The Israeli military on Thursday released the first findings from its internal investigations into the colossal military and intelligence failure of Oct. 7, 2023, describing how senior officers vastly underestimated Hamas and then misinterpreted early warnings that a major attack was coming.
The inquiries attempted to answer the question that has confounded Israel since that day, when thousands of Hamas-led gunmen overran Israeli communities, army bases and a music festival: Where was the army?
Israeli military officials said they spent tens of thousands of hours probing the military’s intelligence-gathering and its subsequent response to the attack, in which about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and 250 taken hostage, in the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Survivors waited long hours to be rescued by soldiers after an attack that began in the early hours of a Jewish holiday.
Briefing reporters the day before publishing some of their initial findings, Israeli military officials, who could not be named under army rules, suggested that the failure stemmed from flawed assumptions about Hamas’s capabilities and intentions, as well as what some military officials have called an “addiction” to precise intelligence, which was lacking.
The mistaken view of Hamas had gone largely unchallenged within Israeli intelligence circles and senior command, and it led to a series of failures. Those included a chaotic military response in the first hours of the assault after troops deployed along the border were swiftly overwhelmed and the military’s Southern Command and Gaza Division was overrun.
The findings of military and intelligence failures largely match detailed investigations by local and international news media. But the military is now presenting its own version of the events for the sake of accountability, Israeli military officials said.
The military did not coordinate its investigations with other bodies, such as the Shin Bet internal security agency, which is also responsible for intelligence-gathering in Gaza, or the police.
It also did not address years of government policy and decision-making leading up to the attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly said that he will answer the tough questions after the war, rejecting a broad public demand for an independent commission that can apportion personal responsibility.
The military’s internal inquiries were not aimed at finding individual responsibility, officials said. That may come later, they said, under Israel’s incoming military chief of staff, Eyal Zamir. He is replacing Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi in early March. They said the main goal was to learn lessons from the debacle.
General Halevi has accepted personal responsibility for the military’s failure under his command to protect Israelis and announced last month that he was stepping down. Aharon Haliva, the former head of Israel’s military intelligence, resigned in 2024, as did the head of the Israeli military’s Gaza brigade. More resignations are anticipated in the coming weeks and months.
Some of the military’s key findings, as laid out by officials, include:
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Hamas had deceived Israel over recent years into thinking it was interested in calm and improving economic conditions in Gaza. The military primarily focused its resources on Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, both formidable enemies.
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There was nothing improvised about the attack. The military acknowledged reports that it had found a Hamas operational invasion plan code-named “Jericho Wall” by 2022, which it says was initially conceived in 2016. It took Hamas time to build up the necessary force, unknown to Israel. The approximately 40-page document outlined, point by point, the kind of devastating invasion that came on Oct. 7. In a written summary of some of the main findings, the military said that “the information was generally misinterpreted as an unrealistic or unfeasible plan.”
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Before Oct. 7, military assessed that the threat posed by Hamas amounted to a limited number of raids at four to eight points along the border, not the dozens seen during the assault, and that any such attack would involve dozens of militants, not thousands.
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There had been an Israeli assumption that any major shift in Hamas would be preceded by an early intelligence warning, but there was no prior intelligence of an attack planned for Oct. 7 and no tactical alert. As a result, only regular forces were deployed for border defense, as usual for a Saturday that was also a Jewish holiday.
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Some early signals of something irregular happening in Gaza were received during the night between Oct. 6 and 7, such as the activation of dozens of cellphones fitted with Israeli SIM cards. But Israeli officials also found enough reassuring signs to feed into existing preconceptions of Hamas’s capabilities, the military said. (The initial report did not specifically address warnings by lower-level army lookouts of strange activity in the months leading up to Oct. 7 attack that appear to have been dismissed.)
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The assault came in three waves. The first, in the initial half-hour, involved about 1,200 Hamas commandos. The second, from approximately 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., consisted of about 2,000 more commandos and gunmen from other armed organizations. The third was mostly a civilian mob urged on by Hamas’s military commander.
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Only by about 1 p.m. did Israeli military headquarters and commanders on the ground manage to piece together a good picture of the overall scale of the attack. The initial response by armed civilians, and officers and soldiers who rushed to the battle on their own was insufficient to blunt the blow of the first few hours. Three brigade commanders and several battalion and company commanders were killed. It took until the night of Oct. 9 for the military to declare it had regained operational control of the border areas.
The military began in recent days to present its findings to residents of communities that came under attack. Reactions were mixed, with some residents saying the inquiries dealing with their villages raised more questions than answers, and others saying they gained new insight.
Amir Tibon, an Israeli journalist and resident of one of the villages, Nahal Oz, praised the military’s inquiry as “in-depth and serious.”
He said he “felt it touched on all the difficult points, without any whitewashing.” But he added that it was essentially a tactical report that could not replace the need for a full independent commission of inquiry.
Mr. Tibon, the author of a recent book, “The Gates of Gaza,” about his family’s ordeal on Oct. 7 and the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said the military inquiry had provided him with some new details of what he described as “the heroic battle for the defense of Nahal Oz,” though not many.
One thing he learned, he said, was that three waves of assailants had entered his village, not two, as he had previously thought, and that the third one arrived at about 11 a.m.
“That shows the absolute madness of how long it took for the army to manage to get organized and to send a large force to rescue us,” he said.
The Hamas-led assault set off a devastating 15-month war as Israel sought to eradicate Hamas in Gaza, killing more than 48,000 Palestinians, a majority of them women, children and the elderly, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. The war has left much of the enclave in ruins and spread into a broader regional conflict.