This is the fourth part of a four-part newsletter.
Fifty years and one day after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, Hamas jihadi terrorist invaded from Gaza on October 7, 2023, murdering, raping, burning and kidnapping Israeli kibbutz members and farmers. For many Israelis, Hamas’ choice of that date had significant and deeper meaning, and those historical parallels are troubling. Our fourth newsletter in this four-part series looks at a some of the October 2023 events, in parallel to similar events which occurred during the October 1973 Yom Kippur War (as described in Part Two of our newsletter), and draws some conclusions.
“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous” (Albert Einstein)
- An Arabic proverb: “rabu sudfat khayr min ‘alf miead” “رب صدفة خير من ألف ميعاد” ; “A coincidence is better than a thousand appointments.”
- “For an old spy and codebreaker like myself, nothing in the world happens by coincidence” (Malcolm Nance, a thirty year veteran US Navy terrorism intelligence collector, code breaker, and interrogator with wide-ranging field and combat experience in the Middle East, South West Asia, and Africa)
- “Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.’” (the James Bond movie ‘Goldfinger’, 1959)
On October 7 2023 Israel suffered both a surprise military attack and an intelligence failure of stunning proportions, unparalleled since its near-defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Hamas’s leaders chose to start this war on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War – the last time Israel was caught sleeping. They know their history. Both wars began with a surprise attack on a Jewish holy day. In 1973 it was on Yom Kippur. In 2023 it was on Simchat Torah, a Jewish festival rejoicing over the giving of the Mosaic Covenant. Unlike the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, where the vast majority of casualties and prisoners of war were military personnel, in this attack over 800 civilians and over 350 IDF soldiers were killed. Over 250 were taken hostage – including women, children, and the elderly – to unimaginable terror-prisons in Gaza.
Beating swords into ploughshares at a time of war
- “And they will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning knives” (Isaiah 2:4)
- “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears” (Joel 3:10)
Raphael Hayon, a civilian intelligence monitor of Hamas transmissions, has for years been monitoring jihadi radio communications and then alerting Israeli authorities on his findings. In the past he had prevented and thwarted many Hamas terror attacks through his diligence. In 2022-23 Raphael had identified thousands of transmissions proving with certainty the existence of Hamas training before the attack, including breaching into Israel, massacring and taking hostages. He alerted and informed IDF and senior security officials in real time, begging for them to listen and act. His warnings could have prevented the attacks if these officials had just listened. But months before October 7 2023, his surveillance license was revoked and equipment was seized by Israel’s Ministry of Communications after senior security officials grew short-tempered at his warnings. Raphael was informed that this order to shut him down “came from above.” Then, on October 7, Raphael lost 37 friends in the massacres.
In the years just prior to October 7, the IDF began to cut down the permissible sizes of all kibbutz security teams (Hebrew, kitot konenut) close to Gaza, viewing them as increasingly unnecessary in light of new technological and engineering measures that supposedly ensured the defense of the border. These security teams were even seen as a nuisance by some IDF officers. In Summer 2022, the IDF imposed new restrictions upon kibbutz members who wanted to keep their weapons in their homes. The army requiring the installation of heavy wall-lockers embedded in concrete to prevent thefts. A kibbutz member at one of these kibbutzim who is a close friend, told me that they actually had had no incidents of weapons theft on their kibbutz. Such thefts occurred mostly at army bases. The weapons possessed by kibbutznikim had neither long-range scopes nor night-vision equipment. Nevertheless, at Kibbutz Nahal Oz nearly all long weapons (rifles and sub-machine guns) were confiscated by June 2023 and stored in locked emergency-access armories (nishkiyot) – a decision carried out by local ravshatzim (rakaz bitachon shotef tzva’i; military security coordinators).
Caroline Glick’s article of December 22, 2023, ‘Rising from the ruins of a generation of Israeli doctrine’ points out how Ehud Barak’s doctrine of a smaller, smarter IDF was ultimately destructive, leading to the disaster of October 7 2023. Defanging the IDF, in retrospect, was not the smartest idea in a venomous Middle East:
- “The primary author of the ‘small and smart IDF’ doctrine was Ehud Barak, who served [1991-95] as Chief of General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces when the Berlin Wall crumbled . . . A generation of IDF Chiefs of General Staff organized around the vision of a ‘small, technological and lethal army.’ As Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brick, (retired) who served as the IDF ombudsman for 10 years, has documented, operating under the spell of Barak’s doctrine, the IDF shut down multiple reserve divisions. It cut its artillery forces by 50%. Armored brigades were shut down. The reserve force was reduced by 80% between 2003 and 2017. The non-commissioned officer corps was gutted. The bulk of the IDF budget and nearly all the U.S. military aid were diverted to the Air Force – the strategic arm of the ‘small, technological and lethal’ IDF . . . Brick’s warnings fell on deaf ears until the ‘small, smart army’ fallacy was obliterated by Hamas invaders on October 7. Israel’s multi-billion shekel ‘smart fence’ was felled by bulldozers. Its automatic response system was obliterated by RPGs. Hundreds of soldiers manning these worthless technological wonders were slaughtered or kidnapped. Everything failed.”
Benny Gantz, who once served as Minister of Defense (2020-22) and Chief of General Staff (2011-15), spoke warmly of the ‘small and smart’ doctrine: “The purpose of [these changes] was to create a smaller yet deadlier army, capable of confronting non-state adversaries in complex environments and on multiple fronts . . . The ability to be a smaller yet deadlier military depends primarily on the ability to obtain accurate intelligence, process and analyze it effectively, and transfer it to the combat forces in real time.” (‘The Transformation of the Israel Defense Forces’; Avi Jager, Naval War College Review; International Institute for Counter-Terrorism; Volume 74, Number 2, Spring 2021).
The above-mentioned article from 2021 speaks prophetically about what Israel is experiencing in its current war with Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Yemen:
- In the summer of 2015, the IDF launched the Gideon multi-year plan (GMYP) under General Gantz to shrink, modernize, and reform the Israeli military to meet the asymmetric, nonstate adversary threats that now were prioritized over its traditional state-on-state warfare mission. The IDF cut combat and noncombat forces alike and across both active and reserve military formations. The IDF standing army was instructed to cut 10 percent of the commissioned and warrant officer posts and reduce their total number from 45,000 to 40,000 troops. The implications of this transformation for Israel’s security and military preparedness are potentially severe. Hamas and Hezbollah have kept developing new ways to challenge Israel actively, which has responded principally by developing defensive measures to protect against these new threats rather than engaging with the sources of those threats offensively. Nonetheless, contending with the existential threats Israeli security experts foresee on the horizon – a multifront war with hundreds of thousands of missiles and rockets targeting Israeli population centers – could require deploying ground forces to capture areas in the Gaza Strip, southern Lebanon, Syria, and perhaps even Iraq and Iran. Since the IDF ground forces have been reduced, deprioritized, and neglected, they will encounter much greater difficulty achieving those objectives. Because the IDF reduced and deprioritized its conventional fighting forces over the past decade, it is reasonable to conclude that the IDF is not sufficiently prepared to contend with this worst-case scenario and contemporary existential threats to Israel.
“Potentially severe” outcomes on the battlefield
Israeli and international military commentators all agree that the IDF was surprised and unprepared – not battle-ready – for the Hamas invasion on October 7 2023. This can be seen by its response (or lack of response) in the following areas on that day. The IDF:
- did not jump to defend the penetration points in the security fence
- did not interdict the bulldozers busy dismantling IDF border installations and the security fence
- did not shell or block Hamas penetration points, either on the first or second wave
- did not shoot Hamas paragliders out of the sky
- did not send tanks or APC reinforcements to the front
- did not engage in real-time pursuit of the abductees – by foot, by car or by motorcycle
- did not enter Kibbutz Nir Oz which was burned and almost completely destroyed until it was abandoned by Hamas
The IDF’s initial response to Hamas’ invasion gave the impression that Israel had no actionable intelligence, no planes, no APCs, no more than 600 hundred of soldiers available – and only one helicopter – for nearly the whole first day, while kibbutz residents were raped, tortured, burned alive, slaughtered and kidnapped.
Three huge missile-detecting balloons (‘zeppelins’ in Hebrew) which normally hover above the Strip were disabled and needing repair on the morning of Saturday October 7. The balloon at Kibbutz Nahal OZ offered a deep view into Gaza, and was intended to be operational 24/7. “The balloon in Nahal Oz didn’t work and no-one was stressed. They were told it would be fixed on Sunday,” said Mr. Ben Shitrit.
According to Alon Davidi, the Mayor of Sderot (a town in the Negev near Gaza) who was interviewed on Channel 14 on December 1, 2024 and who saw the SMS instructions referred to with his own eyes, SHABAK operatives were sent texted orders from SHABAK HQ on October 7 in the morning telling them to stay home. This was also the testimony of the father of SHABAK operative Michael ben Moshe’s father, available for viewing on the above-referenced link.
At 05:30 am on the morning of October 7 2023 (one hour before the Hamas invasion began), members of the IDF Golani infantry brigades were preparing to do a jeep patrol along the Israeli side of the fence something done before dawn every morning. But suddenly they were instructed by their superiors to delay the patrol and stand down, because of a hot threat of anti-tank missiles, three of them told the BBC. “There was a warning. It was forbidden to go up the route next to the fence,” one recalls. Golani soldier, 21-year-old Shimon Malka, said such a warning was unusual but not unheard of, so they gave it little thought. As a result, there were no IDF Golani soldiers present on that road when Hamas Nukhba terrorists broke through one hour later.
The Hamas invasion
For at least a year prior to October 7 2023, Hamas spies were on the job: Gazan workers were sent into in Israel as day laborers to spy on kibbutzim, developing a huge bank of intelligence details which were then used to facilitate Hamas’ rape and slaughter of those same Israelis. These details were found in the intelligence manuals of Hamas terrorists killed by IDF forces on October 7. They contained intricate battle plans, including detailed maps of military bases and civilian towns, extensive lists of weaponry and equipment used by each of the IDF and kibbutz units, and checklists for killing and capturing men, women and children. Instructions were given to kill hostages if they proved too much trouble. One document included a list of phrases transliterated from Arabic to Hebrew, including “Take your pants off,” “We will kill the hostages,” and “How do you use the weapon?” Another pamphlet stated: “Your [Jewish] enemy is a disease which has no cure other than to cut out their livers and their hearts.”
The Hamas terrorists would come in three waves. The first well-armed wave struck at 29 points along the border, neutralizing observation towers using drones, and then penetrating into Israel on motorbikes.
‘Operation 402’ was the military name for the Hamas attack order against Kibbutz Nahal Oz that left 15 residents dead and eight kidnapped. Next to the kibbutz was the Nahal OZ IDF base. Hamas’ attack on the base began with rocket fire, quickly followed by drone strikes, and then invasion by 70 Nukhba fighters coming from four directions, with many more Gazan joining in as the morning went on. There were instructions taken from Hamas’ invasion manual: “The mobilized and reduced platoon from the third company in the fourth battalion will attack Nahal Oz kibbutz. It will cause as many casualties as possible, take hostages, and position itself inside the kibbutz – until further instructions are received.” Section 3 of the plan includes a table detailing the time in which members of the third company are supposed to complete the route from the Gazan city of Shuja’iyya to the kibbutz. “Distance of the advance route between the exit point and the target – 3,050 metres. Average speed of the group’s advance towards the target – 65 km (40 m) per hour. Travel time to reach the target from when the order is received – 2:08 minutes.”
According to the battle order, the raiding force on Nahal Oz included 27 terrorists. The force would advance towards the target on 14 off-road motorcycles, moving in two columns. An additional motorcycle, on which the commander and driver would ride, would be positioned in the middle of the convoy. The order even specified the name of the commander’s driver – Bilal Abu Kanuna. The navigators who led the force were also mentioned by name. A man named Mohammed Hamto was described as a ‘media photographer.’ The manual stated that “photos will be taken using head cameras and phones, in addition to the presence of a media photographer” so that Hamas could live-broadcast the atrocities it was committing to the world.
Hamas’ Shuja’iyya battalion infiltrated Nahal Oz quickly. By 7:00 am, terrorist fire was reported inside the kibbutz. According to IDF estimates, approximately 100 terrorists entered the kibbutz. Only after six and a half hours would the first IDF forces arrive at the kibbutz gate to clear it of terrorists. At the moment of invasion, only two members of the kibbutz emergency response team had long guns. The rest of the weapons were stored in the kibbutz’s armory four months earlier.
Shortly before 08:00 am an Israeli drone, the Hermes 450 (also known as the Zik), arrived, but it had difficulty distinguishing between Israeli soldiers and Hamas terrorists, according to the IDF account.
At about 09:00 am, IDF Sayeret Golani headed to the IDF base’s dining room where the IDF tatzpitaniyot (tower-based observers) had told them most of the Hamas gunmen were located. More than three hours after the attack had begun, at 09:45 am, an IDF helicopter fired into the base 12 times in an attempt to strike the Nukhba terrorists.
Only at 11:00 am did the IDF MAGLAN recon unit receive an order to make their way to Nahal Oz, encountering many Hamas ambushes set on the way. According to the kibbutz emergency response team member Meyerowitz, MAGLAN arrived in Nahal Oz only after 1:30 PM. “At 1:30 PM, we received a message on the radio that forces were arriving.” In the following two days, the army continued to eliminate terrorists in the kibbutz area and repel infiltration attempts by additional terrorists. MAGLAN and Sayeret Givati were later joined by a force from Golani’s 13th Battalion, and starting from the afternoon of October 8, this combined force of about 100 fighters began to systematically go through all the kibbutz houses, clearing them of terrorists. Only on the evening of October 9, two and a half days after the start of the attack, did these Israeli special forces fighters leave the kibbutz.
Amazing exploits of Golani bravery and courage as they retook another kibbutz, Nir Am, can be viewed at: https://www.710360.kan.org.il/en/nir-am/nir-am. Seventy Golani soldiers fell in these first three days of battle here.
Hamas terrorists penetrated beyond the first line of contact (IDF bases and rapid-response kibbutz units) and crossed into the second line – border communities. Terrorists with semi-automatic sub-machine guns attacked Israeli police stations in Sderot and Ofakim. Approximately 54 police were killed in those clashes. After an hour or so, other units of paratroops and commandos arrived at these towns, including the LOTAR, Duvdevan and YASAM (police) counter-terror units, Shayetet 13 (Navy Seals), Shaldag and Sayeret Matkal (Israel’s Delta Force).
Just after 07:00 am, Hamas jihadis attacked at the Nova music festival, ferociously raping and murdering 364 young people in attendance and wounding hundreds. The massacre at the festival was the largest terror attack in Israel’s history, and the worst Israeli civilian massacre ever. Forty young people attending the festival were taken hostage by Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Four of these hostages were later rescued; 5 were released; 13 bodies were recovered; 18 are still being held in exceedingly cruel conditions in Hamas tunnels in Gaza.
At Kibbutz Be’eri, the largest in the Eshkol Regional Council abutting Gaza, 132 out of 1,071 were murdered that day by Hamas terrorists.
At 9:00 am, a 14-member team from the elite IDF Shaldag unit, was quickly overwhelmed and retreated back to Kibbutz Be’eri’s entrance. At 1:00 pm a squad of Shaldag soldiers returned, accompanied by a Sayeret Matkal unit. At 2:00 pm, a team of Hamas terrorists surrounded the rapid-response team, and the pilot of a fighter helicopter informed the team that he didn’t have permission to fire inside the kibbutz. Only at 6:30 pm, IDF troops finally arrived at the kibbutz medical clinic, where there were only two survivors. Avital, one of those two, explained: “Five hundred IDF soldiers were outside [the kibbutz], organized, with dogs, with equipment, weapons, and armored vehicles; they were standing outside and not a single one of them is doing anything. I remember shouting at them from the stretcher, ‘They’re slaughtering us! Go in! Save us!’ and none of them looked at me, none of them said anything. They kept repeating, ‘The field isn’t sterile, the field isn’t sterile!’” [i.e., they were saying that there may still be some terrorists roaming freely on the kibbutz grounds].
When in doubt, read the directions
Henry Kissinger once commented, “Sadat, in fact, paralyzed his opponents with their own preconceptions.”
Israel’s most serious underlying problem in this war deals with false preconceptions about Islam and Hamas: Israel’s intelligence, political and military mavens ignored Hamas’ foundational Islamist beliefs – that Israel is an illegitimate entity whose very existence must be extinguished and its citizens killed. The unappetizing reality is that it is the primacy of Islamist and jihadi ideology which carries the day – for Hamas, for the vast majority of Gazans, for Arabs living in the West Bank, and for many Arabs in Israel as well. Israel’s leadership did not show proper analysis of the Islamist and jihadi nature of Hamas, believing instead that Hamas could be bought off through economic benefits. Hamas willingly played along with Israel, distracting and deceiving the Jewish state’s leaders into what Martin Sherman of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies describes as “a hallucinatory pipe dream.”
This deception was as addictive as heroin to Israeli and American diplomats:
- Only six days before Saturday’s attack, according to The New York Times, Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, said in a radio interview, “Hamas is very, very restrained and understands the implications of further defiance.”
- A week before Hamas invaded Israel, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told The Atlantic, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
- This blinded optimism seems to reflect a joint U.S.-Israeli policy that sought the normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab world through a pseudo-rapprochement with Saudi Arabia. This basic assumption is similarly held by many European diplomats.
Hamas’ commitment to jihad is more important to them than their own pressing economic needs. At a 2017 meeting between Yahya Sinwar (Hamas’s then leader) and Gazan students, Sinwar vowed that Hamas would only disarm when “Satan enters paradise” and that “there’s not one minute of the day or night when we aren’t building up our military might.” He stated openly: “The discussion is not about recognizing Israel but about wiping it out.” For Hamas, Islamist jihadi ideology trumps economics. But the secular leaders of SHABAK, AMAN and the IDF did not have room in their worldview for recognizing the intractable enmity that motivates much of the Arab populations in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, and even in Israel proper.
- During the Yom Kippur War and during the current Swords of Iron Hamas-Israel war, high-quality AMAN SIGINT (signals intelligence), HUMINT (field observations) and VISINT (visual intelligence) have been ignored.
- AMAN’s Research and Analysis Department (RAD) leadership, in both wars, exhibited analytical over-confidence and arrogance, and were unreceptive to contrarian assessments.
- Understanding Arab cultures and Islamic religious perspectives – these have been one of the major challenges facing Israeli intelligence since its early days in the 1950’s. Cultural intelligence is as important today as it was in 1973.
- The ‘human factor’ – groupthink, cognitive closure, over-confidence, arrogance, lack of moral courage in the face of hierarchy – these dynamics were alive and well in 1973 and also in our day. Expressing moral courage was once a cornerstone of Israeli intelligence and politics, especially in the face of a resistant hierarchy.
Here is a closing comment from Moshe Ya’alon – formerly commander of Sayeret Matkal, OC of AMAN, Chief of General Staff and Minister of Defense. In the past he was a watchman concerning the long-term threat of radical jihadi Islam.
- “At a certain point, I told [then U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry] and his staff, ‘You remind me of someone going to see the same movie for the third time thinking, “This time, there will be a happy end” but that is not going to happen’. I told Kerry, ‘You do not appreciate the chasm involved. You think it is a matter of territory and so on. But that is not the issue. From their perspective, there is no place for a Jewish state in this part of the world. You Americans come here from another world. You talk about “the occupation” and the 1967 war and so on, but for the Palestinians it’s all about 1948. Where did the enmity towards us come from? From 1967? Even Fatah was formed before then, in 1965. The hatred towards us and the Zionist movement started in the 19th century. In other words, if you do not understand the diagnosis, how can you come up with a treatment plan?’ I realized the significance of the Americans’ stance in pushing for permanent agreements. I called them ‘misconceptions’.”
How should we then pray?
- Pray for revelation and courage to be given to Israel’s leaders in political, intelligence and military spheres – to understand and counteract strategies against Israel, the apple of God’s eye (Zechariah 2:8)
- Pray for the protection of Israeli and Jewish people from the assaults of jihadi terror organizations and Western fellow-travelers
- Pray for the return of the Jewish people to both the Land and the Messiah of Israel
- Pray for the physical rescue of the approximately 44 to 50 living Israeli hostages (including babies) kidnapped by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and PFLP/PLO. At this moment some of these hostages are being tortured, raped and starved (this based on testimonies of recently released hostages). Sadly, over 100 of all Israeli hostages are dead; Hamas is holding on to their corpses as cold storage bargaining chips
- Pray for the raising up of Ezekiel’s prophetic Jewish army throughout the earth
Your prayers and support hold up our arms and are the very practical enablement of God to us in the work He has called us to do.
In Messiah Yeshua,
Avner Boskey
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