IDF ignored October 6 intel warning of Hamas attack the next morning – report

Drone operation over the Strip flagged Hamas behavior one day before October 7 attack, but military’s Southern Command reportedly dismissed it as a routine exercise by terror group

On October 6, 2023 — less than 24 hours before the devastating Hamas attack that triggered the Gaza war — Israel gathered intelligence indicating the terror group was planning something for the following morning, the Kan public broadcaster revealed Friday.

The information came via an intelligence-gathering operation conducted via drones over the Gaza Strip, focused on the Hamas guards operating in the tunnel where Israel believed hostage Avera Mengistu was being held, the report said.

Mengistu, suffering from mental illness, entered Gaza of his own accord in 2014 and was then arrested and held by the group. He was freed as part of a ceasefire deal in February of this year.

A piece of information obtained during that drone operation, though unclear, set off a red flag, and it was passed along to the Israel Defense Forces’ Southern Command, Kan reported.

The broadcaster claimed, citing “sources,” that the Southern Command dismissed the intelligence as, in all likelihood, indicative of a Hamas training exercise, rather than an imminent attack.

The October 6 operation does not appear in the IDF’s records, nor has it been mentioned by probes into the events leading up to and during the subsequent terror onslaught, Kan noted, saying the reason for its omission is not clear.

Kan first reported on the intelligence operation earlier this month, but initially cited a source privy to the matter who said it had brought neither an intelligence breakthrough on Mengistu nor any indication of the imminent Hamas attack.

The report comes about two weeks after IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir appointed a panel of experts to investigate the military’s failed handling of intelligence reports received since 2018, which outlined Hamas’s intent to launch a wide-scale attack against Israel — a topic not included in the army’s initial probes into the October 7, 2023, onslaught.

The decision came after a different team of former senior officers conducted a review of the IDF’s internal probes into the failures on October 7. The team found many of the probes to be inadequate, and also pointed to several topics that were not investigated at all, chief among them was the intelligence reports of Hamas’s attack plan, codenamed in the army “Jericho’s Walls.”

In February, the IDF’s internal probe of the intelligence failures leading up to the October 7 attack concluded that the military had, over the years, received information and plans outlining Hamas’s intent to launch a wide-scale attack against Israel over a period of several years, but dismissed the plan as unrealistic and unfeasible, all while the terror group continued its preparations for October 7.