Hamas drew detailed attack plans for years with help of spies, documents suggest
Hamas engaged in years of planning, drawing up detailed maps with the help of spies inside Israel
ahead of the 7 October attack, the country’s military has concluded
after examining vast quantities of phones, notebooks and documents
seized from gunmen on the battlefield and in Gaza.
Fighters
also carried guides to hostage-taking and Arabic-to-Hebrew phrasebooks,
one of which included the line “put your hands up and spread your
legs”. The document was included in a cache of material that was
released on Monday by the Israel Defense Forces’ Amshat military
intelligence unit.
A senior Israeli officer said the goal of Amshat, reestablished after 7
October, was to understand “Hamas attack and defence plans”, to gain
operational intelligence and to better understand its doctrine after
Israel’s military was caught unawares by the Hamas raid in which 1,200 were killed and 300 taken hostage.
The latest disclosures underline how little Israel’s powerful security
establishment understood of Hamas’s capabilities prior to the attack and
the sheer amount of signs or clues that were missed or discounted.
Last week, the New York Times reported that Israeli officials had seen a 40-page battle plan
for Hamas’s eventual attack, but it was dismissed as too difficult for
Hamas to carry out. Warnings from IDF spotters, mostly women, that Hamas
fighters were openly exercising for an attack were also cast aside.
Among the documents recovered was a thorough map of an Israeli military
base, arguably more detailed than would have been required by the IDF
itself. Compiling such a map could only have been done using “inside
knowledge” – almost certainly from a Hamas spy – an Israeli intelligence
source said.
Laptops and handwritten notebooks refer to Hamas plans to target
military locations and key points in central Israel, suggesting the
group or some elements of it had aspirations to penetrate dozens of
miles inside the country once its fighters were ordered to breach the
wall surrounding the strip.
The detail and sheer scale of the information found have led insiders to
conclude that Hamas engaged in “years of planning” – an effort that the
IDF and other Israeli intelligence agencies simply failed to take
seriously as a threat. There are details of weapon stores and
home-produced guides to the munitions available.
On 7 October, Hamas fighters carried mobile
phones with Israeli sim cards and walkie-talkies so they had more than
one means of communication. Among the items recovered was a radio
transmitter with solar battery to maintain contact, it is understood,
for an extended period of time in Israel.
An
estimated 3,000 Hamas fighters took part in the cross-border attack, and
about 1,500 were killed in the initial phase of fighting. But the
Israeli military response was so sluggish that in some cases it took
many hours for the army to respond, while some Hamas fighters remained
at large for days.
Many
of items recovered in cars used by Hamas were personal or family
memorabilia. The Israeli military also recovered a map of part of Gaza, riddled with bullet holes, which revealed previously unknown Hamas military sites.
Journalists were shown a wide range of documents and other items
recovered from Hamas on Monday in addition to the handful that were
publicly released. Reporters were asked not to describe the extra
material too precisely – omitting information such as locations – for
operational security reasons.
One of the documents that was made public was originally handwritten but recovered from a laptop. It details a plan to seize an IDF command post
close to the Gaza border fence with two squads of soldiers, listing
their weapons and roles and contains a careful hand-drawn map of the
target location.
Other documents, also made public, appear to demonstrate that Hamas saw a
value in hostage-taking. One is described by the IDF as a “how to take a hostage checklist”
and it recommends that detention areas are booby-trapped with
explosives. It also tells fighters to “kill those who cause trouble and
anyone who tries to escape”, with orders to kill to be given by the
company commander.
It also recommends that Hamas fighters use a phrase list of Hebrew words, phonetically translated from Arabic words. Copies of lists that have been recovered,
and which were published by Israel on Monday, include translations for
“put your hands up and spread your legs” and “remove your clothes”.
Phones and laptops have also yielded a welter of videos, including
graphic footage of the 7 October terror attacks that Israeli officials
have shown to journalists and politicians to underline the violent
horror of what occurred.
But one video released on Monday also appears to show the relative ease
with which a squad of fighters were able to blow open the Gaza wall with
Israel near the Egyptian border.
The footage, taken from a GoPro camera carried by the fighter, follows
the squad inside Israel for several hours, until the fighter is killed
in a shootout at the Kerem Shalom kibbutz close to the Gaza border.
