‘They told us a big attack wouldn’t happen’: the intelligence failures before 7 October

In the late afternoon on 7 October, an Israeli software engineer in his mid-30s found himself driving down a deserted road parallel to the perimeter fence that separated Gaza from Israel. He had been fighting for hours with an AK-47 taken from a dead Hamas militant. Now he and three friends were headed to the town of Ohad to search for relatives who had gone missing.

“Only when we set off south did we understand how big this was. It was like an apocalypse,” the engineer, who did not want to be named, said last week. “There were hundreds of bodies of civilians inside their cars or on the road, hundreds of dead terrorists with their pickup trucks or motorbikes. There were dead police, army vehicles on fire. We were alone.”

He was among scores, possibly hundreds, of Israelis who headed independently to the combat zone around Gaza on the morning of the raid launched by Hamas on 7 October last year. Many were lauded as heroes by their compatriots, but that they were needed at all underlined the deep failures of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that, a year on, remain part of the traumatic legacy of the attack for millions of Israelis.

The continuing recriminations are part of a bitter broader argument over who to blame for the biggest security failure in Israel since the foundation of the country in 1948. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, has avoided accepting responsibility, though several senior military and intelligence officials have resigned or admitted their errors.

In all, about 1,200 were killed in the raid launched by Hamas. Most of the dead were civilians, many murdered in their homes or at a music festival. Victims included children and elderly people. A UN inquiry found reasonable grounds to believe that attackers committed sexual violence at several locations, including rape and gang-rape. Hamas militants, and other extremists from Gaza who followed them, also seized about 250 hostages, of which approximately 100 remain in the territory.

Since the attack, Israel media has picked over what went wrong. A picture has emerged of top commanders caught between their growing concern after warnings of a possible mass attack into southern Israel from Gaza, and the prevailing belief among senior officers and the top political leadership that Hamas had been deterred by repeated bouts of conflict. Many officials were convinced that huge sums of direct aid sent into Gaza from Qatar and other economic incentives such as permits for Palestinian labourers to work in Israel had also convinced Hamas, which had been in power since 2007, to forgo violence in at least the short term. At a counter-terrorism conference months before the attack, David Barnea, head of the Mossad, Israeli’s main foreign intelligence service, did not mention Hamas in a speech about potential threats to the country.

“We were complacent and lazy and suffered a sort of groupthink and we are going to pay a huge price for that,” one military intelligence officer, a specialist in Gaza, told the Guardian shortly after the 7 October attack.

A second big problem was the faith placed in the supposedly impregnable billion-dollar fence built around the territory.

Reservist officers who had served several tours around Gaza were shocked by a new attitude among IDF officers in the year before the attacks.

“There were vehicles that simply didn’t run, equipment that didn’t work, patrols that didn’t happen because there was no threat. When we asked how we were meant to fight back if there was a big attack, they told us … it just wouldn’t happen,” a reservist combat medic said last month.

“We were told that the first line of defence is Hamas, because they’ve got too much to lose now by an attack and will themselves restrain their own people, and anyway then there’s the fence, which no one can get through. I actually argued with my senior officers over this but it went nowhere.”

Just days before the attack, a series of mistakes were made. Concerned local military commanders ordered assessments, which reported intense training by elite Hamas fighters, but failed to act. When dozens, possibly hundreds, of Israeli sim cards suddenly were connected to Israeli networks in the early hours of 7 October, Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, sent only a small team to the border. At a hastily convened meeting at about 3.30am on 7 October, senior IDF officers remained unsure if the unusual Hamas activity in Gaza was a training exercise or preparation for an attack.

But though public anger at intelligence services has been great, some of the most bitter reproaches have been levelled at the IDF itself for failing to mobilise faster to defend communities. Though some regular military units, the police and other services did deploy in the first hours of the 7 October attack, it was often small groups of reservists who had grabbed uniforms or weapons at home who joined the battle, sometimes playing decisive roles.

Nimrod Palmach, a reservist major and the chief executive of an Israeli NGO, defied orders to join his special forces unit in Jerusalem and drove south after hearing that “thousands of terrorists” were in the kibbutz of Nir Oz, where 46 of about 400 residents were killed by militants going from house to house and 72 were abducted, according to the UN.

“I just took a handgun and went as far as I could. I realised that every moment, people were being killed. I left a video testament on my phone for my kids so it could be found if I was killed myself,” he said.

Armed with an assault rifle taken from a dead Hamas militant, Palmach took body armour from a dead soldier and fought for hours alongside other reservists and small groups of regular soldiers around the kibbutz of Be’eri, where, according to the UN report, 105 residents of the kibbutz were killed by the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an allied group, as well as armed civilians from Gaza.

“At the beginning it was just us and special forces who were coming from their homes but as the day went by more and more sporadic [regular IDF] forces arrived. By late afternoon, the full IDF came, in full gear, combat battalions. A lot of good fighters were waiting for directions and orders which never came,” Palmach said.

One reason for the slow response was that the IDF’s forces around Gaza were fighting for their lives through the critical first hours of the Hamas attack when most casualties were inflicted. Defenders were not at full strength because of the holiday weekend – the Jewish festival of Simchat Torah – and only a few hundred soldiers were scattered in small detachments around the perimeter fence. Many were killed or abducted when their positions were overrun; others fought desperately for hours to avoid the same fate. A heavy assault on the main local headquarters at Re’im, just a kilometre from the Nova festival, was nearly successful, which in part explains the apparent paralysis of local commanders and their superiors. Critical surveillance and communications gear was knocked out in the attack.

“There was no central command so we didn’t know what to do and where to go … There was no connection between the units,” said a special forces soldier who was one of the first to reach the combat zone. “We were too few, and [when] we tried to get into the kibbutzim we were attacked by hundreds of Hamas men – we pulled back to wait for bigger forces.”

Several of those interviewed by the Guardian remembered how the situation began to stabilise late on 7 October, though fighting continued for more than 48 hours as remaining militants were found and killed. Some stayed on to help, others drove back to the homes they had left just 10 or 12 hours before. As the initial shock wore off, they tried to understand the day’s events.

“We always trained to attack, to be aggressive … but it was the opposite,” said the special forces soldier. “I still [see] … the dead kids, burned bodies, the girls at the festival.”

As for the engineer, he has yet to make sense of what went wrong on 7 October 2023.

“I actually just really don’t know what happened,” he told the Guardian. “I keep thinking about it. But I don’t know.”