A year after Palestinian armed groups breached Gaza's security fence and led a simultaneous wave of assaults on Israeli communities and outposts, FRANCE 24 looks at the intelligence failures that led to the October 7 attacks. There was plenty of warning that Hamas was planning a large-scale assault: suspicious movements along the border with Gaza, as well as a huge military parade taking place inside the enclave. But Israeli authorities ignored them. FRANCE 24's Claire Duhamel examines how the threat from Hamas was underestimated at the highest echelons of the Israeli army and state.
On October 4, 2023, the Palestinian armed faction Islamic Jihad organised a huge military parade in Gaza. It proudly displayed its new weapons: drones and long-range rockets capable of reaching the heart of Israel. A few women, who had been authorised to attend the parade by the local authorities, shouted slogans encouraging the fighters. Militants had been planning for months to stage the attack on Israel for Shabbat, three days later.
On October 7, Hamas militants, their allies from Islamic Jihad and several hundred civilians, some of them armed, crossed the security fence surrounding Gaza at various points without difficulty. For Dany Tirza, a former Israeli army colonel and now a security consultant, the wall was not equipped to withstand such an invasion.
It could stand in the way of “groups of Hamas as we had in the past (…) but not an army. Not hundreds, not thousands of people,” he lamented. “The problem was that we knew the plan. The plan was in our hands. But we were blind to it.”
