Israel's military censor has cleared for publication a set of warning signs picked up on the night of October 6 to 7, 2023, that were not read correctly before Hamas attacked, JFeed reports. The details had been barred for two years. The most striking of them: the IDF watched Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif leave his home and head underground hours before the massacre.
The Jerusalem Post reports that this tracking, drawn from the IDF's probes, became a distraction. In the early morning of October 7, while then-Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi and then-Southern Command chief Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman were trying to work out whether Hamas planned a small attack, Air Force Chief Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar spent hours probing whether there was a chance to assassinate Deif. Finkelman also put significant resources into finding him. Those assets, the Post writes, might have been used to better understand Hamas's intentions.
Why the focus on Deif? The Post says Israel had tried to kill him many times over a decade, twice wounding him, and before October 7 many still viewed him as more important and dangerous than Yahya Sinwar.
JFeed lays out the overnight timeline. Unusual activity by senior Hamas figures was identified at around 23:30. Close to midnight, Southern Command's intelligence officer told the command's chief that Deif had left his home and might be heading to an emergency underground site. At 02:30, intelligence showed operatives preparing rocket launch pits, and an IDF drone saw a Hamas operative pulling a tarpaulin off a rocket launcher in central Gaza. At a 03:00 assessment, Finkelman concluded Hamas's Nukhba forces were in routine. The Times of Israel reports Deif's move underground was one of at least five warning signs that night.
The Yeshiva World reports that Halevi's overnight assessment determined that "although there is no logic in an initiated offensive action, the information must be examined with a stringent view, with the aim of fully understanding Hamas’s intentions and what could surprise us." At 4:00 AM he ordered the Air Force to examine quick response targets in case Hamas acted "at first light." But the border forces were not reinforced, the alert level was not raised, and no visual collection was carried out opposite Hamas's launch pits. Hamas attacked at 6:29 AM.
What it means: the IDF's own investigation found that each sign on its own did not point to anything significant, but that their accumulation was unusual, and that intelligence bodies at every level failed to provide a warning, The Yeshiva World reports. Deif was killed in July 2024 and Sinwar in October 2024, the Post notes. The pieces were on the table that night. No one put them together.
Until now, The Yeshiva World reports, the main unusual sign cleared for publication from that night had been the activation of dozens of Israeli SIM cards held by terrorists of Hamas's Nukhba force. Military intelligence had noted at the time that a similar wide-scale activation took place during the Jewish holidays in the fall of 2022, and no attack followed. The new details, together with the SIM card activation, formed the backdrop to Halevi's overnight assessment. The Jerusalem Post adds that the officers who did see the signs believed the worst case was a small attempt to breach one or two villages, not the 114-point invasion that came.
JFeed describes what the IDF did with the report that Deif had left home. An extra surveillance drone was diverted from Judea and Samaria to Gaza, and a Shin Bet team known as "Tequila" was sent south. That team was meant to operate advanced capabilities, JFeed notes, not to deal with a terrorist infiltration. The two Southern Command officers raised several explanations, among them Hamas fear of an IDF operation, a training exercise or a localized surprise operation, and the Chief of Staff's office was first updated at 01:46. The Post reports that it was Deif himself who, at 7:58 a.m., announced the invasion to Gaza and the world and called on Gazans and the rest of the Iranian axis to join in.
