September 17, 2024, 15.30 pm in local hours, Lebanon. In one, hundreds of ‘Gold Apollo Ar-924 devices explode in different parts of that country causing 12 dead, some 2,750 injured that collapsed hospitals and generalized panic among the population. The next day, in less than 24 hours and also in areas of Syria, the same happened with hundreds of walkie-talkies ICOM-IC-V82 and portable radios, with a balance of 30 dead and 750 more injured. The Grim Beeper operation It was the prelude to one of the greatest intelligence operations carried out against the Chií Hezbulá insurgent group and that will pass to the history books by being worthy of the script of any James Bond movie.
How the Mossad – the Israeli Secret Service – could manufacture and install explosives months before on electronic devices, cheating at its sale, through a ghost company, to an armed group that has the support of countries such as Iran’s very. That same intelligence service, which ended a stroke with almost the entire dome of Hezbulá or Hamas, was also responsible for having prior information that threatens Israel’s safety or interests. And that includes what happened, the brutal attacks of the Palestinian armed group that were charged with the lives of 1,195 people that same day, with 250 people captured as hostages.
Much has been written in the last two years about the ephemeris that supposed the beginning of an Israeli military campaign against the Gaza Strip that, according to an independent United Nations agency has already acquired the dimension of “genocide”, drags the a whopping the figure of 68,000 palestinians killed -official, because there are more those numbers. Today, we know with some accuracy how Hamas was profiling that massacre. As? Because, just a few months later, on December 1, 2023, one of the most prestigious worldwide communication revealed that Mossad had not failed in previous duties. So, did you know one of the greatest intelligence services on the entire planet that was going to take place this barbarism?
Did Israel know, point by point, what would happen?: The 40 pages of the ‘wall of Jericho’
From the first moment it has been qualifying the massacre of 7-o, which Hamas called as Al-Aqsa flood operationas an operation above the logistics and operational possibilities of the Palestinian insurgency. But that kind of presentation letter already had it in other circles previously, when it was only a plan on the table and not considered as the greatest attack against the Israeli people after the foundation of that state in 1948. According to Israel had not only baptized the attack that Hamas planned like Jericho wallmore than a year had had a 40-page report with exact data of what later happened on 7-O.
In that report prepared through different documents, emails or interviews, the strategy of the terrorist attack was portrayed. From the initial rocket launches, to the points where they would use explosives and heavy machinery to create gaps in Israeli military walls and bases, with difficult details to imagine until they took place, as was the use of paragers to access from Gaza. Those about 40 pages also warned of a mode of operation Designed to cause as many victims as possible, while taking hostages that should be taken to the strip.
While in European and American public opinion, the great ones ask, they were, they are more oriented to how such a military response can be allowed, which affects the civilian population, in Israel, in Israel the debate marked another type of questions. For example, who is responsible for the openly considered the greatest intelligence failure in recent history in Israel? Issue that connects directly with another question: who knew about the ‘wall of Jericho’?
According to the New York newspaper, the report was widely known among the military and intelligence leaders of Israel, with the only doubts of whether he had also reached at the hands of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or those of any of his ministers in the coalition government. Regardless of this, the decisive factor that would have caused the alarms not to jump with this document was to have belittled Hamas’s abilities.
What did the analysts transfer after knowing Hamas’s plans?, Could it have avoided 7-O?
In the information of The New York Times A chronology is also collected on how it acted between the Israeli authorities when the report had on the table Jericho wall. From the division of Gaza they determined in a military evaluation that “it is not yet possible to determine if the plan has been completely accepted and how it will manifest.” That assessment dates from a year before 7-O.
It was not the only voice of Israeli military analysts and experts who got up warning that Hamas’s plans were very real. From Unit 8200, a group that is dedicated to the interception of signals and communications, they warned three months before the 7-O that Hamas had completed training exercises that square perfectly with the assault described by the intelligence report. According to the e-mails to those who have accessed the Timesa colonel of the aforementioned division in Gaza also ruled out that the fears of the activity of the Islamic armed group were founded.
However, this analyst made it clear that they were making an error. “I flatly rejected that it is an imaginary scenario,” he said in those communications, adding that “it is a plan designed to start” and that training “is not just an operation to a city.” What was that exercise? It contained from a border of demolition of Israeli aircraft to take a kibutz and from a barracks in which all recruits would be killed. What determined that colonel? That a great intelligence work had been done, but that it was a “totally imaginative” scenario and that “in summary, hopefully.” Three months later, they found that Hamas did have capacity, beyond imagining a killing, of perpetrating it.
Analysts who talked to the aforementioned American newspaper coincide at another point. If they had attended to all these indicators and had reinforce in the areas where Hamas attacked, not only could the attacks of the militiamen have contain, they would even have been avoided. That is, according to these documents, the same attacks that from the Netanyahu government have been cataloging as its ’11 -s’, in allusion to the jihadist terrorist attack against the twin towers and the American Pentagon, they could have been repelled with the same army that has reduced Gaza to debris.
And interior services?: Shin Bet alerted three hours before 7-O
In the last hours, there has been an important revelation by the Israeli progressive newspaper . Interior Israeli intelligence services – the Shin Bet – alerted that same October 7, three hours earlier, of “suspicious activity” in the strip. They communicated it to the police, but that “preliminary” notification was not received until after the attack was ongoing, by an internal ruling, supposedly caused by an “systems update” that had been made the night before.
According to the data contained in an investigation by the Intelligence Division of the Police to which the aforementioned newspaper has had, this agency parallel to the Mossad moved a preliminary alert at 3.03 hours, after identified that telephones with Sim Israeli Sim cards were being activated in Gaza. When the agents received this alert were 7.03 hours. The assault on the city of Sdeerot was already ongoing, to the Nova Music Festival kibutz.
Taking into account that the report about the Jericho wall It does not contain any date or approach to when the Hamas attack could take place, the alert of the Shin Bet that arrived late represents the last possibility that Israeli security forces had to deal with the attack.
Archive image of Israeli civilian bodies killed during Hamas 7-O attacks, in Kfar Aza.
Suspicions or how could Hamas exact military information from Israel?
Another issue that led to, the colonel in charge of the aforementioned unit 8200 and military manager of Israeli intelligence, or, subsequently, that of General Herzi Halevi ended up flowing into multiple doubts and some suspicions. The report Jericho wall He already described an operation for which Hamas would have to have important Israeli security data. “We already went through a similar experience 50 years ago in the South Front in connection with a scenario apparently imaginary and the story could be repeated if we are not careful,” said the analyst who warned of Hamas’s exercises and that their abilities had greatly increased and continued to do so.
And it is that the document that managed the Israeli intelligence not only included details such as the Koranic event that later repeated high positions of Hamas to celebrate the attacks -“you will surprise them by the gate” -, also detailed the biggest blow given that day by Hamas against the IDF, the assault on the Reim General headquarters. The 7-O, Hamas not only managed to complete an assault with more than 5,000 combatants, destroyed 8 military facilities and caused indiscriminate killings in 15 locations under the control of Israel.
To be able to perpetrate an attack like that of 7-O, in which up to 60 points of the border fence and jihadist militiamen were violated with extreme ease of Israeli military facilities, Hamas had to count necessarily. Proof of this is the video that was recovered from the camera of one of the Hamás assailants, in which it can be seen how it had an exact map to access an intelligence barracks. Cameras were also blinded in simultaneous attacks with drones, while knowing which points would be less covered by Israeli soldiers.
The fact that Hamas had such sensitive data as the time that would take to arrive the reinforcements after the attack has raised serious doubts about the existence of a leak or a filtration by the intelligence services themselves. An initial internal investigation was ordered to purify all the mistakes made in 7-O. Although terrible failures were found, such as that the Israeli unit for Gaza’s control was “defeated” by militiamen in less than 10 hours or that there were only 767 soldiers to control the entire fence, it was not concluded how it could be able to access such sensitive data.
