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- Israel dismissed intel about Hamas attack plan over a year ago - report
Israel dismissed intel about Hamas attack plan over a year ago - report
'It is a plan designed to start a war,' said a veteran analyst reporting on Hamas's training exercise back in July
Israel had access to Hamas's plan of attack against the nation for over a year, reported on Thursday The New York Times. Israeli officials are said to have dismissed the intelligence report on terrorists' invasion plan claiming it was too ambitious for Hamas to execute the plan.
The 40-page document, code-named as 'Jericho Wall,' outlined details of the future October 7 attack: plans of taking over Israeli towns and storming of the key military bases, including the base in Re'im.
The report says that terrorists followed the blueprint "with shocking precision: document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and [terrorists] to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot."
All those scenes were seen across southern Israel during the October 7 attack that resulted in killing of 1200 civilians.
The document also suggested that Hamas had intelligence on the military targets dislocation and size of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) deployments. In the report, NYT raises a fair question of how terrorists could gain access to such sensitive information.
While it remains unclear if Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders were among those who overlooked the threat, it is said that the blueprint "circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders."
“It is not yet possible to determine whether the plan has been fully accepted and how it will be manifested,” read a military assessment cited by NYT.
Later in July 2023, three months before the attack, a veteran analyst of Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, warned that Hamas conducted intense training exercise that matched the preparation outlined in the blueprint, said NYT. "I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary. It is a plan designed to start a war. It’s not just a raid on a village," wrote the analyst.
Those concerns are said to have been brushed off. "The audacity of the blueprint, officials said, made it easy to underestimate. All militaries write plans that they never use, and Israeli officials assessed that, even if Hamas invaded, it might muster a force of a few dozen, not the hundreds who ultimately attacked," cited the report.
NYT stated that Israeli officials would not disclose the origin of the report, but the blueprint is said to have been among "several versions of attack plans collected over the years."
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