Hamas-led gunmen seized an Israeli military vehicle after infiltrating areas of southern Israel during the Oct. 7 attacks. A blueprint for similar attacks was circulating among Israeli leaders long before Hamas struck
A blueprint reviewed by The Times laid out the attack in detail. Israeli officials dismissed it as aspirational and ignored specific warnings.
Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman – New York Times Nov 30, 2023
Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.
The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.
Hamas members pictured training at the Gaza-Israel border months before Oct 7
The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.
Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot — all of which happened on Oct. 7.
The plan also included details about the location and size of Israeli military forces, communication hubs and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks inside the Israeli security establishment.
The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities, according to documents and officials. It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document, as well.
Last year, shortly after the document was obtained, officials in the Israeli military’s Gaza division, which is responsible for defending the border with Gaza, said that Hamas’s intentions were unclear.
“It is not yet possible to determine whether the plan has been fully accepted and how it will be manifested,” read a military assessment reviewed by The Times.
Then, in July, just three months before the attacks, a veteran analyst with Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, warned that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint.
But a colonel in the Gaza division brushed off her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by The Times.
“I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, fully matched “the content of Jericho Wall.”
“It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”
Officials privately concede that, had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them.
Instead, the Israeli military was unprepared as terrorists streamed out of the Gaza Strip. It was the deadliest day in Israel’s history.
An Israeli tank burns on the Gaza/Israel border. Click to enlarge
Israeli security officials have already acknowledged that they failed to protect the country, and the government is expected to assemble a commission to study the events leading up to the attacks. The Jericho Wall document lays bare a yearslong cascade of missteps that culminated in what officials now regard as the worst Israeli intelligence failure since the surprise attack that led to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.
Underpinning all these failures was a single, fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so ingrained in the Israeli government, officials said, that they disregarded growing evidence to the contrary.
The Israeli military and the Israeli Security Agency, which is in charge of counterterrorism in Gaza, declined to comment.
Officials would not say how they obtained the Jericho Wall document, but it was among several versions of attack plans collected over the years. A 2016 Defense Ministry memorandum viewed by The Times, for example, says, “Hamas intends to move the next confrontation into Israeli territory.”
Such an attack would most likely involve hostage-taking and “occupying an Israeli community (and perhaps even a number of communities),” the memo reads.
The Jericho Wall document, named for the ancient fortifications in the modern-day West Bank, was even more explicit. It detailed rocket attacks to distract Israeli soldiers and send them hurrying into bunkers, and drones to disable the elaborate security measures along the border fence separating Israel and Gaza.
Hamas fighters would then break through 60 points in the wall, storming across the border into Israel. The document begins with a quote from the Quran: “Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will certainly prevail.”
The same phrase has been widely used by Hamas in its videos and statements since Oct. 7.
One of the most important objectives outlined in the document was to overrun the Israeli military base in Re’im, which is home to the Gaza division responsible for protecting the region. Other bases that fell under the division’s command were also listed
Hamas carried out that objective on Oct. 7, rampaging through Re’im and overrunning parts of the base.
The audacity of the blueprint, officials said, made it easy to underestimate. All militaries write plans that they never use, and Israeli officials assessed that, even if Hamas invaded, it might muster a force of a few dozen, not the hundreds who ultimately attacked.
Israel had also misread Hamas’s actions. The group had negotiated for permits to allow Palestinians to work in Israel, which Israeli officials took as a sign that Hamas was not looking for a war.
But Hamas had been drafting attack plans for many years, and Israeli officials had gotten hold of previous iterations of them. What could have been an intelligence coup turned into one of the worst miscalculations in Israel’s 75-year history.
In September 2016, the defense minister’s office compiled a top-secret memorandum based on a much earlier iteration of a Hamas attack plan. The memorandum, which was signed by the defense minister at the time, Avigdor Lieberman, said that an invasion and hostage-taking would “lead to severe damage to the consciousness and morale of the citizens of Israel.”
The memo, which was viewed by The Times, said that Hamas had purchased sophisticated weapons, GPS jammers and drones. It also said that Hamas had increased its fighting force to 27,000 people — having added 6,000 to its ranks in a two-year period. Hamas had hoped to reach 40,000 by 2020, the memo determined.
Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan.
Hamas had “decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope,” analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division.
But the Gaza division referred to the plan as a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go but had not arrived there yet.
On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing.
The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times.
The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out.
The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off.
“In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.
The back-and-forth continued, with some colleagues supporting the analyst’s original conclusion. Soon, she invoked the lessons of the 1973 war, in which Syrian and Egyptian armies overran Israeli defenses. Israeli forces regrouped and repelled the invasion, but the intelligence failure has long served as a lesson for Israeli security officials.
“We already underwent a similar experience 50 years ago on the southern front in connection with a scenario that seemed imaginary, and history may repeat itself if we are not careful,” the analyst wrote to her colleagues.
While ominous, none of the emails predicted that war was imminent. Nor did the analyst challenge the conventional wisdom among Israeli intelligence officials that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was not interested in war with Israel. But she correctly assessed that Hamas’s capabilities had drastically improved. The gap between the possible and the aspirational had narrowed significantly.
The failures to connect the dots echoed another analytical failure more than two decades ago, when the American authorities also had multiple indications that the terrorist group Al Qaeda was preparing an assault. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were largely a failure of analysis and imagination, a government commission concluded.
“The Israeli intelligence failure on Oct. 7 is sounding more and more like our 9/11,” said Ted Singer, a recently retired senior C.I.A. official who worked extensively in the Middle East. “The failure will be a gap in analysis to paint a convincing picture to military and political leadership that Hamas had the intention to launch the attack when it did.”
Courtesy Les Visible
“Bergman”..”Goldman”.. NEwYoRk TiMes…’obtained’ documents….’narrative’ reinforcement (that being their pet stooges and mossad embeds greenlighting the massacre of women and children to clear the strip)…..spinning yarns….obvious bollox..
yup seems kosher….. I’m getting a whiff of gas…
Can you smell it?…it’s the methane rising off shit…
Kissinger himself said “it’s the 90% of jewes that can’t behave that ruin it for the 10%”.. of course he was being ironic..and one of the 90%…
Israeli teams have searched for orphaned children in Bosnia Hiaiti Ukraine and ire;and but particularly in Palestine
One of the main things hamas wanted to do was to clear the childe brothels
this they have been doing at great loss
Rescued children ferried back have told god awful stories of torture threats and being used as prostitutes
Moshe Solomons spoke on radio about this and said child sex brings in a lot of revenue from tourists
some children are raped many times a day
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2023/12/05/715840/Palestinians-sexual-violence-Israel
Hamas = Mossad = Israel
They “planned” the entire operation. Like Covid, it did not just happen through negligence. It was all planned. Like Covid, it blew up in their faces. As with Covid, if they were to come out with another virus to finish the job, the people would rebel and they would be dead. Like Covid, if they keep on with their bulldozer operation in their greed to drive the people out of their homeland, the world will rebel not just against Israel but against all Jews.
Sounds very much like the 911 situation. The American government was surely aware of the coming attack but ignored it, so that they would have an excuse to invade Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries. So that those that foresaw through this, kept their mouths shut so that they would not be terminated.
@white knight 777 – wake up and smell the coffee. it was an inside job perpetrated by the israelis who were caught but were ordered to release the 5 israelis. what was the purpose of this false deception – t regime change of the arab states libya, iraq, iran, syria et al to secure israel. Oct 7th attack was purposefully ignored why? – to kick out the palestinians from israel, steal the huge gas and oil fields offshore gazza (recognised by the usa as belonging to the palestinian) and the ben gurion canal that would run through gaza to the red sea.,
When Kissinger said pertinent things, I still wasn’t satisfied–he had to be dead, too
I am not an adherent of Islam. But I know enough of the religion and its cultural derivatives to know that the failure of Islamic nations to act to stop the genocide of Palestinians brings shame and dishonour on Islam. A stain that will never be washed away.
yep nico said it was a Mossad/IDF false flag/black op the day it happened
100% in agreement with Fred. B’s comment, especially this:
“”They “planned” the entire operation. Like Covid, it did not just happen through negligence. It was all planned.”
https://kevinbarrett.substack.com/p/james-perloff-argues-for-107-false
like many i never read carl jones
its obvious his mental health is at fault
everything to him is natzi some one should explain to him about 1945
can i suggest anyone who is obviously mentaly unwell can be banned ?
2 words: Pearl Harbour
The Bill Gates George Soros backed LGBT agenda to give sexual access to children
is still under way, The plan to turn our children into homosexuals has revealed that whole classes of kids now are either homosexual or bi sexual
next stage after puberty blockers is sexual operations to mutilate children and rob them of a proper future.
and our government allows this satanic agenda to take place
http://www.renegadetribune.com/number-of-children-put-on-puberty-blockers-doubles-despite-nhs-promising-to-stop/
Re “a stain on Islam.”
Islam has always been stain upon itself — a fairly reasonable-sounding religion upheld by mass murder of those who are not interested, enshrining rape and justifying slavery and polygamy, and dishonoring and downgrading women.
Yep, that certainly sounds like just exactly what the world needs!
A human being falling for such a religion would, by definition, be so stupid he would need the organized (but wimpy and cowardly) Jews to administer his empire and also to serve as accountants, lawyers, and tax-farmers.
I see a pattern here. Do you?
tresmegistus @ whiteknight 777 is 100 % correct. I might add that the 6 to 7 hr. delay in the IDF response on Oct 7 attack by Hamas says it all. First this length of delay is impossible from a super ultra security state. It was needed to ensure a high Israeli body count so as to enrage the Israeli public and military to engage in what it is doing now…..which is the annihilation of the Palestinian people and freeing up the Gaza for beautiful beach heads as well as for a minimum of 500 Billion USD in Gas and energy deposits. Dont forget just 3 weeks after the Oct 7th fiasco Israel signed 12 contracts with 6 energy co;s such as BP , Eni and 4 others for the exploration rights in the mediteranean off the Gaza coast. Reuters Oct 30 20123. Energy sources also in the west bank which is now being cleared of palestinians is also another project in the process.
On Oct 7th blitz, AlQassam took hold of major intel in the form of documents, laptops. computers, data storage devices and high value hostages in their underpants. The invaluable intel is shared with Resistance Axis. This was all planned! : )
Zionist Jews are living in terror and uncertainty, it has been 2 months that they have been living either in shelters, camps or hotels, many out of their cities and businesses; reverse immigration has been accelerating steadily. ZDF bombs Gaza to dust, but then during hostage exchange Gazans just walk back to their destroyed homes with mountainous resolve. AlQassam releases its multi-national Zionist hostages in north of Gaza not south; they come out of their invisible tunnels in clean uniforms demoralizing the Zionist enemy. Zion looked terrible in hostage exchange period, when you watch their TV, they are clearly in huge disagreements, Netanyahu is hated, he escapes forward, US fails to provide a way out for him; Biden does not like to see his bastard child (Israel) disintegrate in front of his eyes, while pushing for calm throughout region and even not responding to attacks to US forces, he wants to destroy children of Gaza more than Netanyahu. It’s not working… Gazans just stand their ground no matter what… what if Gazans could keep this going for 2 more months!? Can Zionist Jews do the same?
All of their Zionist Muslim allies like Saudis, UAE, Jordan, Egypt, Turkeye, etc… are paralyzed. Biden is making a deal with Putin now over the end of Ukraine… when you see NATO members change their support for Ukraine in just 2 weeks, you can be certain they are brewing up a deal with Russia. Zelensky could be executed or assassinated for all they care. Russia may be fooled into accepting a lesser victory, the greater victory would be the end of Zionist world order; Putin had some weird meetings with Saudis and Emirates, should Putin accept the lesser victory and reduce its alignment with the Resistance Axis, there is no blame on him, but he would be a fool. We have to see how things will develop.
my two tomans
(((Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago)))
and man landed on the moon, are you sure that the Hamas attack is not just a narrative?
34 seconds of film that forever destroys the moon landing narrative:
https://odysee.com/@ARGONAUT:d/VID_20230104_080105_931:f
They can fake anything, now Israel says 200 woman got brutally raped, so stop whining about them dead babies in Gaza. Them Hamas raped and raped and raped, split girls into two, nailed their hands to the floor while they raped them top death.
“There were girls with broken pelvis due to repetitive rapes, their legs were split wide apart in a split,” Richert quoted one survivor of the Nova music festival massacre as saying.
We heard girls that were pulled out from the shelters. Girls that shouted. They raped girls. Burnt them just after that. All the bodies outside were burnt
Yael Richert, superintendent, Israel Police
“We heard girls that were pulled out from the shelters. Girls that shouted. They raped girls. Burnt them just after that. All the bodies outside were burnt,” Richert said, reading from another testimony.
——————-
Yes sirreee Goyim, Hamas in hang gliders flew over the wall and went on a raping spree, it was worse than the Holocaust I tell ya, they beheaded 40 babies while raping 200 Jewish whores non-stop.
———————-
Just remember, Abraham never existed, Abraham is derived from Brahman, Brahma married his sister Saraswati. Abraham married his sister Sarah.
https://www.reddit.com/r/religion/comments/z3g3pf/brahma_abraham_and_sarah_saraswati_how_related/?rdt=45426
The Old Testament is myth no such thing as Jacob, no 12 tribes, and Jesus and th 12 apostles is the 12 houses of the zodiac.
No god, made no covenant, with no Abraham, who had no wife, and who had no offspring, and no tribes and thus Israel has no right to exist. The whole thing is 100% fake, and archeology has proved it. All those stories were lifted from Hindu mythology, and some Brahman probably brought those stories to the Middle East.
——————
BTW, over at VT archives, you can check out my essays here:
https://www.veteranstodayarchives.com/author/yukonjack/
My first essay was published by Gordon Duff, then I published the rest:
https://www.veteranstodayarchives.com/2013/07/08/guess-who-killed-america-hal-lindsey-say-it-isnt-so/
My last essay got me 86ed:
Israel Has No Right to Exist
November 26, 2013
https://www.veteranstodayarchives.com/2013/11/26/israel-has-no-right-to-exist/
———–
10 years later I got 86ed from unz.com for posting this video:
https://goyimtv.com/v/3765110974/Revenge-of-the-Neanderthal–What-It-May-Mean-For-The-World-Today