Israel’s military has published its first official account of the mistakes that led to its failures during Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack, which triggered the Gaza war.
The report concludes that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) “failed in its mission to protect Israeli civilians”.
The 19-page report contains much that is already known about what led to catastrophic loss of about 1,200 lives when approximately 5,000 gunmen from Hamas and other Palestinian groups stormed into Israel, also taking 251 hostages in the process.
There are no dramatic revelations, but it is still sobering to see the military’s conclusions about how it misjudged Hamas’s intentions and underestimated its capabilities laid out in black and white.
The report says the military regarded Gaza as a secondary security threat, with priority given to Iran and Hezbollah. Its policy towards Gaza, it says, was “paradoxical: Hamas was illegitimate, yet there was no effort to develop an alternative”.
The military had chosen a “conflict management” approach to dealing with Gaza, it says. And had assumed that Hamas was “neither interested [in] nor preparing for a large-scale war” – a perception reinforced by Hamas’s own deception tactics.
Evidence from 2018 onwards suggesting that Hamas – which is proscribed as a terrorist group by Israel, the US, UK and other countries – was indeed developing an ambitious plan was interpreted as “unrealistic or unfeasible”, reflecting “Hamas’s long-term aspirations rather than an actionable threat”.
The report says that in the months leading up to the war, the Military Intelligence Directorate began to develop a new assessment, suggesting that Hamas’s plan was not merely a vision but “a concrete framework for operational planning”.
However, this emerging assessment was not brought to the attention of senior officials in military intelligence.
