Despite multiple failures on the IDF’s part, unlike Hamas’s attacks on some other IDF positions on October 7, the destruction of the Erez crossing did not remove any strategic assets, the army said in its probe published on Sunday.Rather, it mainly harmed the Gazan population itself by ending a relatively lucrative employment situation for 18,000 Gazans to work daily in Israel.
Another point that stands out is that reinforcements came even later to assist – not until between 3:30 and 7 p.m. – than they did to many civilian villages where a small number of reinforcements started to arrive around 8:30-10:30 a.m., and larger reinforcements arrived between 12-3 p.m. Nine soldiers were killed and three were taken as hostages in the attack on the Erez crossing.
While some IDF forces at the crossing fought to hold off the Hamas attackers, many found command centers and other locked defensive rooms, which Hamas did not manage to breach, and they remained in those safe locations for many hours until the early evening.
For example, at 6:52 a.m., soldiers manning the main control center noted that their area would likely soon be overwhelmed with invaders and managed to move to a more isolated and defensible location on the second floor of the building at the crossing.
The soldiers at Erez also had essentially no effective help from tanks, artillery, or air power.
But during at least one key point when a drone could have helped by eliminating a group of terrorists gathered together in their pickup trucks, the drone pilot could not imagine that such a large collection of vehicles could be invaders.
He assumed that the trucks must be Israeli and left them alone while being very conservative about even firing on the obvious Hamas forces, as he was very fearful he would get in significant trouble for accidentally wounding soldiers in the near vicinity of the invaders.
IDF soldiers on ground were lacking support, investigation finds
As in many locations on October 7, the soldiers on the ground and the air force assets nearby did not communicate, so they were unable to work together cooperatively to defend the area or themselves.
The invasion of the area started around 6:40 a.m. after the massive volley of rockets by Hamas at 6:29 a.m. sent most of the few dozen soldiers at the crossing into safe rooms.
There were only five guards at the Erez border when Hamas started to invade with a few dozen fighters who had come from Jabalya in northern Gaza.
Hamas tried to invade from around four separate vectors, succeeding in three of four spots.
At the fourth spot, their attempts to explode a hole in a defensive wall failed and only damaged it.
Most of the fighting between the soldiers and Hamas invaders took place between 7 a.m. and 8:30 a.m.
A lucky point, according to the probe, was that a group of paratroopers, who could have been out on patrol, happened to be on base and were able to assist with the defense efforts. There were also Golani forces in the base.At later points, there were two larger waves of invaders, adding up to around 100 terrorists who also attacked the Erez village nearby, but there was less direct fighting with them at the crossing.
Many of these invaders, from Palestinian Islamic Jihad or not affiliated with a specific terror group, spent much of their time breaking apart physical aspects of the Erez crossing and the indoor terminal.
Nine terrorist bodies were found in the terminal, and one was located on the rooftop of the terminal after the battle.Several terrorists had taken up sniper positions on top of the Erez crossing rooftop and were trying to pick off soldiers.
They succeeded at forcing the retreat of the deputy company commander, who had tried to come to the base by vehicle to help with the defense at the orders of the battalion commander.
However, given the heavy fire he took and his lack of clarity about where it was coming from, he retreated.Later, a platoon commander managed to get a clean shot and killed one of the Hamas rooftop snipers.
The IDF probe criticized the mechanisms for locking and unlocking some of the command centers and safe rooms as too slow-moving, given that one soldier was killed while waiting for an extended period to be let into such a room and another was wounded.
Unlike many other battles, there were no Israeli civilians involved in this battle.
Col. Gidi Kfir-El, who led the probe of the Erez crossing, said most of the investigation had been ready for presentation already in the summer of 2024 when all of the probes were originally scheduled to come out.
Ultimately, then-chief Herzi Halevi decided to hold the probes of the individual battles until the larger probes of the high command and IDF intelligence were ready, such that any failings in smaller battles would be viewed through the lens of the larger failings of the upper echelons of the military.