The Israeli army’s inquiry into the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, concludes bluntly: “the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) failed to protect Israeli citizens. The Gaza Division was overrun in the early hours of the war, as terrorists took control and carried out massacres in the communities and roads in the area.”
A 19-page summary of the inquiry obtained by The Epoch Times from the IDF focuses on what led to what it termed “the glaring failure of October 7th.”
Israel’s security forces operated off erroneous strategic, operational, and tactical perceptions, the inquiry finds, fed by faulty intelligence.
Errors were made in the overnight hours leading up to the attack, which launched at 6:29 a.m. on a Saturday that was not only the Sabbath but a Jewish holiday. And so too were they made even as surprised and initially overwhelmed IDF forces fought back, regrouped, and regained the initiative.
The report states the IDF also made 41 inquiries into the individual battles in communities, on military bases, and along roads.
The IDF in general operated according to its existing plans, the inquiry found, but those plans didn’t include a large-scale attack.
The IDF’s outgoing chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, in offering his resignation on Jan. 21 to take responsibility for the attack—the highest-ranking official to do so to date—specified that the inquiry would be done by the time he stepped down on March 6.
The summary is light on details and doesn’t name names. It’s written in abstract terms like “situational assessments’ and ”institutional mechanisms.”
Many of its findings will be no surprise in Israel, a society immersed in the war, the longest in its history, since that day. Hundreds of thousands of reservists were called up. Most are still in uniform. Israeli communities faced rocket attacks until cease-fires with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza went into effect.
Businesses failed when their owners and employees were called up. Tourism collapsed. Airlines cut off their flights to and from Israel. Hundreds of thousands of residents of border communities—both near Gaza and in the north, where Hezbollah initiated sustained bombardment—evacuated.
Countless volunteer groups sprung up to meet innumerable needs, from housing and caring for displaced people to gathering clothing and gear for reservists that the IDF was not ready to equip in such numbers.
Israelis know the military was caught flat-footed and undermanned on a holiday. They know electronic border surveillance failed. They know a military shocked by the sudden large-scale attack took hours to deploy troops to besieged communities, which they then took hours more to pacify.
They know Hamas attackers operated from intricate information about community layouts, security routines, and cameras—much of it provided by Gazan civilians who worked in those communities, people the Israelis often regarded as friends.
Israel’s leaders have promised to review the nation’s failures, which led to the deaths of 1,200 Israeli citizens and residents that day, as well as 251 people taken hostage.
Erroneous Assumptions
The IDF’s inquiry was to center on the military’s own failures, but its report touches on the intelligence and political aspects contributing to those.Key to the failures leading to the war were Israel’s fundamental misperceptions about Hamas for years, from the end of 2014 fighting until Oct. 7.
“The State of Israel, its political leadership, and the defense establishment relied on several fundamental assumptions, which all collapsed on the morning of Oct. 7,” the report states.
Israel saw Gaza as a threat secondary to that posed by Iran and Hezbollah, according to the report.
“Israel used a ‘conflict management’ approach, aimed at preserving and gradually improving the existing reality,” the report states. Leaders thought it possible to maintain long periods of calm based on the erroneous assumption that Hamas was neither interested in, nor preparing for, large-scale war.
They thought they could influence Hamas with pressures reducing motivation for war, such as improving living conditions in the Gaza Strip.
“Israel’s policy towards Gaza was based on defense, stabilization, and efforts to prevent Hamas’ military buildup, readiness for short periods (i.e. days) of direct conflict, and preparation for a scenario of escalation.
“In hindsight, Hamas systematically employed deception tactics that reinforced this perception. In retrospect, this was a grave mistake.”
Excessive Confidence
The IDF mistakenly thought it had succeeded in controlling tunneling operations, and that the primary threat was rocket and mortar fire.
It thought it could defend adequately even with the enemy positioned right on the border. Israel’s border barrier, the report states, “was not designed for a large-scale surprise attack. Rather, it was intended to control mass protests and disrupt limited infiltration attempts.”
“The IDF had excessive confidence in the barrier’s effectiveness, even as troop deployments along the border were reduced due to resource constraints.”
Among the lessons the IDF learned from the massacre were these: “It is incorrect to ‘conflict manage’ with an enemy whose ultimate goal is your destruction.” And Israel must prevent any immediate or significant threat posed by enemy presence on the border and must prioritize eliminating those threats over maintaining temporary security calm.
