TOI staff
Times of Israel, Jan. 23, 2025
“… the concern about burning intelligence sources was a mark of the IDF’s obliviousness.”
It was 2 a.m. on October 7, 2023, when accounts reportedly started to filter into an Israeli Air Force command center of strange activities from Hamas’s aerial division and signs that the terror group appeared to be readying its rocket array for action.
Calls were made, generals were woken and by 3 a.m. the head of the Israel Defense Forces Southern Command general was reportedly on the line with senior officers for a situational assessment on what could be going on.
In a report put together a short time later based on that assessment and more consultations, Maj. Gen. Oded Basiuk, the head of the IDF Operations Directorate, proposed a few possibilities. Hamas could be carrying out a drill, he wrote, or perhaps readying for what they thought was an Israeli attack.
The third option, he wrote, was that Hamas could be “readying for action against Israel in the coming hours, including a seaborne infiltration or attack on a gas rig, an invasion, kidnapping, an extraordinary terror attack, rocket fire [or] an airborne infiltration,” according to a report by the Ynet news site Thursday.
At the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, not far from the IDF’s southern command headquarters, thousands of young people were sleeping or partying in tents. By the end of the day, hundreds of them would be dead, and scores more kidnapped into Gaza. They were never warned. ...SOURCE