The Israeli army announced its first official account of the errors that led to his failures during the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, which launched a war in Gaza.
The report concludes that Israeli defense forces (IDF) “failed in their mission of protection of Israeli civilians.”
The 19 -page report contains a lot of what is already known about what has led to a catastrophic loss of about 1,200 lives when about 5000 armed attackers from Hamas and other Palestinian groups fell into Israel and also took 251 hostages in the process.
There are no dramatic revelations, but this states that the army has misjudged the intentions of the Palestinian armed groups and underestimated its abilities.
The report says that the army considered Gaza with a threat of secondary security, with the priority of Dane Iran and Hezbollah. His policy towards Gaza, he says, was “paradoxical: Hamas was illegitimate, but there was no effort to develop an alternative.”
The army chose an approach to “conflict management” to deal with Gaza, it is said. And assumed that Hamas was not “neither interested in [in] nor is he preparing for the Great War ” – the perception enhanced by the Hamas tactic deceive.
Evidence since 2018, who suggest that Hamas – which Israel, the United Kingdom and other countries have banned as a terrorist group indeed developed an ambitious plan, interpreted as “unrealistic or impossible”, which reflected “Hamas’s long -term aspiration, not as an effective threat.”
The report says that in the months that led to the war, the Administration for Military Intelligence began to develop a new estimate, suggesting that Hamas’s plan was not only a vision, but a “concrete framework for operational planning”.
However, this emergence assessment did not warn senior military intelligence officials.
The report identifies a wide series of complacency within the army about Hamas’s intentions and how to cope with the threat it represents.
“There was no deep discussion about the question: what if we make a mistake?” The report says.
Over time, “a significant and continuous gap between the Hamas intelligence and reality intelligence was developed.”
The report also emphasizes what it says was “a decline in a deep knowledge of a hostile different worldview, including its culture, religion, language and history.”
The deep reform of the Culture of the Administration for Intellation Administration, “Encouraging intellectual openness, skepticism, listening, learning, debate and constructive disagreement” is referred to.
He says that the desire to protect very valuable intelligence sources contributed to the military failure to raise the warning level just before October 7th.
Gaza Division, he says, “was effectively defeated for several hours of” October 7, was significantly disturbed by his ability to understand what was happening and an effective react.
He says the aviation forces responded quickly, but that “there was significant difficulty of distinguishing between the troops, civilians and the Idf terrorist.”
The report also says that in some incidents wounded soldiers were evacuated in front of civilians.
After presenting the findings on Monday to the commanders, leaving the IDF chief, LT Gen Herzi Halevi, he said he had assumed complete responsibility for failures.
“I accept my responsibility. That’s mine. I was the commander of the army on October 7th and I have my own responsibility and I have all your responsibility. I see it as mine. And I see that and in my every command that went wrong, there is also a part of me,” he said in the video.
Last month, the General announced his resignation for failure and called on the investigating commission to conduct a wider investigation that would help prevent another attack.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who did not acknowledge any responsibility for what happened on October 7th, said such a state investigation should wait until the end of the war.
His critics accuse Mr Netanyahu of not willing to admit any personal guilt.
Israel responded to an attack on October 7th, launching a campaign for air and land in Gaza, during which at least 48,365 people were killed, according to the HAMAS Territorial Ministry of Health.
