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Saturday, December 02, 2023

Benny Gantz and body language, from a month ago, and current "Jericho Wall" news, the NYT news scoop, now widespread. Netanyahu and cabinet - were they really surprised or did they let it happen so airstrikes and IDF ground war could destroy two-thirds of Gaza and kill thousands, maiming thousands more, with an aim to destroy Hamas? Circumstances fit either scenario, and either way, they'd say the same thing, "What a surprise!" and back then it was strange but no smoking gun. Today is clearer. Netanyahu wanted a "justification" to do what's been done and some 1200 Israeli lives were expendable people to get his aim moving. Or that's the circumstantial inference Crabrgass has reached.

Back a month ago it was <i>strange</i> that the Oct. 7 slaughter happened with Israel sitting still as it happened. Mossad and Shin Bet have the reputation of being proactive. But no smoking gun that Bibi and crew said, "Let it be, tomorrow belongs to us." Today is clearer. 

Netanyahu wanted a "justification" to do what's been done and some 1200 lives arguably were expendable people to get his aim moving.  Or that's the one circumstantial inference Crabrgass has reached, (the other being surprise).

And, yes, they say otherwise, but what would they say in either event. The circumstantial inference Crabgrass draws is premised on who Netanyahu is and has been. As well as who Mossad, IDF, and Shin Bet have been. We view the quality of character Netanyahu has shown and that within his governing coalition.

Evidence for readers to reach their own conclusions -

Times of Israel, 29 Oct. 2023

Netanyahu slammed for post blaming intelligence chiefs for Oct. 7 failure; apologizes - PM deletes tweet hours later, then apologizes and says he fully backs security chiefs, after Gantz upbraids him: ‘When we are at war, leadership must display responsibility -- ’

In a late-night tweet Saturday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated previous claims that he was not warned by security chiefs about an impending Hamas attack, and claimed all security chiefs had consistently assured him Hamas was deterred, drawing sharp criticism over the apparent attempt to blame them and evade responsibility for the disaster. He deleted the post some nine hours later, and issued a rare apology shortly afterward.

“Contrary to the false claims: Under no circumstances and at no stage was Prime Minister Netanyahu warned of Hamas’s war intentions,” read the original tweet, posted shortly after 1 a.m. local time, hours after Netanyahu held a joint press conference with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Minister Benny Gantz.

The tweet elaborated: “On the contrary, all the security officials, including the head of military intelligence and the head of the Shin Bet, assessed that Hamas had been deterred and was looking for a settlement. This assessment was submitted again and again to the prime minister and the cabinet by all the security forces and intelligence community, up until the outbreak of the war.”

At the press conference, Netanyahu had been asked about a written warning about the growing likelihood of war ostensibly issued in recent months by the head of the Shin Bet and the head of IDF military intelligence, and said the question was “inaccurate.”

About an hour after he deleted the post, Netanyahu issued a rare apology for the statement, writing on X late Sunday morning: “I was wrong. The things I said following the press conference should not have been said and I apologize for that.”

He added that: “I give full backing to all the heads of the security services. I am sending strength to the [IDF] chief of staff and the commanders and soldiers of the IDF who are on the frontlines and fighting for our home.”

Netanyahu’s statement, seeming to place blame on security officials for the failures leading to the October 7 massacre rather than accept any responsibility himself, drew sharp criticism Sunday morning, including from within his emergency government.

Body language, while another guy speaks -

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks (left) as Defense Minister Yoav Galant (center) and head of the National Unity party Benny Gantz (right) during a joint press conference at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv. October 28, 2023. (Dana Kopel/POOL)

The item continues -

“The prime minister must retract his statement and stop addressing this matter,” Gantz tweeted in response on Sunday, in what appeared to be the first public disagreement between the two since the National Unity party leader joined the coalition following the outbreak of war.

“On this morning in particular, I want to support and strengthen all the security forces and IDF soldiers, including the IDF chief of staff, the head of military intelligence, the head of the Shin Bet,” Gantz added. “When we are at war, leadership must display responsibility, make the correct decisions and strengthen the forces in a way that they will understand what we demand from them… the prime minister must retract his statement.”

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, who has refused to join the emergency war government, tweeted that “Netanyahu crossed a red line tonight” and must apologize.

“While IDF soldiers and officers are fighting bravely against Hamas and Hezbollah, [the PM] is trying to blame them, instead of supporting them. The efforts to evade responsibility and place blame on the security establishment weakens the IDF while it is fighting Israel’s enemies,” Lapid said.

Former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, considered a close Netanyahu ally, said Sunday morning to Kan public radio, “Responsibility is something you take at the start of your job, not midway.” Cohen noted that when he led the Mossad, “everything that happened in the agency, from top to bottom, was my responsibility.”

Cohen, who left his post in June 2021, said that he did not want to address “whether there were any warnings” leading up to the devastating October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

Cohen added that he had not been privy to intelligence reports since he left his role, but that the heads of intelligence services are the ones ultimately responsible for understanding intelligence reports and passing that information to the appropriate channels.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) and head of the Mossad Yossi Cohen during a toast ceremony for the Jewish New Year on October 2, 2017 (Haim Zach/GPO)

Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir also joined the criticism of Netanyahu’s since-deleted post, writing that “the problem isn’t specific warnings, but rather the entire mistaken concept. The policy of containment, the imaginary deterrence, and buying temporary quiet for an exorbitant price” were the cause of the entire problem.

Ben Gvir added, however, that such a discussion “is not for now,” but that there will be “a lot of time afterwards for an accounting,” alluding to the position he will likely adopt after the war against Netanyahu’s policies of trying to contain Hamas.

Nobody openly on record questioning whether Netanyahu knew, but let it happen as a tool to boost the Israeli public into a jingoistic war he and cabinet wanted. As in "Remember the Maine." The report went on -

Netanyahu’s late-night tweet came just hours after the prime minister took questions from reporters for the first time since the outbreak of the war, during a Saturday night press conference alongside Gallant and Gantz.

See the prior image of the three at the press conference, where Crabgrass reads Gantz as thinking "His lips are moving and he's lying," with consequent body language. But that's only a guess. Nobody was openly on record suggesting he may have let it happen to boost the nation to want war. The month old report continued;

During that appearance, the prime minister once again stopped short of taking direct responsibility for the Palestinian terror group’s deadly onslaught.

[...] He also refused to commit to setting up a state commission of inquiry — the most powerful and consequential investigative panel — to investigate the failings that enabled the Hamas atrocities. “There will not be a stone left unturned,” he said, adding that his focus right now was only on winning and “saving the state.”


[... image omitted] Netanyahu was also asked whether his government’s judicial overhaul efforts had distracted attention from security challenges, and said the legislative proposals to weaken the courts are “no longer on the agenda” and that disagreements had been resolved in the face of war.

[...] Hamas terrorists breached Israel’s security perimeter around Gaza under the cover of thousands of rockets, and then operated with relative impunity for much of that Saturday.

That last paragraph has mojo in light of the recent "Jericho Wall" reporting, as will in due time be noted in the post.

 

NYTimes, Oct. 10, 2023, describing aspects of the Oct. 7 Hamas incursion:

A bulldozer breaking through a fence.
Hamas fighters used earth-moving equipment to breach the border fence between Gaza and Israel on Saturday, allowing more than 1,500 fighters to surge through nearly 30 points along the border.Credit...Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa/Reuters

The reporters spoke to current and former Israeli security officials to build an understanding of how Israel failed to foresee and confront the Hamas attack.

"Failed to foresee," and "failed/declined to confront the Hamas attack" are two very different things. Obviously. Non-confrontation might have happened alone, or in combination with surprise. Continuing -

Shortly before attackers from Gaza poured into Israel at dawn on Saturday, Israeli intelligence detected a surge in activity on some of the Gazan militant networks it monitors. Realizing something unusual was happening, agents sent an alert to the Israeli soldiers guarding the Gazan border, according to two senior Israeli security officials.

But the warning wasn’t acted upon, either because the soldiers didn’t get it or the soldiers didn’t read it.

Shortly afterward, Hamas, the group that controls Gaza, sent drones to disable some of the Israeli military’s cellular communications stations and surveillance towers along the border, preventing the duty officers from monitoring the area remotely with video cameras. The drones also destroyed remote-controlled machine guns that Israel had installed on its border fortifications, removing a key means of combating a ground attack.

Again, keep in mind detail of how events happened -

That made it easier for Hamas assailants to approach and blow up parts of the border fence and bulldoze it in several places with surprising ease, allowing thousands of Palestinians to walk through the gaps.

These operational failures and weaknesses were among a wide array of logistical and intelligence lapses by the Israeli security services that paved the way for the Gazan incursion into southern Israel, according to four senior Israeli security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss a sensitive matter and their early assessment of what went wrong.

[...] For hours, the strongest military in the Middle East was rendered powerless to fight back against a far weaker enemy, leaving villages defenseless for most of the day against squads of terrorists who killed more than 1,000 Israelis, including soldiers in their underwear; abducted at least 150 people; overran at least four military camps; and spread out across more than 30 square miles of Israeli territory.

The four officials said the success of the attack, based on their early assessment, was rooted in a slew of security failures by Israel’s intelligence community and military, including:

  • Failure by intelligence officers to monitor key communication channels used by Palestinian attackers;

  • Overreliance on border surveillance equipment that was easily shut down by attackers, allowing them to raid military bases and slay soldiers in their beds;

  • Clustering of commanders in a single border base that was overrun in the opening phase of the incursion, preventing communication with the rest of the armed forces;

  • And a willingness to accept at face value assertions by Gazan military leaders, made on private channels that the Palestinians knew were being monitored by Israel, that they were not preparing for battle.

Get real? All that intelligence, and it happened? That does not sound right. Mossad and Shin Bet being exemplary agencies in knowing what's up, when, how, and who's afoot. 

Continuing, where an official notes the incredulous events:

“We spend billions and billions on gathering intelligence on Hamas,” said Yoel Guzansky, a former senior official at Israel’s National Security Council. “Then, in a second,” he added, “everything collapsed like dominoes.”

The first failure took root months before the attack, as Israeli security chiefs made incorrect assumptions about the extent of the threat that Hamas posed to Israel from Gaza.

Hamas stayed out of two fights in the past year, allowing Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller armed group in Gaza, to take on Israel alone. Last month, Hamas leadership also ended a period of rioting along the border, in an agreement brokered by Qatar, giving the impression that it was not looking for an escalation.

Politico, Oct. 24, 2023: ‘Netanyahu Got All the Warnings,’ Says Former Head of Israeli Military Intelligence -- Former chief of Israeli military intelligence Amos Yadlin on where the war goes from here.

Amos Yadlin has unique insights into all these questions. The 71-year-old former Israeli intelligence chief, who oversaw the destruction of Syria’s nascent nuclear program and the serial sabotage of Iran’s, has emerged as a key voice on the crisis, briefing members of Israel’s war cabinet. For nearly a decade following his term as intelligence chief, he served as head of Israel’s highly influential Institute for National Security Studies, and he remains a security eminence grise, now running the national-security consultancy Mind Israel.

In a new interview with POLITICO Magazine conducted via Zoom over two days last week, Yadlin offered a useful window into official Israeli thinking on the escalating war — from solutions to the ongoing hostage crisis to the challenge of avoiding Palestinian civilian casualties.

Yadlin made clear that Israel’s policy in this war was not simply to retaliate for the massacre or weaken Hamas, but to definitively end the jihadist group’s 16-year rule in Gaza.

[...]

Birnbaum: You said that Israel would not go back to the 2005 line. What do you mean by that? Will Israel maintain some sort of a buffer zone even after the invasion?

Yadlin: After the destruction of Hamas, we have no desire to control 2 million Palestinians in Gaza, but we have an obligation to ensure that a catastrophe like the 7th of October never happens again. So the way to do it is, as you mentioned, a buffer zone — a perimeter of one or two kilometers, well-mined with anti-tank obstacles, that will make sure that if there will be another intention to invade Israel, it is not going to be as easy as it was last time. And the idea that you pay in territory if you kill Israelis is also an idea that we want them to fully understand. But this is based on future security needs. Nobody in Israel will come back to live one kilometer from the border if there is no security zone that will ensure we have enough time to stop the next attack.

[...]

Birnbaum: How much of these failures would you attribute to Israel’s domestic crisis over the judicial overhaul?

Yadlin: There were nine months that Netanyahu pushed Israel into a domestic crisis that took all the energy of everybody. The attention of Israel was inside and not outside. And Netanyahu got all the warningsfrom his defense minister, from the chief of staff, from the head of intelligence, from the head of Shin Bet and from independent writers like me, like others — that this is weakening Israel deterrence and endangering Israeli national security, that he is risking and weakening every source of Israeli power — the high-tech industry, the Air Force, the intelligence, the deterrence, the relations with the world, with the U.S.

Netanyahu also has to be blamed for releasing Sinwar and hundreds of other dangerous terrorists [in the 2011 Shalit deal]. And he conflated Hamas with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah because the PA was a body that he should negotiate with, and he didn’t want to negotiate. So he said, ‘OK, Hamas is not that dangerous, we can live with it. Every three, four years, we’ll do a round of exchange of fire. But this is not the most dangerous enemy of Israel.’

Birnbaum: You’re a longtime supporter of the two-state solution. In your opinion, from an Israeli perspective, did what happened strengthen or weaken the case for a Palestinian state?

Yadlin: Weaken, dramatically. By the way, I’m a supporter of a two-state solution, but with zero military presence in the Palestinian state, because I know what the Palestinians want to do. We went through decades of terror, and exactly what happened on Simchat Torah is making me — a security hawk and political dove — even more strict on security. This attack will move the Israeli public even more to the right. The right already blames Oslo and the Disengagement. And the idea that we can give the Palestinians the capability to build even security forces at the levels that the PA has — this will be very difficult now. The only reason that the polls are not showing a move to the right is Netanyahu, because Israelis blame Netanyahu, even on the right. But when Netanyahu departs, getting a two-state solution will become more difficult.

Birnbaum: President Biden visited Israel after the Hamas attack. Are you satisfied with his administration’s response thus far?

Yadlin: I think this is a very friendly administration, and Biden personally is the best president toward Israel. He’s not shy to say that he’s a Zionist — that you don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist. He still remembers the Holocaust. His two speeches belong to the Hall of Fame of speeches. He was empathic. He was making a moral statement that supports Israel. He promised Israel a lot of assistance and security and gave us the sense that we have an ally, that we are fighting together against this very cruel terrorist organization.

Having said that, America has its own interests, and one of the interests is that the war will not escalate to the north and to Iran, so Biden urged Netanyahu not to launch a preemptive strike against Hezbollah. He is also concerned about the Palestinians. He wants a two-state solution. He cares about the Palestinians who are not terrorists, who are under the Hamas control and unfortunately being used as human shields. He supports the war’s objective, to destroy Hamas, but he asked Israel to do it according to international law, with minimum suffering to innocent people.

Birnbaum: Some Republicans have criticized the Biden administration’s recent deal with Iran that unfroze $6 billion in oil revenues, saying it indirectly or even directly helped finance these attacks. Is there any merit to those charges?

Yadlin: America is now approaching an election, and the two sides will use arguments against each other. I’m looking at something that is more encouraging — that Israel is again becoming a bipartisan issue on the Hill, with both parties supporting Israel. This is not the case on the [college] campuses. Over there, the [boycott, divestment and sanctions] and Palestinian supporters are still quite influential. … But in Washington, you see bipartisan support for Israel, and this is what’s important.

A lengthy excerpt, but in a vague way, (insufficiently followed up as to what warnings), but for certain saying, Netanyahu had all the warnings.

TODAY -

 The NYT story which has grown legs comes next, Netanyahu and his people indeed had detailed warnings.

First, to show how widespread the story has become: search = 40-page battle plan, code-named "Jericho Wall"

The NYTimes launched the story, but a look at JP's Israeli reporting first:

Israel had detailed Hamas attack plans a year ago, dismissed them - NYT

The document outlined "a methodical assault" in which drones would attack Israel's surveillance system as terrorists entered the country using paragliders and motorcycles under the cover of rockets.


A bombshell report by the New York Times claims that Israeli officials had a detailed, approximately 40-page document outlining "point by point" the plans for a Hamas attack on Israeli soil, but [ostensibly] dismissed the plan as aspirational and beyond the group's capacities.

The document, which authorities codenamed "Jericho Wall," is reported to have outlined "a methodical assault" in which drones would attack Israel's surveillance system as terrorists entered the country on foot and using paragliders and motorcycles under the cover of a barrage of rockets.

The document is also said to have included the locations and sizes of IDF forces in the area, and specifically stated as an objective to overwhelm the military base in Re'im, the site of the nature party on October 7 that was targeted early in the attack. At the top of the document was a quotation from the Qur'an: "Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will certainly prevail." 

So, holding the roadmap of Hamas, the enemy, a concert style event was put on at a military site, (the nature of the site being at or adjacent to a military base is news; yet see two searches, here and here), i.e., a military target where coincidentally, civilians had flocked. This is troubling news. Continuing -

The plans "circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders," the report says. The IDF's Gaza division wrote an assessment of it, reporting plans for "a new raid, unprecedented in its scope," but concluding that the plans were a "compass," detailing Hamas's ambitions for the future, rather than an immediate plan of action.

Colonel called the plans "totally imaginative," said to "wait patiently"

Then, in July 2023, the IDF's signal intelligence division, Unit 8200, reported that Hamas had been spotted conducting training exercises that mirrored the blueprint in "Jericho Wall," including exercises to simulate shooting down Israeli airplanes, occupying a kibbutz, and overrunning a military base.

During the exercise, Hamas terrorists used the same quotation from the Quran that appeared at the top of the "Jericho Wall" document. The Unit 8200 analyst who wrote the report warned that Hamas was building the capacity to put the plan into action, and that the exercises Hamas was engaged in closely reflected what was outlined in the document. 

The colonel who received the report apparently called the exercise "totally imaginative," saying, "in short, let's wait patiently."

An internal debate followed, with others endorsing the analyst's warning. One even invoked the example of the Yom Kippur War, writing "We already underwent a similar experience 50 years ago on the southern front in connection with a scenario that seemed imaginary, and history may repeat itself if we are not careful."

"Internal debate" without that term being fleshed out in who, where, when, debate opinions, debate outcome - failing to flesh things out in reporting begs the question big time. 

But those internal considerations presumably reached Netanyahu and his cabinet. It is unthinkable that others had discussions with the chief of state and cabinet left in the dark. 

So, chief and cabinet; what message did they have when, and what message did they hand down? We prepare? We stand down and things happen as they may? 

If the latter, with what expectations would you imagine such a policy was formed, and what does that say about the quick, massive destruction of Gazan property and civilians that quickly ensued? 

One possible thing happening as it may if "let it be" was affirmative policy is that there was clearly discernible resultant carnage, on a predictably major scale. What doors of retaliation might that open in terms of appearances to the UN, to the world, and allies of Israel?

In short, "internal debate" is the whole point of whether good or bad faith carried the day and whether mutual war crime from both sides was directly or implicitly expected and sanctioned as chosen policy. 

The world deserves to know and ostensible, "oh, my, who'd have thought," is insufficient in terms of detail enunciation. The circumstantial Crabgrass inference is Netanyahu remained an opportunist in terms of thinking what such planned Hamas actions would hand him and how he'd use the opportunity, and that he'd made a conscious choice accordingly.

The JP item ended:

A previous warning, also unheeded

"Jericho Wall" was not the first intelligence that had prompted such a debate, the Times reports. In September 2016, the Ministry of Defense prepared a top-secret memo, signed by then-defense minister Avigdor Lieberman, warning of an invasion and hostage-taking operation by Hamas.

The memo outlined Hamas's purchases of drones, GPS jammers, and other sophisticated weaponry. It also reported that Hamas had swelled its fighting force by 6,000 men in two years, and aimed to grow it from 27,000 to 40,000 by 2020.

 

WHAT NEW YORK TIMES REPORTED:


Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago - A blueprint reviewed by The Times laid out the attack in detail. Israeli officials dismissed it as aspirational and ignored specific warnings. 

Ronen Bergman and

Reporting from Tel Aviv

Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.

With reference to "documents, emails and interviews," things can be decided and then documented in accordance with such decision making, either evidencing it, or smokescreening it; and we do not know which direction was chosen. We are told "wrongly dismissive," but what else would you expect to be said? Continuing:

The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.

The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.

Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The 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 gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot — all of which happened on Oct. 7.

Lo, there were further RED FLAG things Mossad and Shin Bet could not have reasonably ignored or dismissed as "hope, not reality." Specifically -

The plan also included details about the location and size of Israeli military forces, communication hubs and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks inside the Israeli security establishment.

The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities, according to documents and officials. It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document, as well.

Last year, shortly after the document was obtained, officials in the Israeli military’s Gaza division, which is responsible for defending the border with Gaza, said that Hamas’s intentions were unclear.

“It is not yet possible to determine whether the plan has been fully accepted and how it will be manifested,” read a military assessment reviewed by The Times.

Then, in July, just three months before the attacks, a veteran analyst with Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, warned that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint.

But a colonel in the Gaza division brushed off her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by The Times.

“I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, fully matched “the content of Jericho Wall.”

“It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”

Officials privately concede that, had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them.

Instead, the Israeli military was [was positioned as if] unprepared as terrorists streamed out of the Gaza Strip. It was the deadliest day in Israel’s history.

Israeli security officials have already acknowledged that they failed to protect the country, and the government is expected to assemble a commission to study [and/or whitewash] the events leading up to the attacks. The Jericho Wall document lays bare a yearslong cascade of [ostemsible] missteps that culminated in what officials now regard as the worst Israeli intelligence failure since the surprise attack that led to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.

Underpinning all these failures was a single, fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so ingrained in the Israeli government, officials said, that they disregarded growing evidence to the contrary.

The Israeli military and the Israeli Security Agency, which is in charge of counterterrorism in Gaza, declined to comment.

Officials would not say how they obtained the Jericho Wall document, but it was among several versions of attack plans collected over the years. A 2016 Defense Ministry memorandum viewed by The Times, for example, says, “Hamas intends to move the next confrontation into Israeli territory.”

Such an attack would most likely involve hostage-taking and “occupying an Israeli community (and perhaps even a number of communities),” the memo reads.

The Jericho Wall document, named for the ancient fortifications in the modern-day West Bank, was even more explicit. It detailed rocket attacks to distract Israeli soldiers and send them hurrying into bunkers, and drones to disable the elaborate security measures along the border fence separating Israel and Gaza.

Hamas fighters would then break through 60 points in the wall, storming across the border into Israel. The document begins with a quote from the Quran: “Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will certainly prevail.”

The same phrase has been widely used by Hamas in its videos and statements since Oct. 7.

One of the most important objectives outlined in the document was to overrun the Israeli military base in Re’im, which is home to the Gaza division responsible for protecting the region. Other bases that fell under the division’s command were also listed.

Hamas carried out that objective on Oct. 7, rampaging through Re’im and overrunning parts of the base.

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.

Israel had also misread Hamas’s actions. The group had negotiated for permits to allow Palestinians to work in Israel, which Israeli officials took as a sign that Hamas was not looking for a war.

But Hamas had been drafting attack plans for many years, and Israeli officials had gotten hold of previous iterations of them. What could have been an intelligence coup turned into one of the worst miscalculations in Israel’s 75-year history.

In September 2016, the defense minister’s office compiled a top-secret memorandum based on a much earlier iteration of a Hamas attack plan. The memorandum, which was signed by the defense minister at the time, Avigdor Lieberman, said that an invasion and hostage-taking would “lead to severe damage to the consciousness and morale of the citizens of Israel.”

The memo, which was viewed by The Times, said that Hamas had purchased sophisticated weapons, GPS jammers and drones. It also said that Hamas had increased its fighting force to 27,000 people — having added 6,000 to its ranks in a two-year period. Hamas had hoped to reach 40,000 by 2020, the memo determined.

Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan.

Hamas had “decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope,” analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division.

But the Gaza division referred to the plan as a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go but had not arrived there yet.

On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing.

The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times.

The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out.

The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off.

“In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.

The back-and-forth continued, with some colleagues supporting the analyst’s original conclusion. Soon, she invoked the lessons of the 1973 war, in which Syrian and Egyptian armies overran Israeli defenses. Israeli forces regrouped and repelled the invasion, but the intelligence failure has long served as a lesson for Israeli security officials.

“We already underwent a similar experience 50 years ago on the southern front in connection with a scenario that seemed imaginary, and history may repeat itself if we are not careful,” the analyst wrote to her colleagues.

While ominous, none of the emails predicted that war was imminent. Nor did the analyst challenge the conventional wisdom among Israeli intelligence officials that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was not interested in war with Israel. But she correctly assessed that Hamas’s capabilities had drastically improved. The gap between the possible and the aspirational had narrowed significantly.

The failures to connect the dots echoed another analytical failure more than two decades ago, when the American authorities also had multiple indications that the terrorist group Al Qaeda was preparing an assault. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were largely a failure of analysis and imagination, a government commission concluded.

The official version of the Trade Center events is not universally accepted, including stories of thermite residue found and destruction of Building 7 into its footprint, as with the two towers into theirs, when no aircraft were said to have hit that Building 7. Stories of dancing Israelis in New Jersey exist. A commission was formed and reported, as with the Kennedy assination, where, also doubt over the official commission version doubt lingers.

“The Israeli intelligence failure on Oct. 7 is sounding more and more like our 9/11,” said Ted Singer, a recently retired senior C.I.A. official who worked extensively in the Middle East. “The failure will be a gap in analysis to paint a convincing picture to military and political leadership that Hamas had the intention to launch the attack when it did.”The breached security fence in the village of Kfar Azza, Israel, three days after it was attacked by Hamas.

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman

Adam Goldman writes about the F.B.I. and national security. He has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about Adam Goldman

That is all Crabgrass is posting. Weigh the evidence. Await more evidence. For now the leading story is body count, air strikes, ground action. 

UPDATE: Being one who lived through the Watergate investigation, "What did Bibi know and when did he know it?"

FURTHER:

A reasonable fallout of NYT "Jericho Wall" reporting, per Politico, Dec. 1, 2023:

Though the U.S. and Israel have a close intelligence relationship, Israel does not appear to have shared the secret battle plans with U.S. intelligence officials, according to the current and former officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.

[...] National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said he could not confirm the Times report, and referred to Israel for comment. A spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the CIA declined to comment.

But top Biden administration officials have previously said explicitly that the U.S. had no knowledge that Hamas was planning an attack of this scale.

“If we had those indications, we would share them with Israel,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters in Brussels in October. “But to my knowledge, we did not see that.”

“There is going to be plenty of opportunity for a full accounting of what happened on Oct. 7, including looking back to see what happened, who knew what when, and Israel’s been very clear about that,” Blinken said.

On Capitol Hill, members of the Senate and House intelligence committees have received several briefings about the Oct. 7 attack, according to a congressional aide familiar with the matter.

In at least one of those closed-door conversations, members were told that Israel had been aware about the potential for a Hamas attack from Gaza. But those readouts did not include the specific details of the Jericho Wall document, said the aide.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including Democrats, have in recent weeks raised questions about the extent to which the Biden administration relies on Israel for intelligence about Hamas.

Why would they have not shared such intelligence with our nation is a fine question which many will ask. As in, "Were we hung out to dry?" 

Or, "Why were we hung out to dry?" Or, "Are our own people being truthful?"

Or, hopefully, "How do we react to being hung out to dry by Israeli leadership?"

Or, "What do we do with AIPAC people, propaganda and money - the Benjamins - after being hung out to dry?"

Clearly the last two questions presuppose things which might or might not emerge as true.

Pandora's Box. 

FURTHER: A mid-November, 2023, poll in Israel, i.e., weeks before the "Jericho Wall" disclosure, had Benny Gantz gaining seats, Netanyahu losing seats in the Knesset. After the  NYT report, the best guess is an even greater shift toward Gantz. And Smotrich out of play, as the poll indicated. A reckoning is needed, and from the poll one seems likely. Four billion annual American taxpayer bucks should have a better ROI return. AIPAC should, hopefully, see its influence lessen. Absent a two state movement, sincere and effective, why keep subsidizing?

FURTHER: Link. Also, Biden is put into a bad light by having given unconditional military aid to the Netanyahu government. His tendency is not liking to be hung out to dry. He gets impatient. The time has come . . .

FURTHER: Times of Israel, 30 Nov. 2023; there is no Israeli plan, or none that they will tell to Blinken. This is troubling news. It appears that the IDF is unprepared to conduct a war cognizant of enemy civilian loss of life. IDF appears unwilling to act with precision, which may mean to take more losses in the IDF's ground war effort. The fact seems to be the Israelis don't give a shit how many civilians they kill. This is crazy and genocidal. Why have we allowed ourselves to be backed into support of these ghoulish war mongering planners? 

FURTHER: With regard to Minnesota DFL ranks, this link. State Sen. Ron Latz has too brashly bandied the "antisemitism" smear against those disagreeing with him. The death counts stand against his position, and they are mounting. BDS may be a factor in quelling the worse of what is happening after we've thought over "Jericho Wall" implications.

FURTHER: DuluthNewsTrib carrying Nov. 29, 2023 MPR content

ST. PAUL — An often overlooked governmental body at the state Capitol drew much attention on Wednesday.

The Minnesota State Board of Investment — which includes Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and other top officials — had to meet in a larger room than usual, and one that made entry and exit for state officials more accessible.

That’s because pro-Palestinian and Jewish groups gathered there to weigh in on the state’s foreign investments. The board manages public pension accounts and other investments. Those benefiting Israel make up $116.3 million, or 0.14% of the state’s portfolio, according to the governor’s office.

“As a nurse, this latest bombing campaign — unprecedented in the century by every measure of death and destruction — was unimaginable,” retired nurse Sarah Martin said during the meeting’s public comment period. “Hospitals were at the center of Israel’s attacks. My pension, which I get because I took care of sick and injured people in a state-of-the-art hospital just down the street, was used to destroy the hospitals of Gaza.”

Human Rights Watch on Sunday said its investigation into an Oct. 17 strike on Gaza’s Al-Ahli hospital suggests a Hamas misfire caused that blast. But Israeli bombardments have caused massive death and destruction, including at hospitals. Israel’s military says Hamas uses the facilities as shields for an underground network of tunnels.

The retired nurse, along with five other speakers, asked the state to divest from Israel and weapons manufacturers. The activists said the board moved on its own to divest from South Africa in the 1980s in response to apartheid, pointing to it as a precedent for the actions they want the board to take now.

It’s part of a global movement known as Boycott, Divest, Sanctions, or BDS. Supporters want institutions and governments to withdraw investments in Israel. Some in the Jewish community say the movement is anti-Semitic.

Divestment as part of the Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement would be a profound mistake. You don’t divest from the victim of an attack,” state Sen. Ron Latz, DFL-St. Louis Park, said at a press conference before the meeting.

[...] As for the investment board, it did not indicate whether Wednesday’s actions would change its investment practices. Its members thanked people for their comments and ended the meeting without engaging further with the crowd.

If it does take action — as it did in 2022 with Russia and Belarus and in 2009 with Iran — it will not be swift. The state typically will gradually withdraw its investments to avoid hurting pensions.

For example, six months after the 2022 law went into effect, the state still had about $1 million invested in businesses tied to Russia or Belarus, with about 30% of those targeted for divestment. Both laws also have language exempting humanitarian relief, education and journalism organizations.

Being victim of an initial incident is an Israeli status called into question by the "Jericho Wall" situation. Being a bogus victim, a possibility unfortunately, being set up to stand as initial victim is a real thorny thicket, and Latz must know that at this point, where the Netanyahu government seems to have stood down when they knew they should have stood up complicates his position immensely. 

Yes, the dead Israelis were victims. But if in large part they were victimized by their own government's coarse decision making, the BDS question takes on nuances and complications.

 

image copied from left.mn, at this link

Readers are strongly urged to follow that link, to read the full item, and watch the video. 

FURTHER: AJ's Gaza War in charts and maps, updated 11/29.