli operatives using forged European passports flew to Dubai, where they masqueraded as tourists while awaiting the arrival of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a founder of the Hamas military wing who led the group’s efforts to buy weapons.

Surveillance video later captured members of the team, dressed as tennis players, following Mabhouh to his room, where the Israelis paralyzed and then suffocated the Hamas leader. While it initially appeared that Mabhouh had died of natural causes, Dubai officials eventually identified the hit team and accused Israel of the assassination.

It took years to repair the damage to Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates.

It was the deadly Palestinian militant attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics that cemented the nation’s embrace of covert assassinations as a tool of government policy.

Palestinian gunmen with a group known as Black September took a group of Israeli athletes and coaches hostage in the Olympic Village, leading to a two-day standoff that ended with a failed rescue attempt by West German police. All 11 Israeli hostages were killed.

In response, then-Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered Israeli spies to hunt down and kill all Palestinian militants involved in the attack. The covert campaign was dubbed Operation Wrath of God and became the subject of an Oscar-nominated 2005 Steven Spielberg movie.

Israeli assassins spent 20 years hunting those linked to the Munich attack. They killed Palestinians in France, Italy, Greece, Cyprus and Lebanon. They used a remote-controlled bomb hidden inside a phone in France and used guns with silencers to kill targets in the streets of Rome.

Among those to take part in the years long effort was Ehud Barak, then a young Israeli commando who went on to become prime minister. In 1973, Barak, dressed as a woman, was part of a team that sneaked into Beirut to kill three Palestinian militants linked to the Munich attack. They killed all three in a matter of minutes.

But Operation Wrath of God also led to one of Israel’s most embarrassing covert failures in 1973, when a team of Israeli operatives killed a Moroccan waiter in Norway who they had mistakenly identified as a Palestinian militant involved in the Munich attack. Six of the 15 Israeli operatives were arrested and five were sentenced to short prison terms for their roles in the killing.

Systematic military failures like dysfunctional balloons and disregard of warnings by the IDF's higher ranks contributed to this tragedy

At 6:41 A.M. on October 7, Amir Eyal, a soldier stationed at the Nahal Oz outpost, was the first to inform his family’s WhatsApp group. “They’re shooting at us,” he wrote. “An operation has begun. They started it.”

By “them,” he meant the dozens of Hamas terrorists who raced over the border from the Gaza Strip into Israel and stormed the outpost, which is located near Kibbutz Nahal Oz, less than a kilometer from the border fence. “It’s a world war here,” he wrote a few minutes later.

Eyal belonged to a small unit known as the combat intelligence collection corps, whose mission is operating the army’s observation balloons near the Gaza border.

On that difficult morning when Hamas attacked, he and four of his comrades fought a lengthy battle within their outpost against the terrorists. They managed to kill or wound several members of Hamas’ elite Nukhba force, but were badly outnumbered by the enormous swarm of terrorists who continued to pour into the outpost.

The story of their fight has so far received few mentions in the media, given the huge storm generated by the October 7 attacks and the war that followed it. Like many stories that happened that day, this is a story of soldiers’ heroism, but at the same time, a story of a chain of failures that raise difficult questions on a systemic level.

There were five of them at the balloon monitoring outpost that day – Neta Bar-Am, the commander; Amir Eyal, who was on guard duty when the attack began and was the first to encounter the terrorists; Elroy Ben Shitrit, who just a day earlier had been talking with his father about his big plans for the future; Daniel Shperber, who told his mother after being drafted into the unit, “I’ll deal with anything that happens”; and Shimon Lugasi, who, in the last picture he posted on social media, was in uniform, seated and smiling a modest smile.

All five served in Battalion 414, to which the female spotters killed that same day in another section of the Nahal Oz outpost also belonged. Like the spotters, the balloon operators also warned of problems in the months before the attack, but didn’t always get an appropriate response from the senior command.

Less than a week after the attack, Haaretz reported that at least three observation balloons along the border weren’t functioning properly in the weeks before October 7.

The army assumed at the time that this was due to technical issues. But after the massacre, it decided to open an investigation to determine whether Hamas had sabotaged them. The Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit said at the time that “when the war ends, we’ll examine everything in depth and conducted a pointed investigating into the matter.”

The balloon operators had been telling their families for weeks about some of the issues. Not all of them were dealt with before the attack.

For residents of Nahal Oz, the big white balloon, which could be seen from almost anywhere in the kibbutz, served for years as the ultimate security symbol. As a resident of that kibbutz, I saw it every morning while taking my daughters to preschool, and they often asked questions about the curious flying object in the sky.

The IDF used the balloon to collect information from deep inside Gaza, at distances that the cameras along the fence, which Hamas neutralized at the start of the attack, are incapable of covering.

But that Saturday morning, the Nahal Oz balloon was on the ground, not in the sky; out of service due to a malfunction. Nor was that the first time in the weeks before the attack that the balloon was out of service. Employees of a civilian company were supposed to come fix it that afternoon, but once Hamas took over the outpost, that was obviously impossible.

The five soldiers responsible for operating the balloon – Neta, Amir, Elroy, Daniel and Shimon – were waiting for the repair crew to arrive, knowing that once it was fixed, they would resume operating it and be able to supply intelligence about the situation along the border.

But instead of operating the balloon, the five of them found themselves fighting a large force of terrorists that had managed to penetrate all the way to the back of the outpost.

“They had combat training, but they weren’t supposed to be the initial force fighting for the outpost in the event of an invasion,” said Shai Eyal, Amir’s father, noting that soldiers from the Golani infantry brigade and other units were also stationed along the border.

At 6:55 A.M., Amir managed to write to his family from his guard post that hundreds of rockets had been fired at the outpost. “Battles are being fought here between Golani and the terrorists,” he added. But the enormous number of terrorists who penetrated the outpost enabled Hamas to capture it quickly.

Eyal was also the first to encounter one of the terrorists. He fought him and was wounded, but managed to kill the terrorist. While wounded, he also managed to link up with his four comrades, who, when the heavy rocket barrage began, had gone to a nearby mobile shelter.

From within this shelter, with only a single-digit number of ammunition cartridges and with rockets and mortars raining down on the outpost, the five of them fought a lengthy, difficult battle against the terrorists, who came at them in two waves.

The first terrorist cell suffered losses during the battle, but managed to wound two more of the balloon operators. After that, at least one other terrorist cell came in.

A subsequent IDF inquiry noted that hundreds of bullet casings were found around the shelter, some from Israeli rifles and others from Hamas rifles. Because of the terrorists’ numerical superiority, despite the losses they suffered, the battle ended with all five balloon operators being killed within the shelter.

Neta Bar-Am managed to send his family a farewell message. In an interview with Kan Bet radio this week, his mother Mirit said he expressed his hope that his little sisters would marry and raise children, and that the family would continue his personal hobby – building the Lego models that filled his room.

Elroy Ben Shitrit managed to send a final message to one of his commanders to inform him that his comrade Daniel Shperber had been wounded. “That’s so like Elroy,” said his father, Rafi, a former mayor of Beit She’an. “It didn’t surprise me that the last message he sent that day was a message of concern for his friend Daniel. He was a boy who saw others and took care of others all his life.”

The day before the attack, Shperber celebrated his 20th birthday. His mother Liat came to visit him at the outpost and managed to convince him, unusually, to pose for a photograph with her. It turned out to be the last photo ever taken of him.

She told Haaretz that he enjoyed serving at the outpost and liked being near the kibbutz. “He would take a bathing suit to the base in the summer, and when they got permission, they would go to the Nahal Oz pool,” she said. “They liked being there. It gave me peace of mind that he wasn’t somewhere that made him depressed to return to base. He liked his job and liked his comrades.”

The families only learned that the five had been killed a few days after the attack, because the army had trouble coping with the high number of fatalities at the outpost and throughout the sector.

“It took several days to get answers, so there was a kind of hope that maybe they were taken prisoner or managed to run away,” Mirit Bar-Am said. “But that didn’t happen. They were killed in battle, they fought until the end. They did what they could to stop that cell. Their fight kept more terrorists from coming to the kibbutz itself.”

The five soldiers’ parents have kept in close touch with each other since October 7. Together, they are trying to get answers about the problems and failures that preceded the attack, and also to get the battle at the outpost commemorated.

One idea that has come up is publishing a children’s book about their lives, the things they loved and their military service (“A Tale of Five Balloon Operators,” a riff on the well-known Israeli children’s book “A Tale of Five Balloons”).

“There’s some comfort in knowing that they fought, killed terrorists and impaired Hamas’ ability to murder more civilians,” said Elroy’s father, Rafi Ben Shitrit. “We’re proud of them. But that doesn’t lessen the pain.”

First Hamas fighters raped her. Then they shot her in the head

The terrorists were ‘on a mission’ to carry out sexual attacks on October 7. Campaigners have asked why the UN stayed silent

She had, he says, the face of an angel. Night after night Yoni Saadon, 39, wakes in anguish to the faces of women.

First, that of the young woman hiding next to him under the stage of the Supernova festival where he had been dancing to electronic music as the sun rose on October 7 and Hamas militants opened fire.

“She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too,” he said. “I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologise to her, saying ‘I’m sorry’.”

After an hour, he peeked out. “I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her. She was screaming, ‘Stop it — already I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!’ When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head.

“I kept thinking it could have been one of my daughters,” added the father of four. “Or my sister — I had bought her a ticket but at the last minute she couldn’t come.”

The horror did not end there. Hiding in bushes, he saw two more Hamas fighters. “They had caught a young woman near a car and she was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her. They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her and her head rolled along the ground. I see that head too,” he says.

Saadon, a shift manager in a foundry, told his story to The Sunday Times in a support area set up in Sitria, southeast of Tel Aviv, for survivors of the festival.

Three times a week survivors from around Israel get together with parents whose children were among those slaughtered. On Wednesday evening they gathered on sofas as people brought them beers and steaming bowls of vegetable soup, then went outside to sit round a firepit as the singer Rona Kenan strummed her guitar and sang ballads.

Volunteer therapists on hand included Bar Yuval-Shani, 58, who lost her only sister, Deborah, and brother-in-law, Shlomi Matias, both musicians and peace activists, killed on Holit kibbutz by militants who broke into their safe room. “She was eight years younger but [it was] as if we were twins,” she said tearfully. “I held all her secrets and I miss her terribly.”

Deborah died shielding her son Rotem, 16, who was shot in the abdomen then hid for nine hours as fighters returned again and again, and Yuval-Shani guided him over the phone in how to treat himself.

Yoni Saadon’s account is one of several witness accounts of rape Yuval-Shani has heard from festival survivors, all of whom, she says, are “deeply traumatised”.

Eight weeks after the attack in which 1,200 were killed and 240 taken hostage, there is mounting evidence of widespread rape on October 7. Israeli police have begun their biggest investigation into sexual violence and crimes against women. “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people,” says Shelly Harush, the police commander leading the investigation.

They have collected thousands of statements, photographs and video clips, which she says “as a Jewish mother the mind and soul cannot bear”, including “girls whose pelvises were broken they had been raped so much”.

The first indications came on the day itself when Hamas livestreamed some of the horrors it was perpetrating. Footage showed several women stripped of their clothing. One video showed a young woman with bloodstains on the crotch of her underwear.

“We didn’t understand at first,” says Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an expert on international law who heads a civilian commission into Hamas crimes against women on October 7. Survivors arriving at hospitals were not asked about sexual abuse or given rape kits for evidence.

However, those tasked with collecting the bodies began reporting that many of the women were naked and bleeding from the genitals.

Haim Outmezgine, commander of a special unit of Zaka, a voluntary religious organisation that collects the remains of the dead, including their blood, so they can be buried in accordance with Jewish tradition, has no doubt about what they saw.

“We collected 1,000 bodies in ten days from the festival site and kibbutzim,” he said. “No one saw more than us. “It was clear they were trying to spread as much horror as they could — to kill, to burn alive, to rape … it seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”

He describes finding two girls’ bodies in a field, both shot in the head, legs apart, one with shorts ripped and shot in the vagina and other with jeans pulled down and bruises on her legs. A father of six, he finds it hard to talk about. “One of my girls is 24, around the same age,” he says. His team are all receiving therapy.

Once the bodies were collected they were taken to the main morgue at the Shura military base to be identified and prepared for burial. Among volunteers in an all-female team to prepare female corpses was Shari, 60, an architect who lives in Jerusalem.

Working there day and night for two weeks starting the morning after, she describes scenes of unimaginable horror. “This is a huge building but there were literally body bags filling every room and lining corridors floor to ceiling, all oozing liquids.

“Opening the body bags was scary as we didn’t know what we would see. They were all young women. Most in little clothing or shredded clothing and their bodies bloodied particularly round their underwear and some women shot many times in the face as if to mutilate them.

“Their faces were in anguish and often their fingers clenched as they died. We saw women whose pelvises were broken. Legs broken. There were women who had been shot in the crotch, in the breasts … there seems no doubt what happened to them.”

Her team had to wait while doctors, dentists and DNA experts worked to identify the bodies before they could then gently put them in white linen burial shrouds. “We are just normal women not doctors, we never expected to see such horrors,” she said. Yet what really made them cry was the occasional flash of colour. “Some bodies we took out had pretty pink or bright purple nails — and we would all pause and at that point many of us broke down.”

As more and more reports emerged, Elkayam-Levy was shocked at the lack of international reaction from bodies such as UN Women. On the eighth day she gathered a group of international law and women’s rights experts, including 160 law professors, and drafted letters to UN agencies sharing everything.

The initial response, she says, was silence. “It was absurd that it was so documented yet accompanied by so much silence. One of the UN’s own values is ‘believe women’ as crimes against women are always denied but they failed to believe us — the very organisations meant to protect us failed us.”

The women established a civilian commission to collect videos, photos, and witness statements into a database, both as an archive but also to raise international awareness.

Elkayam-Levy says these make clear what Hamas was trying to achieve. “They wanted to terrorise us for generations to come and instil in us insecurity in the most basic way, and that’s why they targeted women in this way.

⬤ Janice Turner: Why’s the #MeToo crowd silent on Hamas rape?

“I’m a feminist,” she adds, “I teach and fight for women’s rights, yet after October 7 I told my husband to get a gun. For me to want a weapon and put it in my house — against everything I believe in and ever believed in — shows what they did to us.”

Israel Defence Forces (IDF) sources claim that Hamas fighters captured in Gaza have told them in interrogations that they were instructed to “dirty” or “whore” the women. They also showed The Sunday Times photographs and footage not previously seen and too graphic to publish.

Some have questioned the accounts because of the IDF use of propaganda and the fact no victims have come forward. But Dr Dvora Baumann, director of the Bat Ami Centre for Victims of Sexual Abuse at Hadassah hospital, points out: “Usually people who are sexually abused don’t report it for a long time because it is so hard to talk about and they worry they will be judged. We have plenty of other evidence. I’ve been in this field over 20 years and I have never heard such horrific things.”

Most of the women are believed to have been killed or taken hostage. There are reports some survivors of the festival survivors have taken their own lives, while 18 are receiving treatment in mental institutions.

Some fear that those remaining are being held as sex slaves by Hamas commanders in the same way as Islamic State (Isis) did with Yazidis in 2014.

Paradoxically, in a world where rape is being used as a weapon of war everywhere from Ethiopia to Ukraine, this had been cited as one conflict where it did not happen.

Hamas denies that its fighters rape women. One official, Basem Naim, told The Washington Post that the group considers “any sexual relationship or activity outside of marriage to be completely haram” — forbidden by Islam.

Palestinian women say they too have suffered sexual violence in Israeli jails, a claim denied by Israeli officials.

The International Criminal Court has announced it will investigate the October 7 attacks and the situation in Gaza where about 15,000 people have been killed and fighting resumed on Friday. Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor, has spent the last two days in Israel meeting survivors and hostage families in Tel Aviv and visiting the West Bank. “We will investigate crimes within our jurisdiction … depending on the information we have and evidence potentially available,” he said. This is expected to include sexual violence.

For the past week, a delegation of Israeli feminists and human rights experts have been in Geneva and New York lobbying to be heard. Tomorrow they will protest outside the UN headquarters, and Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Facebook, will speak.

On Friday night UN Women finally issued a statement condemning the October 7 attacks. “We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during these attacks,” it said.

Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, who spent 12 years as a committee member on the UN convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (Cedaw), said: “This is the statement they should have issued two months ago.

“It’s mindblowing. We were there for our sisters when terrible things happened across the ocean, when they took away abortion rights in US, the killing of women in Iran, the abduction of Yazidis … but with us they looked away and I can’t think of a reasonable answer.”

Ayelet Razin Bet Or, the former director of Israel’s authority for the advancement of the status of women, does have an answer. “Israeli women have been betrayed,” she said. “What they are saying is MeToo except if you’re a Jew.”

The yellow gate of Kibbutz Beeri is burned. It is half open now and IDF vehicles flow back and forth. What was once a thriving community is now empty of civilians.

The fields are full of gear, backpacks, and other necessities for war. It’s also calm here. The winter months are coming and the clouds above give a crisp air, to this otherwise sweltering hot area near the Gaza border.

It was here that waves of Hamas members and other terrorists from Gaza burst through into Israel on the early morning of October 7. Kibbutz Beeri, Kfar Aza, and several other Israeli communities became ground zero for the massacre that took place.

The IDF fought at numerous sites along the border on that morning, trying to stem the tide of the attack. Golani soldiers from the 51st and 13th battalions fought along 30km of the border at numerous points and took heavy casualties between October 7 and 9.

Dozens of the soldiers from these units were killed, the IDF website for the fallen lists seventy soldiers from Golani as victims in the battles of the first days of the war. They fought to stop the terrorists and helped prevent worse horrors from unfolding. However, even as they fought this delaying action and bases and outposts were overrun, more than 1,000 civilians were massacred in various places.  

Scenes of horror in the south
To get to this site of horror we drove down from Urim, a small community near Ofakim. There are checkpoints near Ofakim and many communities have police at their entrance, a sign that the terror threat remains.

It is day ten of the war. The overwhelming might of the IDF is now here. However, ten days ago this was a scene of chaos and slaughter. This whole road that leads down to Kibbutz Re’im, and then runs along the Gaza border, inland several kilometers from the border itself, was a road of death and massacre on October 7.

It was here that Hamas sent men on motorcycles and trucks to surround concertgoers at the Nova festival. Shelters near the bus stops, decorated and donated with support from abroad, became centers of death as terrorists tossed grenades into them and shot the people sheltering in them.  

The commanders on this frontline faced a long sector to defend. It was divided into two pieces, the northern and southern sectors under the Gaza division, anchored at fortified areas along the line such as Kissufim and Nahal Oz.

A battalion of men, several hundred fighters, held each sector.

This spread the soldiers thin. It was Simchat Torah and Shabbat a weekend that was supposed to be quiet. The 51st battalion of the Golani had a Seyeret or recon unit at Kerem Shalom as well, near the Egyptian border. There was another unit at the Yiftach base near Zikim. The Home Front has a base at Zikim as well.

Dead surprise attack
The soldiers had no indication of the attack. They were not warned or put on alert. If they’d had just an hour to prepare they could have brought forces to bear where necessary against the impending threat and neutralized some of it.

They could have called in air force assets to decimate the 2,900 terrorists gathering near the border at five in the morning. Those terrorists would come in three waves. The first wave was well-armed and they struck 29 points on the border. They neutralized observation towers using drones and use motorbikes to penetrate into Israel, They crossed a billion-dollar fence that was supposed to stop them.  

The Golani soldiers witnessed the rocket fire that awakened the border at 6:30. The battalions were dispersed. One unit, for instance, had to hold an area behind which were five kibbutzim, such as Kissufim, Ein HaShlosha, Magen, Nirim, and Nir Oz.

The soldiers had several tanks in each area along the border and they brought the tanks up to their berms to be able to confront attackers. The company commanders of the battalion summoned their fighters to try to control the damage. But there were black holes of information. Units were overrun, and areas such as Nir Oz lost touch with their commanders. The Gaza division camp at Reim was attacked.

It took time for each sector commander to understand the extent of the attack. Israel has trained and prepared for infiltrations. However, the belief was that each infiltration point was the major point of contact, not that the enemy had hit 29 places at the same time.

Each unit, and many of the Kita Konenut or security volunteers of the local kibbutzim, fought lonely battles, unable to see the full extent of the battle. Where the IDF and local forces were successful, they beat back the attack and the terrorists did not penetrate communities. However, at places like Beeri, the terrorists were able to pour in.  

Commanders and members of the unit who were on leave came back to their units. It took several hours to organize a real defense at the border. And they had just begun to contain and destroy the enemy. It would take another fifty hours of tough battles.

The enemy would be reduced from 29 points of infiltration to nine places and then zero. The air force had difficulty carrying out strikes because the terrorists were mixed in with civilians, in communities and other areas. There were also Israeli forces in many places. This chaos nullified Israel’s technological advantages. The terrorists also had a large supply of weapons, such as RPGs and also kornet anti-tank missiles.

The terrorists also penetrated beyond the first line of contact into a second line of border communities. This presented an added difficulty. Terrorists were confronted by police in places like Sderot, Ofakim, and also at the Nova festival. 54 police were killed in the fighting.

After an hour or so many of Israel’s elite units responded. This included the Lotar counter-terror unit, which went into Sderot and other areas, as well as Shayetet 13, Shaldag, Seyeret Matkal, Duvdevan, Yasam police units, and other units of paratroops and commandos.  

The terrorists had trained for this. They not only had maps of the communities they were attacking, but they also brought trucks and vehicles with weapons, gear, and other capabilities. In Beeri, we saw one terrorist pick-up truck with a “technical” machine gun setup on the back. The gun has been removed. The terrorists even removed spare tires in order to light them on fire to burn buildings in the communities.

The goal of the terrorists in several places was to seize buildings take hostages and entrench themselves. Others took hostages back to Gaza, others massacred people. It took time to kill the terrorists in Beeri. Now numerous buildings have been destroyed, partially burned, and ripped apart, like a tornado had come through here and left a path of destruction. But this was not a natural disaster, this was a human-caused disaster.  

Israel believes this will be a long war. Many questions remain about the response at the border. The battalions that were stationed here paid a heavy price and had many heroes who stood against the enemy. However, they needed more support and lessons must be learned about this response.

Seth J. Frantzman, Ph.D., is the author of “Drone Wars: Pioneers, Killing Machines, Artificial Intelligence and the Battle for the Future.” He has more than 15 years of experience covering conflict and security issues in the Middle East, as a correspondent and analyst, and is an adjunct fellow at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).

Israel’s military leadership faced heightened public scrutiny this week after a string of damaging revelations in the Israeli media and The New York Times suggested that senior officers had ignored or dismissed intelligence reports about the likelihood of a major Hamas attack.

According to those reports, the Israeli military obtained a copy of a battle plan that Hamas ultimately used during its Oct. 7 attack on Israel, but officers wrongly judged that Hamas would be unable to carry it out. A commander also dismissed a subordinate’s warning in July that the group was running drills and building the capacity to set the plan in motion.

The news raised expectations among political commentators that, after the war ends, senior military and security chiefs will either resign or be fired over the intelligence failures.

Supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seized upon the reports, using the allegations of military failure to deflect from accusations that Mr. Netanyahu was himself partly to blame for what many Israelis consider the country’s worst security failure in 50 years.

Still, the revelations did not immediately lead to major public outcry: Analysts say that it has been obvious to Israelis since the opening hours of the Oct. 7 attack, which killed an estimated 1,200 people and led to the abduction of roughly 240 others, that the assault was the result, at least in part, of catastrophic intelligence failures.

While the war is still going, many Israelis are also focused on maintaining a united front against Hamas.

“I’m closing my eyes to these questions for now,” said Ayelet Samerano, whose son, Yonatan, was shot by Palestinian gunmen and taken to Gaza on Oct. 7. Israel is engaged in an “existential war,” she said in a phone interview. “I believe we’ll learn all the answers — after the war.”

Many Jewish Israelis are also reluctant to blame the military, a vaunted institution that is central to their identity: it is a melting pot in which most Jewish Israelis serve as conscripts, and which they consider a sacred national project that is essential to defending their state.

Opinion polling indicates that, even after the attack, trust in the military remains high. A survey conducted in mid-October found that 87 percent of Jewish Israelis interviewed said they trusted the Israeli military, slightly higher than in June.

The attack shattered a central part of the Israeli social contract: the idea that — within living memory of the Holocaust — the army could keep its citizens safer than Jews who live abroad.

As the military struggled to repel the attack on Oct. 7, residents of the villages targeted by Hamas repeatedly spoke of their shock at being left defenseless by the military, according to scores of text messages shared by survivors with The Times.

“Where is the army???” one survivor wrote on the morning of Oct. 7.

But that shock has not yet translated into widespread public protest against Israel’s political and military leadership, including Mr. Netanyahu, said Eran Etzion, a former deputy national security adviser.

Thousands of would-be protesters are also currently engaged in reserve duty across the country, Mr. Etzion added.

“Don’t be fooled — the rage is there. It’s just a question of when it will ignite,” he said. “The idea is we’ll fight first, and then we’ll take to the streets.”

Public anger has also been blunted by the military’s willingness to own its mistakes in a more direct manner than Mr. Netanyahu. The prime minister said last month that he has questions to answer after the war is over, but has not accepted responsibility for any failures.

By contrast, Israel’s military intelligence chief, Aharon Haliva, said in a statement published 10 days after the attack that he took “full responsibility for the failure.”

After the reports surrounding the Hamas battle plan began trickling out this week, the military’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, promised “fundamental and deep investigations.”

“The Israeli military, and within it the military intelligence directorate, failed in the Oct. 7 events,” General Halevi said in a speech. “I have not yet met a commander in the Israel Defense Forces since the start of this war who I did not see bearing a heavy sense of responsibility.”

The outlets that reported on the intelligence failures included Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster; Channel 12, a private broadcaster; and Haaretz, a left-leaning daily.

The Times’s investigation built on the work of those outlets, which had variously reported that intelligence officials had been aware of Hamas’s plans far in advance and that analysts had raised warnings earlier this year.

The Times gained access to those plans and described them in greater detail. The Times also reviewed a previously unreported military assessment, and other undisclosed parts of an extensive encrypted email thread in which military officials debated the significance of the plans.

Benny Gantz, a centrist minister who joined the government after the war began, echoed the sentiment that accountability would come later.

“There will be time for criticism, there will be time for investigations. Now, we must fight and win,” he said in a statement on Sunday.

The U.S. government also tried to ease pressure on Israel’s leadership.

Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state, said in a briefing on Friday that there would be “plenty of opportunity for a full accounting of what happened on Oct. 7, including looking back to see what happened, who knew what when, and Israel has been very clear about that.”

But Mr. Blinken added: “Right now, the focus is on making sure that they can do everything possible to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”

Nevertheless, as Mr. Netanyahu and other political leaders maneuver in expectation of a state inquiry after the war, supporters of Mr. Netanyahu have seized on the military’s errors.

Particular blame has been cast on the head of military intelligence, Mr. Haliva.

“What a failure by the army, especially by Aharon Haliva,” wrote Eli Zipori, a prominent pro-Netanyahu pundit, in a social media post. “How is this man still in the army?”

Earlier in the war, Mr. Netanyahu attempted to deflect criticism of his leadership by saying, in a social media post, that military leaders had failed to warn him of an imminent Hamas attack. Following criticism, he deleted the post and apologized for his comment.

Analysts say that these moves by Mr. Netanyahu and his supporters have helped dampen wider criticism of the military leadership: The prime minister’s critics are wary of anything that would allow Mr. Netanyahu himself to escape accountability.

The broadsides by Mr. Netanyahu’s supporters against the military leadership constituted “an act that stoops to a new low,” Ben Caspit, a biographer and critic of Mr. Netanyahu, wrote this week in a column for Maariv, a right-leaning newspaper.

“It isn’t going to absolve Netanyahu of his responsibility,” Mr. Caspit wrote, adding: “He is the prime minister and he bears overarching responsibility for security. He personally said as much on dozens of occasions.”

Some political commentators were predicting that Mr. Haliva, the military intelligence chief, will be among those who eventually pay the price for the failures.

Mr. Haliva, “will remove his uniform immediately after the war,” predicted Yossi Yehoshua, a military correspondent for Yediot Ahronot, a centrist Israeli newspaper.

“The Israeli military has to ask itself candidly how to prevent preconceptions from blinding the eyes of the wise,” Mr. Yehoshua added.

After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack that initially overpowered Israeli defenses, Israeli military intelligence established a “devil’s advocate” department tasked with challenging conventional wisdom inside the intelligence establishment.

But on Oct. 7, that department “definitely failed,” according to Tamir Hayman, a former head of military intelligence.

“There was a failure to properly assess the enemy and a belief that Hamas was deterred,” Mr. Hayman said in an public discussion broadcast by the Institute for National Security Studies, a research group in Tel Aviv.

“In the future, there are going to be a lot of accusations, allegations, criticism, and division — it cannot be avoided,” Mr. Hayman added.