This is the third 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 citizens – kibbutz members and farmers, children and pensioners. For many Israelis, Hamas’ choice of that date had significant and deeper meaning, and those historical parallels are troubling. Our third 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 our Part Two of our newsletter).
Chariots at the Walls of Jericho
Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah (حركة المقاومة الإسلامية ; Arabic for ‘The Islamic Resistance Movement’) is known world-wide by its acronym HAMAS (حماس; Arabic for ‘zeal’, ‘strength’ or ‘bravery’). This Sunni jihadi movement makes war according to the principles laid down in its December 1987 Charter. Here are some excerpts:
- “The Platform of The Islamic Resistance Movement [ed., Hamas]: Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors . . . Leaving the circle of conflict with Israel is a major act of treason and it will bring a curse on its perpetrators . . . In order to face the usurpation of Palestine by the Jews, we have no escape from raising the banner of Jihad . . . We must imprint on the minds of generations of Muslims that the Palestinian problem is a religious one, to be dealt with on this premise: ‘I swear by that who holds in His Hands the Soul of Muhammad! I indeed wish to go to war for the sake of Allah! I will assault and kill, assault and kill, assault and kill’”.
Hamas’ long-range strategy is twofold: the total destruction of the state of Israel and its Jewish population; and its transformation into an Islamist ‘caliphate’ dictatorship and a jihadi base. Hamas’ terror activities have progressed from individual kidnappings/murders of IDF soldiers to mass suicide bombings of civilians (like the 2002 Passover Seder massacre at the Park Hotel in Netanya). The October 7 2023 mass attack on Israeli kibbutzim, farms and towns was an attenuated ‘jump into hyperspace’ for the terrorist group, revealing how their jihadi reach has accelerated over the years.
Hamas’ plans in the years before the October 7 attacks (documents discovered in January 2024 in Khan Yunis by IDF Special Forces operating in Gaza) involved blowing up the 70-story Moshe Aviv Tower and the Azrieli Mall complex (both of which are near a large shopping complex and train station) in central Tel Aviv. Electronic records and papers recovered from Hamas command centers in Gaza included a 59-page document and a 36-slide presentation. More than 17,000 photographs were found, from satellite images to drone photographs and social media postings. These included Israeli airbase diagrams and flight patterns of commercial aircraft. An accompanying Arabic text said: “If this tower is destroyed in one way or another, an unprecedented crisis will occur for the enemy, similar to the crisis of the World Trade Center towers in New York.” Hamas plans included using a three-man horse-drawn chariot to transport explosives all the way to the Azrieli Towers on existing train tracks. A letter was found there, written by Hamas head Yahya Sinwar in 2021, appealing to several senior Iranian officials for financial and military support and promising that, with Iran’s help, the terror group would be able to destroy Israel within two years.
But even more solemn was a ‘smoking gun’ intelligence document, code-named ‘Homot Yericho’ (Hebrew for ‘The Walls of Jericho’) by AMAN (Israeli Military Intelligence). This document came into Israeli hands (according to unauthorized intelligence leaks through Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman) before May 2022 – one full year before the October 2023 Hamas massacre-pogrom and six months before the January 2024 discoveries mentioned above. In May 2022 the document was briefed to AMAN officers and the IDF Southern Command. In July 2022, the AMAN officer for the Gaza Division gave a briefing on the document to senior IDF leaders titled ‘The Mass Invasion Plan of Hamas.’ The presentation laid out down to the exact details what would be Hamas’ order of battle on October 7 2023 and stated: “This invasion constitutes the gravest threat that IDF forces are facing in the defense” of Israel.
“Surprise them through the gate” (Quran, Surah al-Ma’idah 23)
Hamas titled this 40 page document “Surprise them through the gate!” – a Quranic quote originally spoken by two high-ranking military leaders in Mohammed’s entourage:
- Two men from among those who feared [Allah], upon whom Allah had bestowed His favor, said, “Enter upon them [surprise them by sudden attack] through the gate. For when you have entered it, you will be victorious. And rely upon Allah if you are believers” (Quran, Surah al-Ma’idah 23)
Hamas applied this Quranic quote to their invasion strategy – a concerted attack by over 3,000 jihadi terrorists through impromptu crossing points along the Israeli security fence bordering Gaza. The document intimated that the attack would take place on a Jewish holiday or on the Sabbath, and that Hamas would drop explosives from drones and paragliders (as well as concentrated sniper fire) to knock out security cameras and communications towers before attacking 22 kibbutzim and other farms, as well as military bases. This would come simultaneously with a heavy and extended barrage of Qassam rockets. Terrorists would blow holes in the fences with explosives, and bulldozers would rip through the IDF’s 20 foot high (six metres) double-fence barrier at approximately 30 points along the 65 km (40-mile) border. Goals also included hitting military bases in Rehovot and Beersheva. The attempts to reach Rehovot and Beersheva were thwarted by the extreme bravery of Israeli special ops police unit YAMAM near the Yad Mordechai junction.
In the year prior to the October 7 attack, Hamas exercised excellent OPSEC (operational security), thwarting many Israeli attempts to monitor Hamas terror developments. All jihadi communications were hand-carried by Hamas couriers, and contact between units were highly compartmentalized. Israeli SIGINT was mostly blind to war preparations, much of this due to Hamas’ tradecraft and use of underground tunnels which thwarted real-time VISINT (visual intelligence)
Sergeant ‘V,’ a non-commissioned officer in AMAN Unit 8200, gave a burning warning on September 19 2023 in an e-mail to the intelligence director of IDF’s Gaza Division and other senior intelligence officers. She prefaced it with a quote from an apocalyptic Hebrew prophet: “Then the word of YHVH came to me, saying . . . When I bring armed attackers upon a land, and the people of the land take one man from among themselves and appoint him for them as a lookout, and he sees the army coming upon the land, and he sounds the shofar and warns the people, and whoever hears the sound of the shofar and does not take heed, and the army comes and takes him, his blood will be upon his own head. He heard the sound of the shofar and did not take heed” (Ezekiel 33:1-5). Here is her conclusion:
- “Hamas’s training shows us that the ‘Jericho Wall’ plan is an operative, practiced plan, meaning that Hamas already has forces that have practiced these outlines and know how to implement when the order comes . . . The other side is determined in its intentions to carry out its plan. If the plan is implemented – painful and difficult fighting is expected . . . It is no longer a plan only on paper . . . [My] email constitutes a blowing of the shofar, because the sword is coming – the hour is ripe to warn the nation.”
A senior AMAN officer (with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel; in Hebrew ‘Sgan Aluf’) responded to Sergeant V’s warnings with the terse comment: “It sounds imaginary to me.” The scornful epithets “aspirational” and “totally imaginative” were also added as a withering critique of Sergeant V’s warnings. Sergeant ‘V’ estimated that Hamas had a target of taking 200-250 Israeli hostages; the actual number of hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 was 251.
Two months before the surprise attack, an AMAN agent in Gaza reported back to Israel, with a ‘very high’ reliability level, that Hamas was planning “a major move in the week after Yom Kippur.” Senior AMAN officials remarked: “Focusing on one specific piece of news or another does not reflect the intelligence picture at the time.” They added: “If this really nears implementation, we’ll receive additional intelligence.” This bothersome report was buried, and it was not passed up the chain of command.
Ronen Bar, the head of SHABAK (Israel’s internal security agency) said in a post-October 7 internal memo to service personnel and their families: “Despite a series of actions we carried out, unfortunately, we were unable to generate a sufficient warning that would allow the attack to be thwarted. As the one who heads the organization, the responsibility for this is mine.” On April 22, 2024, Major-General (in Hebrew ‘Aluf’) Aharon Haliva who was head of AMAN, handed in a resignation letter, stating: “The intelligence directorate under my command did not live up to the task we were entrusted with.”
“Who have eyes to see but do not see” (Jeremiah 5:21)
Like the ‘konseptzia’ (conceptual) blindness in October 1973 (as described in Part Two of our newsletter), much of AMAN’s leadership (and that includes the IDF as well, since AMAN is a sub-division of the IDF) misinterpreted and disregarded the huge amount of solid intelligence about Hamas coming its way. This involved the areas of HUMINT (human intelligence), VISINT (visual intelligence), IMINT (image, balloon and satellite intelligence), and OSINT (open-source intelligence) over an extended period of time. Here is a very partial list of examples:
All along the border with Gaza stand IDF watchtowers, where female surveillance soldiers watch over Israel’s security. They are called tatzpitanaiyot in Hebrew. In the weeks before October 7, they reported near-daily drilling by uniformed Hamas top commando unit – the Nukhba (‘elite’ in Arabic) Force. They reported Hamas practicing attacks on models of kibbutz residences, military observation posts, and a replica of an IDF Merkava tank. The tatzpitanaiyot reported that Hamas drones were flying daily along the fence, and that the drone paths demonstrated advance knowledge of camera locations. These hidden cameras had been previously installed by the IDF, using Israeli Arab workers who unfortunately had passed on specific high-security information about camera locations to Hamas. Most IDF surveillance soldiers reported an increase in suspicious activity. Former tatzpetanit Roni Lifshitz spoke of regular patrols of vehicles full of Hamas fighters driving around for months before October 7, which would stop to watch posts on the other side of the fence – “talking, pointing at the cameras and the fence, taking pictures.” Roni identified them by their uniforms as being from Hamas’ elite Nukhba Force – the leading attack force on October 7. A BBC article of interviews with tatzpitanaiyot quoted from a unit WhatsApp group from the base adjacent to Kibbutz Nahal Oz. One wrote: “What, there is another event?” She was immediately answered by her friend’s voice message: “Girl, where’ve you been? We’ve had one every day for the past two weeks!”
The tatzpitanaiyot reports were validated by signals intelligence (SIGINT). In July 2023, a non-commissioned officer (NCO) in Unit 8200, AMAN’s SIGINT and cyber warfare unit, reported that multiple Nukhba battalions were conducting twice-weekly drills, with the apparent objective being planned – to seize kibbutzim across the border. Her assessment was sober: “This is a plan designed to start a war . . . They are training, with large forces, for a big event. This is preparation for the real thing.” Their warnings were not taking seriously, nor were they passed up the chain of command. Indeed, the tatzpitanaiyot were threatened with punishment, including jail time, by their superior officers if they persisted in their warnings.
Nearly two years before all this, in 2021-22 AMAN decided to downgrade its SIGINT coverage of Gaza, reducing personnel and pausing collection of intelligence overnight and on weekends. AMAN’s SIGINT Unit 8200 stopped intercepting communications from Hamas walkie-talkies “because they saw it as a waste of effort.” On October 7 2023 dead Hamas attackers were found with these same walkie-talkies, which they had used to coordinate the assault.
On October 3 2023, less than four days before Hamas’ jihadi onslaught, AMAN Unit 8200 gave a 90-minute briefing to visiting AMAN head Aharon Haliva but failed to mention any of the intelligence warnings from the tatzpitanaiyot.
Just 6 hours before the October 7 attack started, close to midnight on Oct. 6, SHABAK picked up electronic signals that hundreds of Hamas Nukhba members were activating Israeli SIM cards for their cell phones. In a highly secret operation, it seems that SHABAK had managed to plant those SIM cards on a HAMAS contact some time before, in the hopes of striking an intelligence ‘gold mine.’ According to senior former officials in SHABAK’s Southern Division, “Nukhba members told us during their [pre-October 7] interrogations, that when there’s a drill that includes the activation of SIM cards, they receive instructions to go to a mosque. They go to the mosque without their personal phones, then descend into the tunnel to stock up, so they have no signal for several hours or even days. From that moment, they can’t report what’s happening – whether it’s a drill or a real attack – and therefore, our working assumption was that once the SIM cards are activated, we must be on high alert.” For SHABAK, therefore, the activation of the SIM cards was “a clear sign of war, even without any additional suspicious signs.”
But SHABAK was still uncertain, due to other recent similar scenarios which had turned out to be false alarms. Some SHABAK personnel declared that this was only a Hamas preparation for a limited infiltration attack. SHABAK’s working assumption up to that point was that the SIMs were intended for a much more limited scenario: an infiltration of a few small squads, maybe 10-20 terrorists, at two or three points along the fence.
After hearing of the SIM card activations, SHABAK head Ronen Bar rushed to his Tel Aviv HQ in Ramat HaSharon, near Park HaYarkon.
At 2:58 am on October 7, SHABAK sent an alert to AMAN, the Mossad, and the Israeli police, mentioning the activation of the SIM cards: “So far, we have no information on the nature of the activity. However, it should be noted that these are unusual activities, and given other suspicious signs, it could indicate an offensive action by Hamas.” At 03:21 am, the deputy head of AMAN called up Aharon Haliva (head of AMAN) and informed him of SHABAK’s alert, which was not definitive in nature. Haliva then asked to receive further updates in the morning.
On October 7 between 03:30 and 04:00 am, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Col. Matan Feldman called IDF Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Herzi Halevi with an intelligence warning. Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi notes: “If the Chief of Staff gets up at night, it’s because we’re on the brink of an abyss. You don’t wake the COS for nothing.”
On that call were IDF Major General Southern Command Yaron Finkelman and Head of Operations Directorate Major General Oded Basyuk, as well as someone unnamed from SHABAK. No AMAN representative was on the call. Unit 8200 was out of contact at a time of extreme crisis. Because Hamas members had activated Israeli SIM cards during previous exercises which were not real attacks, it was assessed at that meeting that Hamas was merely conducting another exercise. It was decided to revisit the issue later that morning (October 7) but not to change the security posture at the border in the meantime. According to an unnamed source, none of the top army brass on that call were familiar with the ‘Walls of Jericho’ presentation or with the warnings of ‘Sergeant V,’ the NCO from Unit 8200. Both of those documents had warned of the likelihood of a full-scale Hamas invasion. Prime Minister Netanyahu was not updated about this call. His military secretary Maj. Gen. Avi Gil was only updated at 06:15 am that morning, and he called the Prime Minister only at 06:29 am, when the attack had already commenced.
Between 04:00 and 4:30 a.m., Ronen Bar (the head of SHABAK) held a situation assessment at the organization’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, attended by the heads of the various divisions. At this stage, SHABAK’s assumption was changing: they now tentatively concluded was that Hamas activities in Gaza were probably offensive, but that the jihadi invasion was expected to take place in the near future, not immediately. At around 04:00 am Bar had decided to call up SHABAK’s ‘Task Force Tequila’ team – a fast-response ‘any eventuality’ and ‘last resort’ special operations unit composed of SHABAK elite operators and the crack YAMAM unit (‘Centralized Special Police Unit’ or ‘National Counter-Terrorism Unit’) of Israel’s Border Police. The name ‘Tequila’ had been chosen for this unit, as a tongue-in-cheek reference for quick shots and rapid, significant effect. Several Tequila team members were killed fighting Hamas that morning.
At approximately 04:00 am, Nukhba terrorists were instructed to go to mosques for morning prayers. There they received precise order to report to their invasion points as of 06:00 am.
At 04:30 am IDF Operations Director Basyuk chaired a meeting to carry out army measures in accordance with COS Halevi’s guidelines. One combat helicopter and three UAVs with reconnaissance (but not offensive) capabilities were put on standby.
At 06:29 am, a massive rocket and missile barrage was unleashed from Gaza onto sleeping Israel. Simultaneously, 3,000 Gazan terrorists (and thousands of other Gazans who joined in for the pogrom) began to storm the IDF fence. Standing between them and thousands of Israeli civilians were 600 IDF soldiers and 12 Merkava tanks.
- Whereas Isaiah the prophet once exclaimed “His watchmen are blind” (Isaiah 56:10), it seems that on October 7 2023 it was mostly the watchmen’s and watchwomen’s superiors who were the blinded ones.
How should we then pray?
- Pray for Israel’s leaders to be giving divine guidance and vision in how lead the Jewish people and defeat their enemies at this time (see Elisha’s example in 2 Kings 6:8-14)
- 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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