The Untold Story of How Israel Failed on October 7
Jonathan Foreman
The Hebrew word mechdal has no precise equivalent in English. It signifies a great catastrophe for which human beings are responsible by inaction, error, or irresponsibility. The Yom Kippur War of 1973, which began when an unprepared IDF was taken by surprise by simultaneous Syrian and Egyptian attacks, has often been referred to as a mechdal. The October 7, 2023, attack was an even greater mechdal.
The more you learn about the events of that day, the more it seems that almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong. In fact, things could easily have gone far worse.
That the attacks did not kill many more people, and have a vastly more destructive effect on the State of Israel, was largely thanks to the extraordinary heroism of civilian defense teams, local police units, and small groups of soldiers who fought Hamas attacks on communities, cities, and key junctions even as nearby IDF garrisons were overrun. The thanks also goes to special-forces teams that were the first to arrive in the south in response to the invasion.
All these defenders were both outnumbered and outgunned by the Hamas Qassam Brigades that formed the majority of the invaders. (The Israeli special-forces teams that raced to the south expected to confront five- to 10-man groups of terrorist infiltrators, not to be caught up in long, intense battles against 100 or more trained infantry with a vast supply of ammunition.) Many did not survive long enough to be rescued by the Israeli army when its battalions finally arrived that afternoon.
Then came Israel’s Dunkirk-in-reverse: the heroic response of hundreds of Israelis, many of them reservists and retirees, but also active-duty soldiers who did not wait for orders but raced down to the Gaza envelope in private vehicles, rifles and pistols in hand. The fact that these volunteers were able to get so quickly to Route 232 (the sole highway to the battle zone, and the road on which so many were killed by Hamas ambush) makes the many hours it took for sizeable IDF units to get to the combat zone look all the worse.
Errors and indiscipline on the part of otherwise disturbingly impressive Hamas invasion forces also prevented deeper disaster. At least two convoys of Hamas attack trucks got lost, including the one that came upon the Nova music festival while trying to get to the city of Netivot. Some Hamas Nukhba (elite) units that were apparently instructed to penetrate deeper into Israel after overrunning nearby posts and communities chose instead to indulge in hours of looting, rape, and corpse-mutilation alongside Gazan civilians, before eventually returning to Gaza with their material and human booty.
The Blame Game. Certain Israeli institutions and individuals share particular blame for the disaster, alongside the prime minister and his cabinet, who bear ultimate responsibility by virtue of their position. Among those individuals are the men (and they were all men) then in charge of the Military Intelligence Directorate, the Shin Bet security service, the Defense Ministry, and the generals and colonels who at the time headed the IDF’s Gaza Division and Southern Command.
But responsibility for the mechdal goes much wider. While conducting interviews for a British parliamentary report on October 7, one overseen by the historian Andrew Roberts and published this March, I and a small team of researchers from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on UK-Israel, were struck by evidence of deeper unpreparedness that could not all be laid at the feet of the current administration and the current senior leadership of the military and security services. The more people we spoke to, the clearer it became that October 7 was the product of vast systemic failure. Moreover, Hamas’s shocking, murderous triumph depended as much on relatively long-term trends that had led to the decline of the IDF as a conventional army as on the disastrous failings of the intelligence community and the policies of the Netanyahu administration.
This is why the instant historical analogies of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 may be less apposite than a comparison to the British loss of Singapore to imperial Japan in February 1942. That epochal defeat—the largest in the history of the British Empire after Yorktown during the Revolutionary War—was also accompanied and followed by atrocities and war crimes against both civilians and soldiers. It was enabled by willful strategic blindness, poor planning, foolish faith in the colony’s fortifications—and, once fighting began, by the poor performance of under-trained troops badly led by their commanders at every level, followed by abject failures of coordination and communication in battle. At bottom of the failure lay an attitude toward the Japanese that hubristically combined arrogance with unmerited and ill-informed contempt for the enemy’s military capability. Every one of those factors was present in Israel’s October 7 mechdal.
Most of the early examinations of the October 7 disaster have focused on what was self-evidently a colossal Israeli intelligence failure in the days and months before the invasion, or on the missteps made on the night before Hamas struck. During that night, key officials—including the chief of defense staff, the head of IDF Southern Command, and the prime minister’s chief intelligence adviser—were all notified of worrying intelligence data from Gaza, but they either failed to pass on those warnings or failed to act on them.
The warnings that were delivered that night by the Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security service) and the army’s Military Intelligence Directorate were mostly based on “anomalies” such as the sudden activation of dozens of mobile phone SIM cards by known Hamas commanders. Neither agency suggested any kind of mobilization or said it suspected an imminent major attack of any kind, let alone one of unprecedented size—this despite an accumulation of suggestive evidence over the previous weeks and months.
The Cassandras. Much has been made of IDF commanders choosing to ignore the concerns raised by the corps of young female observers whose job it was to watch footage coming from Gaza 24 hours a day. Many of the observers were stationed at the Nahal Oz post right next to the border. (Sixteen of these Cassandras were killed and seven others kidnapped when that strategically vital but thinly fortified and poorly guarded base was overrun in the first half hour of the attack.)
It was just one instance of the reflexive refusal by senior Israeli military, intelligence, and political leaders to engage with reports from their own observers and analysts that threatened to undermine their group shibboleth—the belief that Hamas was not and could not be an existential threat. From the very top of the political tree down to the relatively junior officers who commanded the observer units on the Gaza border, adherence to this shibboleth was so ingrained that it trumped all evidence that suggested Hamas might be preparing for an attack.
That evidence was abundant and unsubtle. It was noticed on many occasions, but only by people too low in the defense hierarchy to enjoy real influence. In July 2023, less than four months before the invasion, an experienced analyst in Unit 8200, the IDF’s signals-intelligence agency, warned her superiors that Hamas had conducted a daylong training military exercise that corresponded extremely closely to the captured Hamas invasion plan code-named Jericho Wall. After her commander chose to ignore her concern, the analyst, an NCO, went over his head and sent her concerns to more-senior officers. The only result was an official reprimand. At the beginning of October, the Gaza division commander was informed that six Hamas battalions—units of 600–800 fighters each—were engaging in twice-weekly training drills. He took no action with the information. Meanwhile, the female conscripts of the Combat Intelligence Collection Corps made frequent representations to their commanders about what looked like preparations for a large-scale Hamas assault between May 2023 and the morning of the actual attack. Their warnings were dismissed as hysterical, despite the fact that the observer corps had a sterling reputation. (One now-retired battalion commander told me, “I worked with these girls when I was in the infantry and we trusted them with our lives. They were our eyes. Not trusting is so counterintuitive.”)
The fact is that Hamas hid its invasion preparations in plain sight. In Spring 2022, Hamas TV broadcast a series that dramatized a mass attack of the October 7 type in which invaders captured the Reim Military Base as well as civilian communities. The series was praised by Hamas’s Gazan leader Yahya Sinwar as “an inseparable part of what we are preparing.” In 2023, Hamas’s propaganda arm released several videos of uniformed, masked Nukhba commandos training to overrun mock-ups of nearby Israeli bases and practicing with the weapons and breaching materials they would use on October 7.
All Hamas really kept secret was the precise timing of its attack—a date that, in hindsight, looks like an obvious choice given the traditional Islamist obsession with anniversaries and the State of Israel’s 21st-century practice of essentially disarming itself on religious holidays. (It is now known that the date was decided in May 2023, Sinwar having previously considered launching the “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack during Passover of that year.)
For hundreds of senior leaders coming from all sides of the Israeli political spectrum to dismiss the increasing tempo and size of Hamas military exercises, the captured plans, and the stated desire of its leaders to bring about Israel’s complete destruction required what now looks like a quasi-religious devotion to what Israeli analysts call the intelligence community’s conceptsia. This is the Hebrew term given to the overarching strategic narrative about the conditions holding between Israel and Hamas. The pre–October 7 conceptsia held that Hamas had, for the foreseeable future, been both deterred—thanks to its battering by Israel first in 2014 and then in 2021—and co-opted. The co-optation had supposedly come thanks to a huge influx of mostly Qatari money, growing prosperity in the Strip, and what Israel chose to see as a turn by leaders like the supposedly pragmatic Yahya Sinwar away from the organization’s core destructive goal and toward the quotidian challenges of governing Gaza.
Such self-delusion would be more understandable if Israel had not spent the previous year commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War—with dozens of conferences exploring how adherence to an incorrect strategic concept combined with underestimation of Arab military capability had almost destroyed the state in 1973. In that case, the conceptsia of the time—blasted into smithereens by the 1974 Agranat Commission that felled then–Prime Minister Golda Meir and led inexorably to the election of the first conservative government in Israel’s history three years later—was a dogged assumption that Egypt would never even consider attacking Israel until it had obtained long-range bombers and Scud missiles to take out the bases of the Israeli air force (IAF).
On-the-Ground Failures. The intelligence failure that preceded and enabled the October 7 attack was so enormous that rather less attention was paid in its aftermath to the many things that went wrong on the day itself, between the rocket barrages that began at 6:29 a.m. and the arrival in the Gaza envelope of sizeable IDF formations beginning around 2:30 p.m. Still less was paid to the troubling things that the day revealed about the IDF’s doctrines and operational readiness.
But each new internal investigation and outside study has revealed previously unreported command errors, gaps in training and equipment, inattention to basic security, inadequate coordination, and unwillingness to take initiative—as well as the extraordinary depth of Israel’s intelligence failure. While there were many incidents of individual heroism on October 7, IDF units in the army posts attacked that morning did not, as a general rule, perform well or even adequately—regardless of whether they were reservists or members of regular forces such as the storied Golani Brigade.
Take the Erez Crossing and its adjacent military liaison base. The latter was overrun by a force of just 20 Hamas Nukhba commandos (a further 100 terrorists arrived later in the morning to loot, burn, and take captives). While it is clear from the abundant video footage of the attack that the Nukhba attackers were highly trained and well-equipped infantry (Iran’s IRGC has claimed credit for Hamas’s military effectiveness), the base was home to an entire company of IDF backup troops. Moreover, those soldiers had almost half an hour to prepare a defense after the pedestrian terminal at the Erez Crossing was stormed at 6:42, but they failed to do so.
It did not help that, as an IDF report has pointed out, the Erez base, like the other posts in the region, was not fortified. (It lacked fighting positions, foxholes, berms, or machine-gun posts despite sitting up against the border.) Nine soldiers were killed and three kidnapped before air force drone strikes on Hamas vehicles prompted the terrorists to leave for Gaza or other targets in the area around 8:30 a.m. Two hours later, a second larger wave of attackers arrived at the now largely abandoned base and looted it. It was only at 3 p.m. that IDF troops arrived from the north. It is worth noting that it is only an hour’s drive to the Erez Crossing from Tel Aviv, and just two and a half hours from the Lebanese border.
For all the abundant heroism shown by individual Israeli soldiers and civilians that day, there were also incidents of unprofessionalism and worse. When the Nahal Oz observation base was attacked early on October 7, a group of staff officers, though armed, chose to take no part in the desperate fighting for the base and have been accused of actually abandoning the unarmed observers in the command center. In several other border posts, quite large groups of soldiers hid from the attackers rather than take the offensive, as has long been the doctrine and practice of the IDF.
There were also astonishing failures by IDF commanders to convey vital information. It turns out that none of the IDF ground units that raced down to the Gaza envelope on October 7 were even aware of the existence of the Nova music festival, let alone the need to rescue its attendees. The nearby IDF garrisons also did not know that the Friday–Saturday rave was taking place. This despite the fact that the IDF had itself approved the party at several levels, as with all such events in the Gaza envelope. (The IDF report into the massacre at the festival, released at the beginning of April, revealed that there should have been an army liaison officer at the police command post on the site, which is not far from the divisional headquarters at Reim.)
Ironically, it now seems that Hamas was also unaware of the festival’s presence but, on discovering it and its easy targets around 8:20 a.m., dispatched additional truckloads of gunmen to the site. They overcame the 31 police officers assigned to the festival for traffic and crowd control and the small units that arrived at the site over the next hours. Together with the Palestinian civilian attackers who came from Gaza by foot, the gunmen enjoyed free rein until midday. A total of 344 festivalgoers were murdered, either at the site or while fleeing for their lives, while 44 were kidnapped to Gaza. Taken separately from the other 40 attacks on the border that day, the assault on the Nova festival was the most lethal terror attack in Israel’s history.
The Failure of Imagination. During conversations with Israeli officials at various levels of seniority, I was told repeatedly that a mass incursion or invasion from Gaza had seemed so unlikely as to be almost inconceivable. That such an attack was near impossible was taken for granted by everyone—civilian and military—at the top of the Israeli state. It underlay not just the Netanyahu administration’s policies but the disposition and doctrine of the entire Israeli military and intelligence apparatus. But the inconceivable attack had in fact been conceived by various Israeli observers for more than decade and a half.
The earliest prediction of an October 7–style mass attack from Gaza was one made in an article entitled “How Arabs Plan to Fight Israel,” by Lieutenant Colonel Rubi Sandman, writing in an Israeli military journal in 2010.
The article, which has not been translated into English, won the IDF Chief of Staff Award for military and security writing but was apparently forgotten, at least by Israelis. It is possible that it was read and taken seriously by Hamas and Hezbollah planners. Hezbollah soon afterward developed a plan envisioned in the article to use tunnels to enable a mass incursion into Israel leading to the capture of the Galilee. It was to carry out that plan that Hezbollah set up its elite Radwan Force with the help of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Hamas’s Nukhba force was essentially a copy of Radwan, just as its invasion plan was copied from Hezbollah’s.
In 2014, soon after that year’s 50-day war against Hamas—a war that saw the first duel between Hamas rocket artillery and the Iron Dome system—the IDF discovered that Hamas had been planning and preparing for an assault from Gaza involving scores of attackers through subterranean tunnels.
Then in 2016, then–Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman—another October 7 Cassandra—wrote a secret memo sent to then–Prime Minister Netanyahu in which he said that “Hamas intends to take the conflict into Israeli territory by sending a significant number of well-trained forces (like the Nukhba for example) into Israel to try and capture an Israeli community (or maybe even several communities) on the Gaza border and take hostages.”
The memo went on to point out that the high-tech Gaza security barrier, then in its infancy, “cannot constitute a strategy in itself. Modern history and past precedents (the Maginot Line, the Mannerheim Line, and the Bar Lev Line) have proven that fences and fortifications do not prevent war and do not constitute a guarantee for peace and security.”
Lieberman’s 2016 memo was inspired by the capture in the summer of that year of a Hamas plan for a mass incursion into Israel. The plan envisaged the capture of bases and communities in the Gaza envelope. A second, more detailed version of this Hamas blueprint, code-named Jericho Wall, fell into Israeli hands in 2022 but was taken even less seriously.
The original Hamas concept for a major incursion envisioned making use of infiltration tunnels of the type that had been used to kidnap the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006—whose five-year ordeal as a hostage led to the deal that featured the release of 1,000 Palestinian terrorists in exchange for his return, including Hamas’s October 7 mastermind, Yahya Sinwar. By the run-up to the 2014 war, Hamas had built 14 such attack tunnels, but after Israel developed expensive high-tech means of detecting them and preventing their construction, it gave up on the idea.
We don’t know when Hamas leaders Sinwar and Mohammed Deif realized that they could more easily get large numbers of gunmen into Israel simply by knocking down sections of the border fence with bulldozers, given the right timing—i.e., on a religious holiday—or when they developed the ability to blind or otherwise cripple the IDF’s automated security systems.
According to the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, who was allowed to read the Jericho Wall Hamas invasion plan after it was obtained in 2022, the revised plan included astonishingly precise details about Israel’s defenses. Not just the whereabouts and complements of specific army units, but exact placement of cameras and antennae, the timings and scope of patrols and guard changes, the numbers of troops around on weekends, and the location within army bases of control rooms and shelters. Collecting all that information, plus the detailed knowledge of the layouts of the communities attacked on October 7, took years of patient work. The Hamas maps and diagrams captured that day were made using commercial satellite imagery and drone photographs as well as information gleaned from Gazan workers employed by Israelis in the envelope. At kibbutzim such as Kfar Aza and Be’eri, the attackers knew precisely which houses the civilian security volunteers lived in, as well as the locations of the armories. The attackers’ knowledge of how under-strength the border garrisons were that weekend was enabled by careful, extensive study of Israeli social media. Sinwar was far from the only Hamas leader to have become fluent in Hebrew in Israeli prisons.
As a result, Sinwar and his gunmen understood the disposition and capabilities of their enemy far better than the Israelis knew and understood theirs, for all the boasting by Israeli officials over the years that a cockroach couldn’t move in Gaza without the IDF knowing about it.
It is now clear that some of Hamas’s rocket barrages in the months and even years before October 7 were part of a program of intelligence-gathering, in accordance with the old Soviet military doctrine of Razvedka Boyem, or “reconnaissance through battle.” The bombardments not only offered a means by which Hamas could assess the capabilities and limitations of the Iron Dome system, they led to the discovery of an enormous Israeli vulnerability. This was a civilian and military safety measure without which the October attack would have been much harder to pull off. It had somehow become standard operating procedure for all IDF personnel, as well as the Kitat Konenut guards on the Kibbutzim, to go into their rocket shelters on hearing rocket alarms, leaving the posts and communities for which they were responsible completely open to attack.
This was not previously the norm in the IDF. And for an obvious reason: Attacking armies have advanced under cover of artillery fire since at least the invention of the ballista in the fifth century B.C.E. As one retired IDF officer reminded me when despairing of this contemporary Israeli practice, “During the First World War, the armies on the Western Front kept soldiers on the fighting steps of their trench systems even during the heaviest artillery bombardments, bombardments vastly more intense and destructive than the rocket barrages of October 7.”
At 6:30 a.m. on October 7 in Kibbutz Magen, an ornery resident who habitually refused to go into the shelters when the alert sounded caught sight of a convoy of Hamas attackers approaching the community and warned the community defense squad, who were able to get their weapons and mount an effective response. A single observant human presence above ground can be all it takes to save an entire community.
Worshipping High Tech. Had there been human sentries backing up or supplementing the electronic systems on which IDF border security relied, they would likely have spotted either the Hamas drones taking out cameras and gun towers, or the Hamas fighters cutting holes in the border fence, in time to call out whatever quick-reaction forces were available. There were none because of the IDF’s excessive, even idolatrous, faith in high tech. Its planners seem genuinely to have believed that Israel’s cyber-age Maginot Line along the Gaza border—with AI-assisted sensors and automated machine guns—was unbreachable. That those expensive, complex systems could be neutralized by $50 mail-order drones carrying hand grenades never occurred to them. It did not help that unlike most of the world’s militaries, and unlike Hamas’s leaders, the IDF unit tasked with learning from foreign conflicts apparently paid minimal attention to the war in Ukraine, a war that had already seen several revolutions in computer-age warfare in the 18 months between its start and October 7.
Analysts of the Yom Kippur War mechdal have pointed out that behind the incorrect assumptions of the then current “concept” was a tendency to underestimate the Arab enemy. Fifty years later, a whole host of IDF doctrines and practices rested on a similarly reflexive, ill-informed, and perhaps even bigoted underestimation of enemy capabilities, combined with a regrettably sabra-like conviction of inherent superiority and invulnerability.
You can see this in the Israeli intelligence agencies’ assumption that Hamas’s leaders were inherently incapable of learning from harsh experience. But while it took a long time and many losses to Israeli strikes for Hamas commanders to stop using mobile phones that the Shin Bet could listen to and track, they eventually did so.
In any continuing war, both sides learn from each other, and the side that learns the quickest gains substantial advantage. The Allies in World War II eventually became as competent at modern combined-arms warfare as their German opponents; just as the Russian army in Ukraine has learned how to deal with the drones and modern tanks that were fielded with such initial success by the defenders. It was surely inevitable that Hamas would one day turn to alternate means of communication and find ways of defeating even Israel’s most advanced surveillance technologies after being defeated in four minor-to-major direct confrontations between 2009 and 2021—and, as October 7 was to prove, they did.
Hamas was aided in this by at least two peculiar Israeli decisions, both redolent of excessive self-confidence. One was the Shin Bet’s 2010 abandonment of its human-intelligence program in Gaza. Essentially, it gave up recruiting new spies and sources. Another was the decision in the summer of 2022 by Unit 8200, the IDF’s famous signals-intelligence agency, to stop eavesdropping on the Hamas network of hand-held radios.
Less than a year later, more than 40 Israeli targets adjacent to Gaza were attacked by some 3,000 Hamas fighters. Having breached the border fence in more than a hundred places, they arrived in units ranging in size from 40 to 200 men. They were led by Hamas’s Nukhba forces, who were as well armed and at least as well trained as most of the defenders they encountered. In Israel it has become the norm to refer to all Hamas operatives as Nukhba and all the attackers who crossed the border as “Hamas terrorists,” but in fact, the 2,000–3,000 intruders who came in the second and third waves were mostly made up of allied militias, criminal gangs, and civilian opportunists.
In normal times, the Gaza envelope was protected on paper by three IDF infantry battalions and one armored battalion, totaling about 1,5001 combat troops. It used to be four infantry battalions, but one was removed after the construction of the celebrated high-tech border fence.
The IDF’s 21st-Century Holiday. On October 7, there were fewer than 800 IDF combat troops guarding the entire 40-mile-long border region, with its 30-odd agricultural communities and 12 military installations, most of which lacked basic fortifications. Many of the army posts were at just 40 percent strength. When we asked active-duty IDF commanders why troop numbers had been so low, they replied, with evident surprise at the question, that it was both the Sabbath and Simchat Torah, and the troops were with their families for the holiday. It was as if the IDF as an institution had somehow forgotten that there was a quite significant precedent for an enemy to attack Israel on a religious holiday, or it simply assumed that Israel had no enemies willing and capable of carrying out such a deed.
The holiday absence of more than half the standing force on October 7 was not unique to the Gaza border region. It turns out to have been standard procedure for the military throughout Israel, with the air force stripped down by an even greater proportion.
According to one serving colonel I spoke to in the course of researching our report, this mass holidaying had much to do with the Israeli military’s adoption of a practice common in private Israeli business: the use of “concentrated vacations” to save on electricity, bureaucracy, etc. As he sadly admitted, the policy reflected a certain complacency about the country’s security threats.
The same complacency, along with what many older former IDF officers see as general decline in professionalism, can be seen in the way that almost all of the IDF installations in the Gaza envelope had abandoned the standard Western military practice of holding a “stand-to” before sunrise. During the daily stand-to at a military base or camp, soldiers take up defensive positions as if expecting an enemy attack. (The idea behind is to ensure that troops know what to do and where to go in case of attack, and for an outpost to be ready at the time that attacks are most likely.) The procedure is theoretically required at dawn on all IDF bases, and had it been followed on October 7, the day might have gone very differently. It would have made a particular difference at bases such as Nahal Oz, which had had no sentries on gate duty that morning, and whose complement of 90 combat soldiers did not have time to get their machine guns out of a locked armory when Hamas attacked.
A retired colonel who commanded an IDF battalion during the second intifada assured me that, in his time, there was always a stand-to on every base he was ever stationed at. It is not clear when or how it became normal or acceptable for IDF units to drop the practice, especially in inherently dangerous locations like posts abutting the Gaza border. (That Hamas was watching and targeting Nahal Oz was no secret. It had built a mock-up of the base and made films of its troops practicing its capture.) Hamas operatives knew the base so well that, earlier in the year, one of them held up a poster at the fence wishing one of the female observers happy birthday—with her full name and age.
Another shocking dereliction at Nahal Oz, at least for anyone used to American military practice, was that the young female soldiers monitoring the surveillance systems were unarmed and had no combat training. During the War on Terror, I visited or stayed at dozens of U.S. and allied military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in all those installations, even those deep within the “Green Zones” of Baghdad and Kabul, almost everyone, male or female, from generals to radio repairmen, carried a sidearm.
When I asked a young Israeli who had recently served as an intelligence officer at a nearby base about the presence of unarmed soldiers on a post so close to Gaza, he told me that during his year on the border he had never worn the pistol he had been issued, adding that “it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.” He then explained that he didn’t really know how to use it, having had only a few hours on the range during his training: “Some [conscripts] don’t get any training on weapons, if you’re ill that day, then you can be deployed without ever having fired a weapon.”
Of course, conscripts headed for elite units and soldiers in combat units in the regular army are given proper weapons instruction, but apparently in the 21st-century IDF, the great majority of citizen soldiers receive minimal training in weapons handling or other basic combat skills. It is the very opposite of the approach taken by the U.S. Marine Corps, with its doctrine of “every Marine a rifleman”—which ensures that every person in the entire service from pilot to mechanic to driver to medic to cyber warrior can fight if need be. It is also the opposite approach to that of the early IDF and its predecessor organization, the Haganah. The potential cost of not bothering to train noncombat troops was made all too clear on October 7.2
This is part of a larger, long-term phenomenon that began at the start of this century. Successive Israeli defense ministers and chiefs of defense staff from 2002 onward cut expenditure on the IDF’s ground capabilities, underfunding training, maintenance, transport capacity, and combat logistics, in the belief that the country could rely on air force jets, intelligence agencies and special forces to keep its enemies at bay and protect its citizenry. In 2015, it gave an entire squadron of its helicopter gunships to Jordan. Close air support of ground troops was no longer viewed as a priority, now that the focus had shifted to Iran and cyberwarfare. The belief that substantial conventional ground forces were no longer that necessary underlay the cutting of compulsory national service from three years to just over two and a half and also a new policy of ending reservist duty at age 40 instead of 54, even though this deprived the IDF of a great many combat-experienced troops.
The Kibbutz civilian-security teams, supervised by the IDF, were also allowed to deteriorate in the years before October 7. Many had minimal training. It did not help that the IDF, more concerned about weapons thefts than readiness, ruled that the squads had to keep all their rifles and ammunition in locked armories. This meant that on October 7, many of the security squads were not able to get their weapons in time to confront Hamas attackers—who knew not just the armories’ locations but which residents held keys for them. (Fortunately, at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, but only there, the security coordinator not only disregarded the IDF’s order to store all weapons centrally but had drilled his team, for whom he had purchased modern helmets, body armor, and gunsights for their rifles. They were able to drive the attackers off and save their fellow residents.)
The neglect of ground forces combined with complacency about the Hamas threat had many dire consequences on October 7. Some of the tanks that should have protected the attacked army bases had had their .50 caliber machine guns removed for maintenance or because of fear that they might be stolen. Armored vehicles were not kept fully fueled: The tank that stopped at the Nova festival and provided shelter for some of the partygoers did so because it had run out of gas. A shortage of working jeeps meant that some IDF outposts could only send out foot patrols. Several of the cameras on the aerostat balloons that were a key part of Gaza border surveillance had been out of order for some time.
A retired reservist colonel told me that, after 2003, his infantry battalion engaged in just one whole-unit exercise in the next decade. If it had had to cope with a real ground war rather than constabulary or counterinsurgency work in the territories, it would have been in terrible trouble. Even regular army combat battalions no longer train sufficiently to be combat-ready. This was one reason why it took three weeks after October 7 for IDF ground forces to enter Gaza: The IDF lacked soldiers who were ready to take part in intense urban warfare—and had to train up infantry and armor battalions so that they could carry out the mission.
Hours to Kill. In several of the places attacked on October 7, Hamas operatives and Gazan civilians who followed them across the fence enjoyed more than five uninterrupted hours of opportunity to kill, rape, and kidnap. Given Israel’s small size, and the fact that there are large army bases like the giant Ariel Sharon complex even closer to the attacked area, the failure of the country’s armed forces to arrive in sufficient numbers in time to save the residents of Negev communities has provoked confusion and anger.
It was not until after noon that sizeable units of IDF troops arrived at the Nova site. One survivor of the attack there, a capable female army reservist who led several others to safety, told interviewers that by mid-morning she had become convinced that Israel had collapsed under a massive multifront attack and that her family in Tel Aviv was likely dead. It was the only way she could understand the failure of the IDF to arrive in the region.
At Kibbutz Nir Oz, where the IDF didn’t arrive until 1 p.m., 40 minutes after the last terrorists and camp followers had left, one in three of the residents present that morning was killed or kidnapped—including the entire Bibas family.
Some of the “where was the army?” expectations and criticism are unfair. It takes more than a few hours to mobilize ready reserve forces even in a country as small as Israel, and even with the benefit of mobile phones. To put the challenge in context, the minimum time for the British army’s rapid-reaction force, 16 Air Assault Brigade, to be ready to deploy is five days. Moreover, Israel has a much smaller regular army than is often realized, and of necessity much of it had to be kept on the northern border in case of invasion by Hezbollah. That said, there does seem to have been paralysis at the center—both at the Kiriya in Tel Aviv, Israel’s equivalent of the Pentagon, and in the prime minister’s office.3
Some foreign intelligence agencies have suggested that an additional explanation for both the total surprise Hamas achieved, and the apparent paralysis that followed, was a successful hacking of the IDF’s command-and-control networks—possibly by Iran using its Chinese-supplied technology. A hacking would go some way to explain otherwise mysterious logistical derelictions, among them the failure of the Ministry of Defense to organize buses to get reservists to their posts, the IAF’s failure to get helicopters out of repair shops and ready for use, and the Kiriya’s odd failure to send armor units to clear route 232. (A reservist who drove down to Gaza on the evening of October 7 told me how astonished he was not to see long convoys of military vehicles heading south.) If such a hacking took place, the IDF is not only not admitting it but is actively discouraging any speculation on the matter.
One of the more likely explanations for the apparent chaos is the effectiveness with which Hamas hamstrung the IDF’s command-and-control infrastructure in the south. It did this by destroying cellular towers of the army’s communication system along the border and by taking control of Reim Base—the headquarters of the IDF’s Gaza Division and its two brigades.
Despite its strategic importance, Reim Base had been all but unguarded when 120 Hamas Nukhba troops arrived there in 10 pick-up trucks at about 7 a.m. At 7:30, there were still many soldiers in their beds. That it was not completely captured was thanks in large part to a Bedouin tracker unit that had been warned of the coming attack by civilians fleeing the Nova site and that set up a fighting position near the entrance.
The overrunning of Reim Base was arguably Hamas’s most important military success on October 7—one that seems especially impressive given that in all of Israel’s wars, including that of 1973, no Arab army ever succeeded in overrunning and capturing even a small IDF post, let alone a divisional headquarters. The virtually unguarded Reim Base was not only the coordination node for IDF forces in the Gaza region, but the HQ on which the Kiriya (again, Israel’s Pentagon) depended for information about the entire area of operations. As a result of Reim’s conquest and Hamas’s earlier destruction of the IDF’s communications antennae on the border bases, Israel’s top brass had no conception of the depth, ferocity, and success of the Hamas invasion, and did not know where it should be sending reinforcements for most of the day. Even when the Gaza Division commander, besieged in his own headquarters, was able to get a message to the Kiriya in Tel Aviv that his base and the surrounding area were under heavy attack, the national HQ sent only small units of special forces prepared for short encounters with small units of infiltrators—many of Israel’s best elite troops were killed as a result.
For reasons as yet unexplained, the country’s satellites and also the IAF’s reconnaissance aircraft were either unavailable or incapable of providing Israel’s leaders with a timely picture of what was going on in the south of their own country. For several hours, the small forces that made it through the Hamas ambush positions on Highway 232 were also unaware which communities or bases had fallen or where they were most needed.
Although citizens and soldiers under attack made thousands of phone calls to relatives, friends, and government connections in the hours after the attack began, there was no agency collating or collecting the information they provided. Again and again, five- or 10-man special-forces detachments arrived at kibbutzim expecting to be fighting an incursion by a handful of terrorists and found themselves outnumbered by a factor of 10 or 20. Many died because they ran out of ammunition.
Although there were several thousand IDF troops stationed within a 40-minute drive of the Gaza envelope, their arrival was hindered by the lack of roads leading from their bases to the combat area and the fact that Hamas controlled the one highway through the western Negev that links every attacked community and post. Even if some of those Hamas ambush positions had been neutralized, there was also, it turns out, a severe shortage of working trucks in the IDF’s Southern Command. The obvious alternative to moving those troops by road—moving them by air—was not an option, because, as an Israeli military spokesman told me, working transport helicopters were simply not available. Just why this was the case remains one of the mysteries of October 7, but it seems to have to do with the great shift in the IDF’s spending priorities since the beginning of the century.
Willful Blindness. No military or political establishment has ever been immune to confirmation bias. Even the strongest and most effective military powers have endured intelligence failures owing to strategic blindness, wishful thinking, or underestimation of the enemy. It is harder to understand, or forgive, the bread-and-butter unreadiness of the IDF in the south. It is not Monday-morning quarterbacking to expect that army posts on a violent frontier would have (human) sentries on duty at all hours, that all personnel would be armed, that somewhere in the Gaza envelope there would be a well-trained, quick-reaction force of at least battalion strength.
Apart from a handful of anti-aircraft machine guns mounted on the unarmored pick-up trucks that carried them around the Gaza envelope, Hamas’s thousands of invaders carried only small arms. Their limited routes to the communities they attacked left them highly exposed. Had they come up against a reasonably well-trained battalion of heavy infantry with its full complement of machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars, and armored fighting vehicles (let alone an armored unit or a pair of helicopter gunships) before reaching the kibbutzim, the entire invasion force would likely have been wiped out in minutes. For that matter, had any of the Nukhba companies arrived at an IDF base that was fortified and manned, like a U.S. combat outpost in Afghanistan or Iraq, it would not have lasted long. That Hamas’s leaders were so confident that the attackers faced no such obstacles is itself an indictment of IDF doctrine and practice.
What Happens Now. The UK All-Party Parliamentary Group report was intended to provide a clear-eyed and historically accurate account of an important moment in contemporary military history. The question now is how Israel is going to handle these matters.
At the time of this writing, several internal reports have been made public. There will eventually be more than 40 such reports just from the IDF alone, dealing with the attacks and battles that took place in as many locations in the Gaza envelope.
There have been many calls for an official government investigation akin to the Agranat Commission. The Netanyahu administration has resisted this, saying any such inquiry should begin only after the end of the current conflict. Benjamin Netanyahu’s critics say he is stalling, and not only that, but that he has unnecessarily and selfishly prolonged the war in Gaza—refraining from finishing off Hamas in order to avoid the fallout that would inevitably accrue from such a commission. Netanyahu likely needs such a commission, even if its judgment of his leadership proves harsh, partly to answer charges that may unfairly lay all or most of the blame for the debacle on his shoulders, but mostly to make sure that the systemic failures of the day are properly examined and the right lessons are learned from those failures.
However, one Israeli senior officer, who is not a Likudnik, told me there are valid reasons for not having such a commission—the main one being that in Israel these are traditionally run by Supreme Court judges. That court, he pointed out, is now more politicized than at any time in Israel’s history and might not be able to conduct such an inquiry with even a minimum of fairness. Moreover, as he pointed out, the High Court itself played a role in the disaster, not least in rulings that serve to undermine border security in Gaza. One ruling forced the IDF to allow Gazans to gather at the border fence unless the latter were actually firing on Israelis. This not only enabled Hamas to test the barrier and make accurate preparations for 130 breaches on October 7, but it “habituated IDF observers to the sight of Gazans at the fence,” making it harder to spot those preparations or the attack itself.
We still do not know the true extent of mastermind Yahya Sinwar’s hopes and plans for the October 7 attack. The fact that the invaders brought with them such large stores of food and ammunition persuaded some observers that Hamas actually intended to hold and fortify the positions it had seized in the envelope and use hostages to hinder their retaking by the IDF. Many Israeli analysts believe that the attack was not intended to be a terrorizing raid in the medieval Arab tradition, or a provocation that would goad Israel into a militarily and diplomatically disastrous counter-invasion that would bring normalization to an end. They think it was intended to be the beginning of the end of Israel as a state—a devastating first strike that would demonstrate beyond doubt its brittleness not just to its Arab enemies on all sides but to the Israeli population.
As awful as things were, they could have been worse. It was fortunate that, unlike the army, the often maligned Israel Police Service not only had a contingency plan for a large-scale Hamas attack, but practiced dealing with one, holding one such exercise in September 2023. As a result, the Hamas attacks on the towns of Netivot and Sderot were contained by 8 a.m. Moreover, if the Israel Police had not prevailed in three little-known battles—at the Reim junction, the Black Arrow Monument, and the Yad Mordechai junction—then large convoys of Hamas pick-up trucks could have headed east and north. Nothing stood between them and the civilian populations of Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. Had even a few pick-up trucks reached those cities and wrought just the limited slaughter achieved in Sderot and Ofakim, the impact would have been enormous. A senior commander I spoke to believes it would likely have inspired copycat attacks on Israeli communities in the West Bank, uprisings in Israel’s majority-Arab cities and neighborhoods along the lines of the upheaval in May 2021, and, deadliest of all, a massive ground invasion of the north by Hezbollah.
It is far from clear how the Israeli state as it was constituted on October 7—a nation that struggled to deal with the Hamas invasion alone—would have coped with simultaneous attacks on multiple fronts. The fall of the Assad regime in Syria shows just how quickly and how easily military defeat and panic can cause a state to collapse. It is now up to Israel’s people and leaders, traumatized and politically divided as they are, to ensure that the country’s military and intelligence institutions will never again be as unprepared and complacent and unable to protect its citizenry as they were on October 7.
The article represents the author’s opinions only and not those of the APPG UK-Israel.
1 Israeli brigades, battalions, and companies tend to be smaller than their U.S. and NATO equivalents.
2 Apparently, the IDF has still not learned its lesson with regard to giving ordinary conscripts basic military training sufficient to keep them alive in case of a surprise attack. A retired lieutenant colonel told me that his recently conscripted daughter, currently assigned to guard duty at one of the abandoned kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope, was sent there having fired just 15 rounds from an M16 during her training. (Fortunately, he assured me, she is a crack shot, having spent a great deal of time with him on the range.)
3 It must be said that rumors suggesting Benjamin Netanyahu suffered some kind of psychological breakdown and was unavailable for several hours—like Stalin on the night of Hitler’s invasion—have not been substantiated in any way.
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