Israeli occupation military has concluded that Hamas engaged in years of planning, drawing up detailed maps with the help of spies inside the occupied territories ahead of the 7 October Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, The Guardian reported.
The British daily noted that the Israeli army’s finding was after examining vast quantities of phones, notebooks and documents seized from fighters on the battlefield and in Gaza.
Fighters also carried guides to hostage-taking and Arabic-to-Hebrew phrasebooks, one of which included the line “put your hands up and spread your legs”, according to the report.
“The document was included in a cache of material that was released on Monday by the Israel Defense Forces’ Amshat military intelligence unit,” The Guardian reported on Monday.
It quoted a senior Israeli officer as saying that the goal of Amshat, reestablished after 7 October, was “to understand Hamas attack and defense plans, to gain operational intelligence and to better understand its doctrine after Israel’s military was caught unawares by the Hamas raid in which 1,200 were killed and 300 taken hostage.”
The latest disclosures underline how little Israel’s powerful security establishment understood of Hamas’s capabilities prior to the attack and the sheer amount of signs or clues that were missed or discounted.
Last week, the New York Times reported that Israeli officials had seen a 40-page battle plan for Hamas’s eventual attack, but it was dismissed as too difficult for Hamas to carry out. Warnings from the Israeli military’s spotters, mostly women, that Hamas fighters were openly exercising for an attack were also cast aside.
Among the documents recovered was a thorough map of an Israeli military base, arguably more detailed than would have been required by the Israeli army itself, The Guardian reported.
Compiling such a map could only have been done using “inside knowledge” – almost certainly from a Hamas spy –, the report cited an Israeli intelligence source.
The paper added that “Laptops and handwritten notebooks refer to Hamas plans to target military locations and key points in central Israel, suggesting the group or some elements of it had aspirations to penetrate dozens of miles inside the country once its fighters were ordered to breach the wall surrounding the strip.”
The detail and sheer scale of the information found have led insiders to conclude that Hamas engaged in “years of planning” – an effort that the occupation military and other Israeli intelligence agencies simply failed to take seriously as a threat, according to the report.
Source: The Guardian
