New details emerge on IDF failure to take known Hamas invasion plan seriously

The IDF has yet to establish a team dedicated to investigating the Jericho Wall fiasco.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

New details emerged last week about the IDF’s failure to take Hamas’ invasion plans seriously even though it had obtained several versions dating from 2016-2018 through August 2021.

It has been known since shortly after the war began that a military intelligence officer had been alarmed by the plan’s details — the latest of which were seized in April 2022 — but her efforts to push it up the chain of command for immediate action were quashed by superiors who dismissed its importance.

The plan, dubbed “Jericho Wall,” was also not widely shared with intelligence officers in the Southern Command and the Gaza Division, whose troops would have been called on to react to its implementation.

Ynet reported that the Gaza Division learned about the plan in 2022 but didn’t know earlier versions existed, calling it “initial,” “unprecedented in scope,” and “the first plan of its kind in the Gaza arena that imposes Hamas’ offensive power all at once and in a routine manner.”

It would have been enough to compare all the versions to see they were increasingly advanced iterations of the same plan, the report said, “but that did not happen.”

This, the report pointed out, “undermined its importance, because an ongoing process is a different matter than a single, exceptional document that might fade away as quickly as it appeared.”

Taking the plan seriously would have meant shifting focus from the danger of incursions through attack tunnels to above-ground attacks.

Ynet said the plan described “a massive and well-timed infiltration of Hamas forces into Israeli territory across the entire sector, while activating all the formations and means at their disposal – fighters (Nukhba), engineering teams, air defense, anti-tank, artillery, drones, paragliders, and naval forces.”

There were three parts to the plan – all of which were carried out on Oct. 7, 2023.

The first was “crossing the front line,” which was defined as the most critical objective.

The second was “destruction or neutralization of the [Gaza] division’s main military posts,” and the third was “reaching first-line cities (Ashkelon, Sderot, and Netivot) and carrying out sabotage operations.”

According to one Ynet source, the chief of staff’s office has refused to approve an investigation dedicated solely to the ignoring of the Jericho Wall plan, although there has been an inquiry into the Gaza Division’s broader intelligence failures.

That investigation said that the entire intelligence community “did not translate the ‘Jericho Wall’ plan into a warning model for a large-scale surprise attack by Hamas,” and it “did not, in general, arouse skeptical discourse regarding its reality or the implications arising from its very existence in everything related to understanding Hamas’ strategy, capabilities, and the operational outline of a future campaign in the Gaza Strip.”

An intelligence source told the news site that there were other critical failures, including a large turnover of staff in the military intelligence research division over the years, where information regarding the Jericho Wall Plan was not properly handed off and remained only in computer files.

“It’s psychotic, the knowledge simply didn’t get through,” the source said.

The IDF was also mistakenly convinced it had destroyed a large part of Gaza’s tunnel “metro” in 2021’s Operation Guardian of the Walls.

“The way we convinced ourselves with the lie that we won also explains the ignoring of the Jericho Wall, because if you are a senior commander in the Southern Command, and you tell everyone that you just gave them a decisive blow that will teach them a lesson, then why would you take seriously some plan that says they will attack again?”

A source hinted to Ynet that outside considerations could have played a role in the decision not to devote a team to the Jericho Wall failure, saying, “A true and comprehensive investigation … without calculating or compromising, could produce a much longer list of those responsible, and it’s not certain that [they would be] only from the defense establishment.”