This is how Israeli commanders responded to warnings of a Hamas attack: “You will be court-martialed if you talk nonsense.”

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After Hamas’s attack on Israel, it quickly became clear that the Israeli military and intelligence service ignored warnings of a possible attack for weeks.

According to the Israeli news portal N12, guards at the border with the Gaza Strip had been reporting unusual activities by Hamas terrorists for weeks. However, the commanders ignored the warnings, one of the soldiers is quoted in the report. One of the commanders said: “I don’t want to hear this nonsense anymore. If you bother us with these things again, you will be court-martialed.”

The commanders were also convinced that no attacks would take place, the soldiers reported to N12. “Hamas are a bunch of idiots. “They won’t do anything,” one of the superiors reportedly said.

“I saw it like it was on TV”

Another report in the Jerusalem Post quoted one of the soldiers speaking to his commander about the “unusual events in the Gaza Strip.” He told him it was “nothing special,” the young soldier recalled.

“We watched the exercises as if they were on television,” the soldier remembers. “We had fun. The commanders did not take the event seriously, but found it interesting that they were doing exercises.” The soldiers exchanged information about it. “We were like, ‘Shit, can we really ignore this? Will the fact that we ignore this nonsense one day come back to haunt us?”

Radio traffic not monitored

An investigation by the New York Times showed at the end of October how Israeli intelligence underestimated the risk of an attack. For example, Hamas radio communications were no longer intercepted. Israeli intelligence had stopped eavesdropping a year before the major attack because the agents considered it a waste of time.

Israeli military intelligence and the National Security Council had agreed since May 2021 that Hamas would not dare attack Israel for fear of a devastating counterattack.

And so the Hamas terrorists could prepare at their leisure, scout targets and train fighters for the attack. Israeli authorities believed they were safe and relied on their air defense system and border fortifications to keep Hamas at bay – a serious mistake.

Source: Blick