According to the “New York Times”, Israeli officials became aware, more than a year ago, of an unprecedented Hamas attack plan
Based on secret documents, the American newspaper New York Times claimed Thursday that Israeli officials had obtained Hamas’s plan to carry out an unprecedented attack against Israel more than a year in advance, but had deemed the scenario unrealistic.
Israeli military intelligence had got its hands on a document of around forty pages from the Palestinian Islamist movement detailing, point by point, a vast attack like the one perpetrated by commandos on October 7 which left around 1,200 dead in Israel, according to the American daily.
This document, which circulated in intelligence circles under the code name “Jericho Wall”, did not give a date for a possible attack but defined precise points to saturate the Israeli security system and then attack targets. cities and military bases. More specifically, the document reports a barrage of rockets, drones destroying security cameras and automated defense systems, then fighters crossing to the Israeli side by paraglider, by car and on foot, elements at the heart of the attack of October 7. But he was not “not possible to determine” if this plan had been approved ” completely “ by the Hamas leadership and how it could translate into reality, insists an internal Israeli army document obtained by the Times.
However, in July, an analyst from the elite intelligence unit 8200 warned that a military exercise that Hamas had just conducted resembled in several points the attack plan planned in the “Jericho Wall” document. But a colonel in the military division responsible for Gaza dismissed this scenario, calling it “totally imaginary”.
“I categorically refute the idea that this scenario is imaginary (…) This is a plan for war.” not just for an attack “against a village”writes this analyst in encrypted emails consulted by the newspaper. “We already had a similar experience fifty years ago on the southern front regarding a scenario that seemed imaginary. History could repeat itself if we are not careful”the analyst wrote almost prophetically to his colleagues, in reference to the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
According to the “Times”, although the “Jericho Wall” document was circulated within the Israeli military hierarchy, it is unknown whether the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his cabinet consulted it.