State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the defense establishment in August 14, 2023 of severe border security negligence, and none of the involved parties took any action to fix the situation prior to the October 7 disaster.
The disclosure was made alongside Englman’s issuing of a new report on Tuesday which slammed border security on the northern border during the mid-2023 period.
Although the criticisms themselves were made regarding the northern border, and the reality there has radically changed post the 2023-2024 conflict with Hezbollah, the fact is that if Netanyahu, the IDF, and then defense minister Yoav Gallant had taken the criticisms seriously, it is possible Hamas’s October 7 invasion could have been prevented.
Nearly all of the problems Englman found on the northern border existed on the southern border as well at the time, and in many ways, they were even worse there.
In the defense establishment, the impact of the latest disclosure may be limited, given that Gallant was fired on November 5, IDF chief Herzi Halevi resigned on March 5, and Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar is expected to be ousted in the coming weeks or months.
However, for Netanyahu, the latest allegations could be a lightning rod for at least two reasons.
For one, it presents a scenario where he had warnings of severe border security problems from a serious authority separate from the IDF and Shin Bet, who he has said misled him about the security situation.
In other words, it will be harder for him to claim that there was no way for him to know how bad the border security situation was.
Second, Englman has stuck his neck out to defend Netanyahu at a number of key points over the years, for which much of the center-left has turned on him as a “rogue” loyalist comptroller who ignores his duty to criticize the prime minister.
The fact that he, and not your usual officials who regularly slam Netanyahu, is attacking the prime minister for ignoring the border security warnings, gives the issue a flavor of greater credibility and of being nonpartisan.
According to the report, the comptroller undertook a visit of the northern border, including eight different IDF positions around July 10, 2023.
Although the IDF responded on September 27, 2023, which may have also represented Gallant, there is no record of a separate response by the PMO.
In the report, Englman noted that there had been an increase of Hezbollah activity ultra-close to the border fence, and that this was sometimes exhausting the capacity of the limited number of IDF forces to follow Hezbollah’s forces’ movements.
Further, the report said that the IDF intelligence was doing a poor job at field intelligence collection regarding threats posed by Hezbollah.
It is worth noting that during that time period, Hezbollah managed to set up a tent several dozen meters inside Israeli territory, and since there were no Israeli troops nearby and a generally slow reaction, the IDF allowed those Hezbollah forces to remain there for months.
Moreover, the report stated that very few of the additional safe rooms and bomb shelters that were supposed to be installed in the North to provide greater safety from Hezbollah aerial threats had been installed.
Next, Englman said that sometimes, the IDF forces in the area of one or more border positions received a dozen or so false warnings of possible border violations per day.
He warned that the number of false warnings could reduce force readiness for an actual border penetration.
Also, the report said that there remained too many areas where the exact borderline between Israel and Lebanon were unclear, something which Hezbollah could exploit and which could lead to sudden eruptions of violence.
Finally, the report said that soldiers on the border were unhappy with the rules of engagement and had tried to change them, but the process was stuck.
The implication seemed to be that the rules of engagement were too restrictive.
Almost all of these issues were also problems for Israel on the Gaza border and contributed significantly to the IDF’s failure to prevent Hamas’s October 7 invasion.
The comptroller also said that all of the above illustrate why both the PMO and the defense establishment need to cooperate better with his office going forward than they have until now.
Englman fought a year-long battle with Halevi from around January 2024 to January 2025 over how much time and cooperation in sharing classified information and granting interviews with officers he would get from the IDF.
Likewise, the comptroller has said that the PMO has slow-walked its cooperation with Englman’s October 7 probe.
IDF responds to report
The IDF responded to the report by saying that the reality in the North has fundamentally changed since July 2023 and that many of the criticisms from the report have already been addressed.
For example, the rules of engagement are now far more aggressive than they were in 2023.
There is also a wider context in which the IDF has five military positions inside Lebanese territory, which are manned by several hundred troops cumulatively.
Moreover, the IDF currently is far more aggressive against Hezbollah deeper within Lebanon, attacking Beirut twice in recent days in response to minor attempted attacks by Palestinian terror groups acting within Lebanon, and likely with encouragement from Hezbollah and Iran.
Further, the IDF has far more forces on the border now than it had in 2023 and a host of additional obstacles near the border as well as an array of new sensors.
Moreover, the IDF justified its handling of the northern border by virtue of the results of the current war, in which the military overwhelmed Hezbollah in only a few weeks in September-October 2024.
According to the IDF, this success showed that the military’s plan for the North had been worked on properly and was effective.
However, the IDF did not address the fact that its defensive measures in July 2023 were wildly inadequate in the event of a Hezbollah invasion, something that the Post saw up close during visits to Hezbollah weapons storage areas within Lebanese villages in October 2024.
In other words, had Hezbollah invaded northern Israel on October 7, the IDF would have been ill-prepared, and the results could have been even worse than they were in the South with Hamas.
Regarding ignoring the comptroller’s warnings about border security which could have helped avoid the October 7 Hamas invasion, the IDF did not respond on Tuesday, but its probes since February have made it clear that the entire military was “infected” with a stubborn and wrongheaded notion that Hamas was deterred and presented no real invasion danger.
At press time, neither Netanyahu nor Gallant had responded.