On the afternoon of October 7, 2023, an Israeli computer engineer in his thirties was driving on a deserted road parallel to the perimeter fence separating Gaza from Israel. He fought for hours with an AK-47 that killed a Hamas militant. Now he and three friends were heading to the town of Ohad to search for missing relatives.
“It was only when we headed south that we realized the magnitude [del ataque]. It was like an apocalypse,” says the engineer in a conversation with The Guardian. “There were hundreds of corpses of civilians in their cars or on the road, hundreds of terrorists killed with their trucks or motorcycles. There were dead police officers, military vehicles on fire. “We were alone,” says the young man, who prefers not to reveal his identity.
The engineer was one of many Israelis, perhaps hundreds, who made their own way to the combat zone around Gaza on the morning of the Hamas attack on October 7 last year. . Many of their compatriots consider them true heroes. However, the fact that they were necessary shows the serious failures that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) committed that day.
As a year has passed since the cross-border attacks, for millions of Israelis the question of what went wrong remains part of the attack’s traumatic legacy. These constant recriminations are part of a broader and bitter debate over responsibility for Israel’s greatest security failure since the country’s founding in 1948. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, has avoided taking responsibility, although several senior military officials and intelligence services have resigned or admitted their mistakes.
In total, around 1,200 people were killed in the raid launched by Hamas. Most of the victims were civilians and many were killed in their homes or at a music festival. Among the victims were children and the elderly. A UN investigation concluded that there is sufficient evidence to believe the attackers committed acts of sexual violence in several locations, including rape and gang rape. Hamas militants and other Gaza extremists who followed them kidnapped some 250 hostages, around 100 of whom are still being held in the Gaza Strip.
Over the past year, Israeli media have wondered what went wrong. Since the attack, a situation has formed among senior leaders between growing concern over warnings of a possible massive attack on southern Israel from Gaza and the prevailing belief among senior officers and political leaders that Israel had succeeded in deterring Hamas through repeated conflicts.
Many senior military officials were convinced that the huge sums of direct aid sent to Gaza from Qatar and other economic incentives, such as permits for Palestinian workers to work in Israel, had also served to deter Hamas (at power since 2007) to commit violence. actions, at least in the short term.
At a counterterrorism conference held a few months before the attack, David Barnea, head of Mossad, Israel’s main foreign intelligence service, did not mention Hamas in a speech about possible threats against country.
“We were complacent, lazy and trapped in a kind of groupthink for which we are going to pay a very high price,” a military intelligence officer specializing in the Gaza Strip told the Guardian shortly after the October 7 attack.
Another serious problem was the trust placed in the supposedly impregnable billion-euro fence built around the territory.
By contrast, reservists who had served several tours in Gaza in the year before the attacks recalled their surprise at the rather relaxed attitude of the armed forces soldiers.
“Some vehicles were not working, some equipment was not working and some patrols were not being carried out. When we asked how we would defend ourselves in the event of a full-scale attack, we were told it wouldn’t happen,” a reservist combat medic said last month. “They told us that Hamas was the first line of defense, that they had too much to lose with an attack and that they were containing the population. They also told us that, in any case, the fence was there and no one could cross it. In fact, I discussed it with my senior officers, but it came to nothing.
Just days before the attack, a series of chain errors occurred. Some local military commanders requested assessments after learning that elite Hamas fighters were conducting intense maneuvers and training. However, they did not act.
When dozens, if not hundreds, of Israeli SIM cards suddenly connected to Israeli networks in the early hours of October 7, the Shin Bet, Israel’s national security service, deployed only a small team to the border. At a hastily convened meeting around 3:30 a.m. on October 7, senior military officials remained unsure whether Hamas’ unusual activity in Gaza was a training exercise or preparation for an attack.
Although public outrage against the intelligence services has been considerable, some of the sharpest criticism has been leveled at the IDF itself for failing to mobilize more quickly to defend communities under attack. In the hours following the October 7 attack, some regular military units, police and other services mobilized, but the truth is that groups of reservists played a decisive role, taking the uniforms or weapons that they had at home and going to fight.
Nimrod Palmach, a reservist commander and executive director of an Israeli NGO, defied orders to join his special forces unit in Jerusalem and headed south after learning that “thousands of terrorists” were on Kibbutz Nir Oz, where 46 of the nearly 400 residents were located. killed by Hamas militants going from house to house. The UN estimates that around 72 people were kidnapped.
“I grabbed a gun and went as far as I could. I realized that people were being killed with every passing second. I sent my children a video over the phone with my will so they could find it if they killed me,” he explains. Armed with an assault rifle salvaged from a dead Hamas militant, Palmach grabbed a dead soldier’s body armor and fought for hours alongside other reservists and small groups of regular soldiers around Kibbutz Beeri, where, according to the UN report. , 105 kibbutz residents were killed by the military wing of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an allied group, as well as armed civilians from Gaza.
“At first, only us and the special forces left our homes, but as the day progressed, more and more sporadic forces arrived. [regulares de las FDI]. At the end of the afternoon, all the defense forces arrived, with all their equipment, combat battalions. Many good fighters were waiting for instructions and orders that never arrived,” laments Palmach.
One reason for the slow response was that soldiers around Gaza were fighting for their lives during the critical first hours of the Hamas attack, when most casualties occurred. The defense units were not at full strength because it was a holiday weekend – the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah – and there were only a few hundred soldiers scattered in small detachments around the perimeter fence.
Many died or were kidnapped when Hamas managed to reach its positions; others fought desperately for hours to avoid the same fate. A violent assault on the main local headquarters in Re’im, just a kilometer from the Nova festival, was almost successful, which partly explains the apparent paralysis of local commanders and their superiors. Essential surveillance and communications equipment was disabled during the attack.
“There was no central command, so we didn’t know what to do or where to go… There was no connection between the units,” says a special forces soldier who was one of the first to arrive in the combat zone. “We were too few in number and [cuando] When we tried to enter the kibbutzim, hundreds of Hamas men attacked us; “We withdrew to await reinforcements.”
Several of those interviewed by The Guardian recalled how the situation began to stabilize late on October 7, although fighting continued for more than 48 hours, with remaining militants found and killed. Some stayed to help, others returned to the houses they had abandoned ten or twelve hours earlier. After the initial shock wore off, they tried to make sense of the day’s events.
“We were trained to attack, to be aggressive… but the opposite situation happened,” explains the special forces soldier: “We always [veo] the dead children, the burned bodies, the festival girls.
For his part, the engineer has still not been able to conclude what went wrong on October 7, 2023. “In fact, I don’t know what happened,” he admits to Guardian: “I still think about it. . Honestly, I don’t know.”
Translation by Emma Reverter
