Hamas planned invasion 7 years in advance – here’s why Israel missed it

The IDF’s internal investigation revealed that the department held onto the concept that Hamas was deterred, ignoring signs that this was incorrect.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The Military Intelligence Directorate now believes that Hamas planned its invasion of Israel for seven years while it missed the signs that could have prevented the massacre of October 7th, Channel 12 reported Wednesday.

The internal report on the intelligence failure, considered the most massive in Israel’s history, said that it stemmed from the department’s senior echelon holding onto a specific “concept” despite having in hand evidence to the contrary.

They believed that Hamas was deterred from fighting after several rounds in which the terror group suffered heavy losses, and that the terror organization’s leaders wanted quiet so that more Gazans could work in Israel and materially improve their lives.

This led them to ignore years of clues presented to them by intelligence analysts and eyewitness reports from IDF observers on the border of terrorists training in tactics for the takeover of kibbutzim, just as took place on October 7.

A major finding was that the intelligence bosses rejected the theory put forward by certain researchers that Hamas had sat out two clashes with the IDF in Gaza because it was preparing for a much larger conflict and needed to ensure the flow of Qatari money to its coffers to that end.

In the three-day Operation Breaking Dawn in August 2022, the IDF targeted the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, a direct Iranian proxy that is a Hamas rival although it is much smaller.

While Hamas verbally supported its “resistance” its men did not join the fight nor launch rockets at Israel as the PIJ did.

Hamas also sat on the sidelines when the IDF clashed with the PIJ in November 2019.

The terror organization did instigate the 11-day Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021, in which it and the PIJ launched thousands of rockets at Israel and the iDF conducted around 1,500 aerial, land, and sea strikes on the Gaza Strip.

During the investigation, the Channel 12 reporter Nir Devori said, there was “debate on the interpretation of the findings and the insights” to be gained from them, to the point at times of fierce arguments breaking out in security meetings.

Even after outgoing Military Intelligence head Aharon Haliva accepted the findings, Devori noted that the debates are continuing over what changes need to be made in the future.

“Still, even now, the Intelligence Division does not know how to determine with certainty how such incidents can be prevented in the future,” he said.