Israel knew Hamas' plan and did nothing. Why?
New evidence first obtained by an Israeli public broadcast channel shows that the Israeli military had shockingly clear and precise intelligence about Hamas' plans to attack and take hostages weeks before October 7th. An internal IDF report dated September 19, 2023, detailed Hamas' training for attacking military stations and kibbutzim in the southern part of Israel opposite the besieged Gaza Strip, capturing hostages, and rules for guarding hostages. The report was allegedly so precise that it accurately predicted Hamas’ plans to take 200-250 hostages. Hamas wound up taking 240 when they executed their operation.
Of course such intelligence raises countless questions, about why this report from last September is only now coming out, about who knew what, and about Israel’s inaction. Both in Palestine and around the world, and no doubt in certain halls of power, this explosive report is causing ripples, ripples that may turn into considerable waves. In understanding the ramifications here we have to consider that in addition to the report obtained by Kan, part of the Israeli Public Broadcast network, there is also an even earlier document. Over a year before the attack, Israeli intelligence had already produced a 40-page report outlining Hamas' attack plans in some detail.
The official line being used, both for the September 2023 report and for the one written up in 2022, is that Israel underestimated Hamas' ability to breach its wall around Gaza. As The Times of Israel declares, “Israel long thought the high-tech security barrier dividing it from the Gaza Strip — bristling with razor wire, cameras and sensors, and fortified with a concrete base against tunnels and remote-controlled machine guns — was impenetrable.” And this feeling of invincibility and impenetrability, specifically regarding their endless siege of and control over Gaza, reportedly led top officials to disregard the multiple warnings about Hamas’ capabilities and plans.
If we assume this official narrative is true, it gives us one possible insight into the sort of thinking that may dominate the IDF, the Israeli government, and much of society writ large. Namely, the dehumanization, oppression, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has, as anyone can observe, led a large cross-section of Israeli society to view the Palestinian people as lesser to such a severe degree that the theft of people’s homes, belongings, and even culture is often not given a second thought. The line between this degree of dehumanization and the willingness to commit genocide is short and swift, as the world has witnessed over the past eight months. And, in looking down upon the other so drastically, the IDF may have overlooked the potential of Palestinians in Gaza to resist, the potential of Hamas and others had to break out of the open-air prison they had been trapped in. This attitude towards the oppressed immediately takes me to Aimé Césaire’s “Discourse on Colonialism.” Here is a slightly longer than usual quote from that seminal text:
“Colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.”
If we take the current Israeli narrative, that they severely underestimated Hamas, at face value, then we see one part of this boomerang. In thinking that Palestinians are animals, in treating them as such, Israel may have come to think the people trapped in Gaza incapable of escape. Césaire, in this section of his work, is not only speaking about how the colonizer looks at and treats the colonized, but also about how the colonizer becomes dehumanized through the act of dehumanizing others. In Israel and the IDF we see not only the underestimation of Palestinians but a willingness to ignore the safety of the people they claim to care so much about, a willingness to ignore their own civilians. We know this not only from this new report’s evidence of the IDF ignoring Hamas’ plans, but in the bombing of areas in Gaza where hostages are kept, the confirmed shooting of hostages, and even through reports of Israeli soldiers killing Israeli citizens on October 7th.
I say all of this not just to say that the behavior of the IDF exemplifies Césaire’s claims about how colonization dehumanizes the colonizer, but also to offer one disheartening alternative to why the Israeli forces did nothing to prevent Hamas’ attack. For the past eight months people have speculated that Netanyahu refuses to halt the genocide in Gaza in part because he wants to cling to power. At this moment Israel’s Prime Minister is embroiled in a corruption trial, and that is just one sign of the precarity of his position. A recent development, coming right before this new and damning report, is the dissolution of the war cabinet. In other words Netanyahu has just gone from making war decisions with a small body representing a wide range of the Israeli political spectrum to making them with an even smaller consortium of more like-minded advisors, after prominent centrist Benny Gantz left the war cabinet.
This shift leaves Netanyahu even more weak and isolated, as thousands of Israelis call for new elections and he looks more vulnerable than ever. It’s hard to know what he’ll do next, and if we look back to October 7th it’s hard to know what he would have been willing to do in order to solidify his position leading up to that day. This report meant Netanyahu must have been aware of the very real risk to his citizens, Israeli intelligence services did after all predict almost exactly what came to pass. And while the official narrative is that Israel underestimated Hamas, there’s a very real chance that Netanyahu was willing to leave the south of Israel open to the attack. One foreign policy analyst, Rula Jebreal, even says that Israel transferred two military units from Gaza to the occupied West Bank, despite the foreknowledge of Hamas’ plan.
Regardless of the exact reasons that Netanyahu and the IDF failed to act on their knowledge, the rationale for Israel’s relentless attack on Gaza has been severely undermined. The endless emphasis on the hostages is considerably undercut by the world knowing that Israel had a detailed map of Hamas’ hostage-taking plans and still did nothing, not to mention how they’ve bombed and shot hostages since October 7th. The impetus, the excuse, the reason Israel claims and clings to as their rationale for murdering tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza now looks entirely preventable. And some series of choices led them to do nothing to prevent it.
Of course there is no possible justification for Israel’s actions, but in light of the latest news, reasonable people around the world are forced to see things a bit differently. Do Netanyahu and the IDF not care about their own people? We see how little they think of Palestinians, how sociopathic and murderous their actions are in Gaza. We see how colonization and apartheid dehumanize the oppressor. But could it really get to a point where you’re willing to sacrifice, or risk the lives of, the people you claim to be fighting for? This news forces us to consider that reality very seriously, to confront that possibility and in doing so confront the unpleasant, brutal roads this latest reports leads us down. And we can’t afford to look away.
The saddest part of reading this as news is that it is not shocking. Obvious and expected.
This is heartbreaking to read.