There are countless figures inside and also outside the IDF who seem to be heavily responsible for the Oct. 7, 2023, failure to prevent the Hamas invasion.
While a state inquiry will need to probe Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) Director Ronen Bar will need to publish a redacted version of his agency’s probe at some point, honing in on the IDF, since it decided not to name names – who should be held responsible?
Of course, there are some pretty clear culprits who are less well-known to the wider public, such as Gaza Division chief Brig.-Gen. Avi Rosenfeld; Gaza Division intelligence chief Lt.-Col. “A”; and some named and unnamed IDF Intelligence officers.
Rosenfeld not only lost control of his forward headquarters, which was supposed to manage the defense of the Gaza Corridor, but he also refused to fully acknowledge his defeat, which left much of the IDF partially clueless that no one was managing it.
“A” has become infamous because he shot down “V” (a non-commissioned officer in IDF intelligence), who tried to use the Walls of Jericho document, which Israel intercepted from Hamas, to sound the alarm of a potential massive invasion in both 2022 and 2023.
The named and unnamed IDF intelligence officers, among them, often-discussed Unit 8200 chief Brig. Gen. Yossi Sariel, pressed to favor technological intelligence over human spying, and convinced everyone that Israeli intelligence knew “everything” about Hamas, helping to blind Israel to the possibility of a broad surprise attack.
All three of the above have resigned or have been forced out.
Three key figures responsible for failures of Oct. 7
But there are three other much bigger and more recognizable names who need to be judged: IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi; IDF Southern Command chief Maj.-Gen. Yaron Finkelman; and IDF intelligence chief Maj.-Gen. Aharon Haliva. Herzi Halevi resigned in April 2024, only to extend and resign for real in August 2024 after Iran’s first direct attack on Israel.
Halevi’s last day on the job is March 5, and Finkelman has said he is ready to be replaced by incoming IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir as soon as he sees fit.
But that does not answer how responsible they were for Oct. 7 compared to each other and to others.
In order to determine their personal responsibility, it is crucial to analyze their actions on the eve of the attack between October 6 and 7. This is important because while none of these three major figures can be held more accountable than Netanyahu or other former top defense officials over the last decade for Israel’s general failed misunderstanding of Hamas’s intentions, they are uniquely responsible for whatever last-minute decisions they made once there was evidence on the table of a potential imminent attack.
What did they know, and when did they know it?
So we ask, what did they know and when did they know it? Why was what they knew not enough, and should it have been?
There are many pieces of evidence regarding what Hamas might have done the night before October 7, which The Jerusalem Post has been exposed to but is barred from publication for now.
Of the evidence that is allowed to be published for now, the most crucial components are: (1) The Walls of Jericho Plan; (2) the SIM cellphone cards, which Hamas turned on in Gaza; (3) the Air Force noticing some movements relating to Hamas’s rocket crews; and (4) a variety of intelligence readings on Hamas movements (the specifics of which are still classified).
One fascinating aspect of the IDF probes as presented to the Post is that although one would assume that such top-level officials would have access to everything, each of these three major characters knew different pieces of information. In fact, a chart of the Israeli intelligence community presented to the Post showed that out of six different key parts of the community, almost all of them have different levels of knowledge and do not see the full picture.
Halevi never knew about the Walls of Jericho plan or the Hamas rocket crews, but he knew about the SIM cards and the intelligence about Hamas’s movements. Finkelman knew about all of the above.
Haliva was not brought onto the key virtual call in which Halevi, Finkelman, IDF Operations Command chief Maj. Gen. Oded Basiuk, and various intelligence officials discussed how Israel should respond to the potential Hamas threat. So he didn’t know about most of what was going on, though his top aide did update him in a separate call about the SIM cards issue.
It is unclear to this day what Haliva knew about the Walls of Jericho plan and “V”’s warnings about it. In official papers, he was not told about the plan.
For example, according to IDF sources, a 90-minute PowerPoint presentation was shown to Haliva on October 3, which did not mention “V”’s concerns even for a moment.
Haliva did not set the agenda, so the content for the PowerPoint was chosen by Unit 8200 officials – who chose to leave “V’”s warnings out of the presentation. All of this would seem to clear Haliva of any special responsibility for the Oct. 7 failure, beyond the general failure of 15 years of political and defense officials, of which he would just be one on a long list.
But then something else interesting happened. After the formal part of the meeting, the floor was open to more informal and wide-ranging debates. One of those present started to raise “V”’s concerns, leading Haliva to request they accompany him out of the meeting afterward in a smaller and more direct forum.There is a dispute as to whether Haliva dismissed the officer’s concerns at that point or whether he told the officer to feel free to look into it more.
It is also possible that Haliva and the officer had different understandings of what was said – as one person’s “feel free to look into that” could be understood by another person as a rejection. Unlike almost all of the other key IDF figures involved who have presented their version of events in various forums, Haliva has not given his version of events, or at least the probe as presented to the media does not feature his narrative on this issue.
Back to Halevi, his narrative is that given that he did not know of the Walls of Jericho plan and did not know about some of the Hamas rocket movements, his acceptance of all of the IDF and Shin Bet intelligence recommendations, along with Finkelman’s recommendations, was reasonable.
In other words, his understanding that what was at stake was, at most, a possible small-scale penetration at some later point, was reasonable. Also, the additional surveillance actions he requested showed that he took the situation seriously within the limits of what everyone involved thought were the potential threats.
Halevi also believed it was reasonable for him to accept the recommendations of Finkelman and the intelligence officials involved that “burning sources and methods” was a serious concern if the IDF took too many sudden actions to reinforce the border. Further, Halevi knew there had been a large number of instances, not just one or two, where Hamas had activated SIM cards in Gaza.
Put differently, while uninitiated readers egged on by critics of Halevi could easily conclude that he was insane not to order readiness for a full imminent Hamas invasion, to those who live the day-to-day and year-to-year life of classified intelligence, this was at most a small relative uptick in activity and not something highly unusual.
In fact, Halevi would go even further and likely claim that even if he had known of the Walls of Jericho plan, he would have acted in almost the same way because he would have accepted the intelligence community’s clear consensus that the plan was theoretical or Hamas’s fantasy scenario and not something that the group was remotely considering implementing or thought was possible.
Circling back to Finkelman, suddenly he seems to be the most responsible of the three, given that he knew all of the data points that Halevi and Haliva did not know and was on every key call the night of Oct. 7. In fact, it seems that it is even worse for Finkelman than that.
Not only did he know about the Walls of Jericho plan, but also he had written a memorandum analyzing it in 2022, warning that the mass invasion scenario must be taken seriously and should not be dismissed based on arrogance toward Hamas. How did Finkelman go from being a campaigner for taking a Hamas mass invasion seriously to not even mentioning the issue to Halevi on the evening between October 6 and 7?
According to Finkelman, the virtual call with Halevi on October 6-7 was held long after he had written that memorandum.
Not only that, but Finkelman’s view would be that he wrote that memorandum when he was in a different post as the deputy for the Operations Command and that he wrote hundreds of similar memoranda during the year or so between that specific memorandum and October 6-7.
In other words, part of Finkelman’s job in Operations was to constantly raise the alarm on all kinds of extreme scenarios to generally keep the whole IDF on its toes, but this was much different than calling for any specific concrete action, such as mobilizing the entire army for a national emergency on a Simchat Torah holiday weekend, when there was no unambiguous evidence that a mass invasion was possible.
Therefore, Finkelman would argue that there was no reason for him to have remembered or considered the Walls of Jericho plan on October 6-7 when his intelligence experts were not raising it, and many of them did not know about it, since even “V,” who had first flagged the invasion threat, never suggested any specific timeline.
So there are clear narratives to blame all three figures for ignoring signs of a mass invasion which led to calamity, and there are reasons to say they were no more responsible than all of the other cogs in the system who had gotten stuck on the idea that Hamas could not mount an invasion threat.
This also impacts the question of why Halevi didn’t bring Haliva onto the call. Or then-defense minister Yoav Gallant. Or Netanyahu.
Halevi would say that if he had woken them up in the middle of the night that time, he would have had to do it countless other times, and they would not have taken him seriously because they also bought into the same misconception of Hamas as deterred.
Whereas outsiders see Halevi holding a major consultation and leaving these key figures out, essentially his view is that he just wanted to speak to Finkelman to ensure that the situation was being handled in an extra careful way compared to usual (given the spectrum of limited threats they were all considering).
He did invite Basiuk and others to join the call, and some of them just joined of their own initiative, and he did not object. But it was not as if this was a major, wide-ranging consultation with some included and some strategically excluded. Of course, we will always wonder whether, if any of those other officials had been on the call, one of them would have jumped out of character and sounded the alarm beyond what anyone else could imagine.
Probably not. But this thought will haunt many for years to come.