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Some 250 reservists from the IDF’s elite 8200 intelligence unit have thrown their support behind the Israeli Air Force pilots who recently called for an immediate shift in the government’s war policy, drawing the ire of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who accused them of “encouraging” Israel’s enemies.

The intelligence unit reservists said in a letter published Friday that they were joining “the call of the aircrews in demanding the immediate return of the hostages, even at the cost of an immediate change in the conduct of the war.”

The declaration was the latest in a growing wave of criticism from within Israel’s reserve forces over the continued war in Gaza and the failure to return the remaining 59 hostages.

The calls began with a group of roughly 1,000 Israeli Air Force veterans, the vast majority of whom are in retirement, who published a letter Thursday demanding as much.

The letter did not call for a general refusal to serve but instead urged the government to prioritize the release of hostages over the continuation of the war in Gaza, which the signatories argued now serves “political and personal interests” rather than national security.

Some 60 of the 1,000 IAF veterans are still active reservists, and the IAF has said that they will be dismissed.

The Air Force veterans were then joined by a group of some 150 ex-Navy officers and dozens of reservist doctors who signed their names to letters demanding an immediate end to the war for the sake of the remaining hostages.

Voicing many of the same concerns as those before them, the intelligence unit reservists also warned that high rates of reservists were experiencing “burnout” after multiple rounds of being called up, many of them to the front lines.

They said that they had “noticed the ever-increasing rates of non-reporting for the reserves,” and as such were “concerned about the future effects of this trend.”

Furthermore, it argued, the war in the Palestinian enclave was not bringing Israel any closer to its oft-touted goals of returning the hostages, defeating the Hamas terror group, and ensuring that Gaza could no longer pose a threat to Israel.

“The continuation of the war does not contribute to any of its stated goals, and will lead to the deaths of hostages, IDF soldiers, and innocents,” they wrote, adding lower down: “We see Hamas controlling the Strip and recruiting new operatives to its ranks, while the government has not presented a convincing plan to overthrow it.”

None of the letters published over the last few days have included calls for refusals to serve.

Nevertheless, IAF chief Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar slammed the letter written by Air Force veterans in a missive issued Friday, in which he said that the “manifesto that was published weakens the solidarity and leads to generalizations that affect servicemembers who are not partners to these views, as well as the entire [IAF].

“It is not appropriate for active reservists to call to stop the war, which they themselves take part in. We cannot allow this in any unit that participates in the war, including the Air Force,” he said.

He said that he had been “forced to act and declare that active reservists who signed the manifesto cannot continue to serve in the IDF.”

“This is a policy designed to maintain a strong, cohesive, and functioning [IAF],” he said, calling it a “painful, but necessary process.”

“Over the past week, we have had conversations with those involved. This message was delivered directly and indirectly, with the aim of separating the military from politics,” he said, adding that the IAF “will continue to operate like this in the future as well.”

In a scathing response to the letters on Friday, Netanyahu accused the reservists of representing a small minority funded by organizations he claimed wanted to overthrow his government.

“It is a small, noisy, anarchistic, and disconnected group of pensioners, a large group of whom have not served for years,” he said, referring to the discovery that just 60 of the Air Force veterans who signed the original letter were active reservists, and within that number only a handful were competent pilots.

“The weeds are trying to weaken the State of Israel and the IDF and are encouraging our enemy to harm us,” Netanyahu continued. “They already broadcast a message of weakness to our enemies once. We won’t allow them to do it again.”

It was the second time in recent days that Netanyahu attributed the mass protests against his government that took place for most of 2023 as being a key factor in Hamas’s decision to launch its invasion and massacre in southern Israel on October 7.

Civilians back reservists’ demands
Also, on Friday, Ynet reported that some 1,840 academics signed a petition in support of the Air Force veterans and reservists and their call to end the war.

“We, faculty members at institutes of higher education, join the call of the Air Force personnel and demand the hostages return home without delay, even at the cost of immediately ending the war,” they wrote.

They similarly declared that they found the war in Gaza to have shifted from its stated goals to instead serving “political and personal interests.”

“As has been proven in the past, only an agreement has returned the hostages safely, while military pressure mainly leads to the killing of hostages and the endangerment of our soldiers.”

The signatories were said by Ynet to include Avishay Braverman, who served as the president of Ben-Gurion University from 1990-2006, and until 2015 as a member of Knesset for the Labor Party.

It was also signed by Joseph Klafter, president of Tel Aviv University from 2009-2019, and the former president of Ariel University, Yehuda Danon.

A group of more than 250 Mossad veterans and nearly 200 reserve medical officers have signed letters calling for the end of the war, Israeli media reported on Sunday.

The two new letters add to the two already existing letters signed by veteran pilots and Unit 8200 veterans published on Tuesday and Friday, respectively.

The Mossad veteran's letter included three former Mossad heads, Danny Yotam, Ephraim Halevi, and Tamir Pardo; a former deputy head of the Mossad; and dozens of department heads and deputy department heads. The initiative is reportedly led by David Midan and Gail Shoresh.

"We, the Mossad intelligence and special services veterans, who have dedicated many years to safeguarding the country's security, will not continue to stand by. We express our full support for the pilots' letter, which also reflects our deep concern for the future of the country, and we join the call to act immediately to reach an agreement to return all 59 abductees home, without delay, even at the cost of ceasing fighting."

They concluded the letter saying, "The sanctity of life, Mr. Prime Minister, takes precedence over 'God of Revenge.'"

The letter was organized through a Mossad veterans society, which Ynet confirmed also exists in the security services.

Medical officers join the call
Around 200 reserve medical officers signed a similar letter on Sunday, calling for an end to the war and the return of the hostages.

"We will return [to service] and stand firm whenever necessary. We feel with pain that the continued fighting in Gaza is intended primarily to serve political and personal interests without a security purpose. The continued fighting does not advance the achievement of the goals of the war declared from the beginning and only endangers IDF soldiers and the lives of our citizens being held hostage."

"As medical officers, we serve in the reserve force out of a commitment to the sanctity of life, to the spirit of the IDF and the doctor's oath, and as an expression of mutual guarantee in Israeli society. We warn that the continued fighting and abandonment of the kidnapped is contrary to these values ​​and to the Medical Corps' commitment not to leave any of our people behind."

"The continued fighting and abandonment of the kidnapped, as wounded people abandoned on the battlefield, irreversibly erodes the values ​​of the sanctity of life and the commitment to the security of the state and its residents. We call on the Israeli leadership to come to its senses and act in accordance with the values ​​of the State of Israel and the spirit of the IDF."

The IDF renewed invasion that started with a bang on March 18 has been reduced to a crawl.
While the IDF killed 5,000 Hamas fighters in a few weeks when the war opened in October-November 2023, all messaging on Monday and in recent days has indicated progress that was comparatively tiny in relative terms, with some days the military only taking out single digit numbers of Hamas operatives.

On March 25, the IDF reported that it had killed 150 Hamas fighters since renewing hostilities, though most of them were killed in the first 10 minutes by a massive air barrage on March 18

IDF operating more slowly than in recent Gaza operations
As of April 3, the IDF had only killed around 250 Hamas terrorists, meaning only an additional 100 over more than a week.

On April 9, the number of Gazan terrorists killed by the military was still only up to 300, meaning about only another 50 in another week.

Approaching the one-month point of renewed hostilities that will be marked on Friday, the number of Hamas fighters killed will likely remain below 400, less than 15 per day on average.
In comparison, during the initial invasion of northern Gaza in 2023, the IDF killed around 5,000 Hamas fighters in only 20 days, or an average of 250 per day.

Not only are the numbers of Hamas fighters killed by the IDF increasing at a snail’s pace, but Hamas’s total number of fighters has continued to jump or at least solidified at an estimated 20,000-25,000.

In contrast, on Monday, the IDF only mentioned single digit kills of Hamas fighters and as such focused its update on dismantling Hamas “terror targets” across the Gaza Strip, including terror tunnels and weapons storage facilities.

In southern Gaza, IDF troops dismantled yet another underground tunnel route, stretching 20 meters deep and several hundred meters long, in the Shabura area of Rafah.

While the army noted that this tunnel was used as a meeting point for Hamas operatives and connected several other tunnel routes in the region, there have been countless such tunnels found in the past and it is estimated that the military may only have uncovered 25% of Hamas’s tunnels so far.

Tactical victories for the IDF in Gaza?
Additionally, during a separate operation, the IDF announced that its soldiers discovered a Hamas weapons cache hidden within a structure that had once served as a school. The cache contained various weapons, including mortars, hand grenades, explosives, and other military supplies.
Once again, this is a tactical victory for the IDF, but the military has no indication that it is coming anywhere near confiscating enough weapons to reduce Hamas’s ability to fight.

In northern Gaza, soldiers identified a terrorist ambush several hundred meters away. With coordination from the IAF, the ambush was neutralized, and the terrorists were killed.

This operation helped with force protection, but was more of going slightly on offense to achieve better defense than it was breaking new ground.

IDF troops also located additional weapons caches and several tunnel shafts used by terrorist groups in the Rafah and Morag Corridor areas.

In the past 24 hours, the IAF carried out airstrikes targeting approximately 35 sites throughout the Gaza Strip.

These strikes included a weapons manufacturing facility in southern Gaza, which was responsible for supplying weapons to terrorist organizations, as well as a launch site containing multiple rocket launchers aimed at Israeli territory.

However, on April 9, the IDF updated that it has targeted 1,000 “terror targets” since March 18, meaning both that 35 is a drop in the bucket and that even those 1,000 targets have not had any strategic impact on Hamas to date.

In fact, on April 9, IDF sources told The Jerusalem Post that at the current slow pace of the invasion, eliminating Hamas could take years.

The IDF divisions operating in Gaza are the 252th, 143rd, and 36th, but they are all operating at heavily reduced levels compared to their troop complement at the start of the war.

The overwhelming assumption is that the government is holding the IDF back to give the hostage negotiations a chance to lead to a deal, worried about accidentally harming the hostages, and concerned about initiating a larger invasion that would require a controversial large reservist call-up and likely also lead to more IDF soldier and Palestinian civilian casualties.

The gaps in indirect talks between Hamas and Israel over a potential hostage deal in Gaza "are still significant," an Israeli official told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

Hamas appeared to have shifted from its initial position in talks by voicing its willingness to release nine Israeli hostages as part of a deal. Previously, the terror group was only prepared to release a single hostage.

Israel attributes the change in Hamas’s stance to the IDF's operations and continued military pressure, which have led to the capture of approximately 30–40% of Gazan territory.

Summing up the situation in a conversation with The Post, an Israeli official said: “Despite some progress, it is currently very difficult to move forward with a deal.

"Hamas is expected to respond again in the coming days, but if they remain firm on the issue of guarantees, it’s hard to see the agreement happening.”

Point of contention
The main point of contention between Israel and Hamas centers around the terror group's demand for guarantees to end the war.

Hamas is insisting on assurances from Qatar, Egypt, and the United States that, in the context of a future deal, Israel will commit to ending the war. Israel is refusing to give such guarantees.

Al Jazeera reported on Monday that Egypt has made it clear to Hamas that ending the war would involve Hamas being disarmed, a condition a senior Hamas official reportedly rejected. According to Al Jazeera, the proposed deal would include a 45-day ceasefire.

An order extending Israel’s time to respond to South Africa’s genocide claims against it for its conduct in Gaza by six months – from the original July 28 deadline to January 12, 2026, of this year instead – was published by the International Court of Justice on Thursday.

The order was issued on Monday, and its existence was subsequently first reported on by i24News, but the actual order only came out Thursday.

According to the order, Israel requested an extension for three main reasons: 1) Procedural and substantive problems relating to the timing and manner of South Africa presenting its evidence, with many of those issues still open for the court to decide; 2) The parallel new ICJ proceeding Israel will soon need to contend with to respond to claims of starvation and cutting off humanitarian aid; and 3) The voluminous number of additional claims by other states, like Ireland, against Israel, who Israel must now also respond to, along with South Africa.

The Jerusalem Post understands that South Africa has and is in the process of producing thousands of documents to try to prove its genocide case against Israel.

Many of these documents and processes will likely be challenged by Israel before the process even gets to what issues Jerusalem must respond to in more detail.

The Israeli Defense Forces faulted a series of "professional failures" and "breaches of order" in the incident last month when Israeli soldiers killed 15 Palestinian aid workers in Gaza, an event that sparked widespread condemnation and calls for an independent investigation.

In the summary of an internal report on the killings and a briefing to foreign media Sunday, the IDF said it “regrets the harm caused to uninvolved civilians” and announced that it had discharged the field commander leading the implicated unit and formally reprimanded a senior officer.

The report and the IDF’s rare acceptance of blame were the culmination of a weekslong scandal that had heaped further criticism on Israel’s military just days after it broke a two-month ceasefire agreement with Hamas and restarted its offensive in the Gaza Strip.

The controversy around the killings worsened after United Nations personnel recovered the bodies from a shallow mass grave near the scene of the incident on March 23, and cellphone video found on one of the corpses revealed serious inconsistencies in the IDF’s original version of events.

“It’s like a chain of professional mistakes but with no ethical gaps,” Brig. Gen. Ephraim Defrin, said the newly appointed IDF spokesperson, in a presentation to reporters Sunday evening. “There was never any intention to deceive the public.”

Some initial reports from Palestinian examiners claimed that some of the medics had been found with their arms bound. However, other Palestinian medics said there was no evidence that the medics had been restrained before they were shot execution-style, a claim the IDF also denied.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said in a statement after the bodies were found that the targeting of the medics “can only be considered a war crime punishable under international humanitarian law, which the occupation continues to violate before the eyes of the entire world.”

The investigation revealed “several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident,” the IDF said.

But the public report and the presentation, which retired Maj. Gen. Yoav Har-Even, who led the presentation, said were conducted “outside the chain of command,” did not answer all of the questions surrounding the shootings. It did not provide evidence to back up the Israeli military’s contention that six of the 15 slain emergency workers were actually Hamas operatives, nor did it explain why the number of slain medics whom the IDF considered terrorists had changed.

The report and the presentation also left it unclear why one of the surviving medics, Asaad al-Nassasra, was detained by the IDF and still remains in its custody.

Alongside the report summary, Har-Even showed a video presentation that featured aerial surveillance of the early-morning shootings, including night-vision reconnaissance video.

The probe found that troops were hampered by poor visibility and that they misidentified ambulances and rescue vehicles as threats during a mission targeting Hamas operatives, according to Sunday's report. Har-Even laid partial blame on the soldiers’ night vision goggles for leading to what he called the “tragic and undesirable result of a complex combat situation.” The goggles’ limited peripheral perspective, among other factors, made it difficult for the soldiers to recognize the trucks as civilian emergency vehicles despite their flashing emergency lights, he said.

Another strike on a U.N. vehicle resulted from a breach of operational rules, the IDF’s report says.

The field commander in charge of the operation on the ground, whom the report did not name but whom IDF public relations officers identified as a major, was dismissed in part for “providing an incomplete and inaccurate report during the debrief.”

The commanding officer of the 14th Brigade received a formal reprimand that will appear in his personnel file, the report summary said, both because of his “overall responsibility” for the shooting and his “management of the scene afterward.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke via phone on Tuesday with US President Donald Trump, the American leader said, declaring that the pair “are on the same side of every issue.”

The call covered “numerous subjects including Trade, Iran, etc.,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, adding that the conversation went “very well.”

Notably, Trump did not include Gaza or the 59 hostages being held there in his list of topics discussed amid the ongoing impasse in ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas. However, according to a report in Axios, the pair did talk about efforts to reach a hostage release deal, with the Trump administration pushing for a breakthrough and Israel wary of any agreement that would end the war.

There was no immediate readout of the call from the Israeli side, but Netanyahu reposted Trump’s post, commenting, “Thank you, President Trump!”

An Israeli source told The Times of Israel that the call was short and that the two discussed Iran’s nuclear program, among other issues.

Last week, The New York Times reported that Trump blocked an Israeli plan for a series of joint strikes next month on Iranian nuclear facilities to instead pursue diplomatic means.

Asked about the report at the time, Trump said that “I wouldn’t say ‘waved off’” a joint attack on Iran, but then he added, “I’m not in a rush“

The Israeli army unit that killed aid workers in Gaza's Rafah last month had received a report about increased ambulance traffic on the route shortly before the incident. The soldiers fired at the vehicles continuously for three and a half minutes – even from point-blank range – reloading their ammunition multiple times, despite attempts by the aid workers to identify themselves.

These are the findings from materials collected after the incident, some of which were submitted to the IDF operational investigative teams and the IDF General Staff investigative team.

These materials, made public here for the first time, indicate a lack of operational discipline among the IDF Sayeret Golani unit, as well as a lack of credibility in the versions of events provided to commanders and investigators. The materials also suggest that the force's conduct endangered both the soldiers themselves and other nearby units.

The investigation conducted by the IDF General Staff investigative forum, a summary of which was made public last week, was intended to address the harsh international criticism following the incident in which 15 aid workers were killed.

However, it did not present the full picture. Haaretz now presents additional details that shed more light on the unit's conduct during the incident.

This information was provided to Chief Military Prosecutor Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, who is reviewing the testimonies and evidence collected in the investigation to determine whether there is a basis for opening an investigation by the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division.

The General Staff investigation, headed by Maj. Gen. (res.) Yoav Har-Even, found that in three separate incidents, the force mistakenly fired on ambulances and a UN vehicle, frequently deviating from orders. The public summary of the investigation rejected claims that the workers were bound and executed and stated that "the forces did not fire indiscriminately."

However, some of the materials indicate that in one incident, indiscriminate fire toward a convoy of aid vehicles did occur and lasted for three and a half minutes.

On the night of March 23–24, when the incident occurred, the IDF was preparing for a surprise assault on the Tel al-Sultan district of Rafah, planned for March 24. In the days leading up to it, forces from the 36th Division and the Gaza Division had deployed in the area.

During the cease-fire, the army observed that a significant number of Hamas fighters from the Rafah Brigade had returned from the humanitarian zones in al-Mawasi, where they had been hiding, and were attempting to reorganize the brigade, which had been severely weakened during the war. An evacuation notice for Tel al-Sultan was scheduled to be issued to local residents at 8:00 A.M., and the surprise offensive was intended to cause the militants to flee.

The Sayeret Golani unit, operating as part of the 14th Brigade, was tasked with setting up an ambush without being detected before the evacuation order was issued. Their mission was to ambush a location where the army believed Hamas militants would attempt to flee under the cover of the civilian population and to strike them.

The force set out around 2:00 A.M. and positioned itself along a route expected to be used by civilians evacuating toward Khan Yunis and al-Mawasi. The IDF has a mechanism to allow aid organizations operating in Gaza to travel safely on otherwise restricted routes.

However, the route where the Israeli force positioned itself that night was one where travel was permitted for rescue personnel and civilians at the time. Therefore, the aid and medical workers using it were not required to request special permission – contrary to the IDF's initial statement following the incident. That statement was later found to be based on incorrect information provided by the forces in the field.

At around 3:30 A.M., another IDF unit under the command of a deputy company commander from the same brigade reported over the battalion's radio about increased ambulance movement on the route. The report did not mention any suspicion regarding the ambulances. The Sayeret Golani unit, which heard the report, was positioned 30 meters (roughly 100 feet) from the route.

At 3:57 A.M., an ambulance with flashing lights passed through the area on a routine trip. The occupants could not see the hidden troops. Positioned on higher ground, the troops were not under threat of a ramming attack and had been ordered not to reveal themselves before the main offensive on Tel al-Sultan.

The entire area was dark during the incident, and it was impossible not to notice the ambulance's flashing lights – this is evident from footage of the incident held by the IDF, which was captured by drones accompanying the force.

The deputy commander of the Sayeret Golani force, a reservist officer who was commanding the force, decided on his own initiative to alter the mission assigned to him and instructed the entire force to prepare to fire on the ambulance that was approaching the ambush site.

As the ambulance was about to pass near the force, the soldiers opened fire on it. The force charged toward the vehicle while shooting, killing two aid workers and detaining another person.

One of the Israeli soldiers, who does not speak Arabic, attempted to extract information from the detainee about the identity of the deceased, and concluded from the detainee's statements that they were Hamas members. The deputy battalion commander reported the shooting and the casualties to the brigade commander, who was stationed at the forward command post.

The commander of the 14th Brigade, Colonel Tal Alkobi, tried to assess during a conversation with the force whether the incident had exposed them and could jeopardize the broader offensive plan – and whether the element of surprise had been compromised. In the conversation between the two, the deputy battalion commander said he believed the force had not been exposed.

The soldiers turned off the rescue vehicle and its lights, concealed the bodies, and returned to the same position in the ambush. In his testimony, the deputy battalion commander claimed that from his position it was not possible to see the ambulance's lights and that he believed it was a Hamas police vehicle, which is why he decided to open fire – even though that was not his mission.

The IDF General Staff investigation team was not convinced by the deputy battalion commander's account and decided to conduct a reconstruction with him at a base in central Israel to test his version.

Even after the reconstruction, the deputy battalion commander failed to convince the investigators, though they accepted his assertion that this was a combat zone and that the force had been on high alert ahead of a major assault.

Therefore, they focused primarily on the broader decision-making process rather than the misidentification of the first ambulance.

After the initial shooting, the force returned to its ambush position as instructed by the 14th Brigade commander, who believed the force had not been exposed and that the element of surprise remained intact. At 5:06 A.M., a convoy of rescue vehicles, including ambulances and fire trucks, traveled along the route. All the vehicles had their lights on and flashing – it would have been impossible not to see them in the dark area.

In his testimony, the deputy battalion commander claimed that, once he believed the people killed in the first vehicle were Hamas operatives, he concluded that the rescue convoy approaching the scene was actually a group of Hamas operatives who had heard about the incident and arrived to retrieve the bodies of their comrades and attack the Sayeret Golani Unit.

A scenario in which Hamas operatives travel in marked rescue vehicles to a location where they know IDF troops are present is one that the army had not encountered during the fighting in Gaza.

As such, neither the investigation team nor the brigade command accepted the deputy battalion commander's version.

The convoy of rescue vehicles slowly approached the ambush site, heading towards the location where the bodies of the first ambulance's occupants were found. Contrary to claims that the convoy posed a threat to the force, the incident's documentation raises doubts about whether they were aware of the soldiers' presence.

The convoy stopped near the attacked vehicle, and medical teams disembarked to move towards the bodies, on the opposite side of the route, effectively distancing themselves from the IDF ambush site. The medical personnel wore fluorescent vests and kept their identification lights on, along with the sirens, to make their presence clear, fearing they might be targeted by the IDF.

As the convoy stopped, the deputy battalion commander ordered the force to open fire on the vehicles. Those equipped with machine guns were instructed to fire from the ambush position, and the rest of the force was ordered to charge toward the convoy.

The distance between the convoy and the soldiers was between 20 and 30 meters, meaning that the entire force could clearly see, even through night vision equipment, that the people were not armed militants but medical personnel.

The soldiers who charged reached the aid team within seconds and fired continuously for approximately three and a half minutes. The soldiers reloaded their magazines and kept shooting even after it was clear that no return fire was coming from the other side – and despite the cries of the aid workers who tried to identify themselves.

Some of the aid workers attempted to flee into open terrain, but by the end of the three and a half minutes of close-range gunfire, 12 of them had been killed.

The commanders' operational debrief concluded that the force's conduct on the ground had been negligent. The soldiers failed to advance in a coordinated line during the charge, crossed each other's lines of fire, did not maintain designated firing zones, and the incident could easily have resulted in friendly fire casualties. These conclusions also arose in the IDF General Staff investigation.

The deputy battalion commander reported the incident to the brigade but initially stated that the convoy was unidentified, without flashing lights, and claimed that the decision to open fire was made due to a perceived threat to the force, although footage held by the army contradicts his account.

The brigade commander again spoke with the deputy battalion commander to assess whether the force had been exposed and if the element of surprise for the assault on Tel a-Sultan, for which all 36th Division forces were already positioned, had been compromised.

The brigade commander instructed the deputy battalion commander to hide the bodies in the ground and to bury and crush the ambulances so that anyone traveling the route would not uncover the attack plan that was about to be carried out.

At no point did the brigade commander suggest transporting the bodies to Israel or transferring them to international aid organizations.

During discussions about how to proceed – about 12 minutes after the IDF's assault ended, while the forces were still at the scene and the ambulances remained on the road – a UN vehicle arrived, carrying a UNRWA worker. In footage held by the army, the UN vehicle is seen arriving slowly, apparently aware of what was happening and likely having received reports of the shooting at the aid workers.

The vehicle approached with its lights on, seemingly attempting to signal its presence to the IDF force at the scene. The UN worker did not leave the vehicle or approach the soldiers, but the deputy battalion commander decided to fire at the vehicle, joined by one of the soldiers – they killed the UN worker.

At this point, the IDF realized that the force had been exposed, and that both those in Gaza and international organizations were aware of the IDF's shooting – although not of the broader offensive plan planned for later in the morning.

The brigade commander ordered the force to finish burying the vehicles and bodies and to mark the location, but the senior division and brigade leadership preparing for the assault understood that the conduct of the deputy battalion commander and the brigade commander was problematic and, above all, jeopardized the operation and the soldiers involved, which was scheduled to begin around 10:00 A.M.

The IDF's Southern Command and the Gaza Division believed the force's actions had exposed it, and fearing damage to the element of surprise, decided to move the assault on Tel a-Sultan up by two hours. At 6:00 A.M., local residents were given notice to evacuate the area.

In the morning hours, the IDF provided international organizations with the location where the bodies had been hidden so they could retrieve them. Although attempts were made to locate the bodies, they were not found, and the organizations were ordered to leave the area.

The following day, the commander of the 14th Brigade returned to the scene of the incident, unearthed the buried bodies using engineering equipment and covered them with sand, marking the location with camouflage-colored netting so it could be identified. By the time aid workers asked to retrieve the bodies and take them to Gaza, the assault in Rafah had already begun, and due to the risk to IDF forces in the field, the IDF only announced their location five days later.

Following the incident, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir dismissed the deputy battalion commander "due to his responsibility as the force commander on the ground and for his incomplete and inaccurate reporting during the debrief." It was also determined that Col. Tal Alkobi, commander of the 14th Brigade, had been negligent in preparing for the operation, and he received a formal reprimand in his personal file.

The Red Crescent and the Civil Defense organization stated that the aid workers killed in the incident were Mustafa Khafaja, Izz al-Din Sha'at, Salah Ma'amar, Rifaat Radwan, Muhammad Bahloul, Ashraf Abu Labda, Muhammad al-Hila, Raed al-Sharif, Yusuf Khalifa, Fuad al-Jamal, Zuhair al-Farra, Anwar al-Attar, Samir al-Bahabtza, Ibrahim al-Maghari, and Kamal Muhammad Shakhtut.

The IDF's General Staff investigation determined that six of them were Hamas members, identified retroactively. The IDF did not specify which of the 15 were identified as Hamas operatives or what their roles were. Sources familiar with the details said that even if they were indeed Hamas operatives, they were not part of the organization's military wing.

Israel’s focus remains firmly on its campaign in Gaza and the twin imperatives to “increase the pressure on Hamas to release the hostages, and end Hamas’s power to govern, both politically and militarily,” as IDF Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Effie Defrin told journalists during a visit to Gaza this week.

The IDF still has work to do, but, as an IDF source told The Jerusalem Post, there has been a “decline in Hamas’s capacities, though they can still surprise.”

Regarding Hamas’s Rafah Brigade, against which the IDF is currently engaged in combat along the Morag Corridor between Khan Yunis and Rafah City, “We assume that the missile issue is largely behind us,” the source continued. What remains is close combat to root out the remaining fighters of the brigade, numbering probably 100-150 men.

But while the once formidable missile threat from Gaza has substantially diminished, residents of Haifa and the western Galilee were reminded Wednesday morning that Gaza is not the only active front in the current conflict, when a ballistic missile launched from Yemen set off warning sirens. There were no injuries, and the missile appears to have been destroyed by air defenses. Ansar Allah (Houthis) organization, which controls the Yemeni capital and a large swath of the country, claimed responsibility for the launch.

The Yemen arena is currently the most active of all the fronts opened up in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 massacres by Iran-aligned elements. Iran’s bruised proxy militias in Lebanon and Iraq have chosen for now to leave the fray. The Assad regime in Syria has been destroyed. Iran itself has yet to respond to Israel’s extensive counterstrikes following Iran’s launch of missiles and drones against Israel last October. Hamas in Gaza clings on, with its capacities severely degraded.

Only the Houthis, once dismissed as a barely relevant sideshow, remain fully engaged, with high capacities, and determined to continue the fight. They are the only Iran-aligned force not to have suffered serious setbacks since launching their campaign. They are also the sole member of the pro-Iran axis to have directed its attacks not at Israel alone but also at Western targets.
Since the ending of the Gaza ceasefire on March 18, the organization has launched around 20 ballistic missiles at Israel. But the Houthis’ targeting of Israel is largely symbolic in nature. The more substantive part of their effort, since it commenced in November 2023, has been directed not at Israeli targets but, rather, at international shipping along the Red Sea/Gulf of Aden route to the Suez Canal. Fifteen percent of global seaborne trade prior to the war passed through this route. The Houthis’ attacks have now virtually shut it down.

It has been a year since a US-flagged ship has passed through the Suez Canal. The Trump administration, contrary to its preference for deals to end acts of aggression elsewhere, appears determined to force the Houthis to end their campaign, and appears willing to back up threats with force. At the commencement of the offensive in March, Trump warned the Yemeni Shia Islamists that if the attacks on shipping did not stop, “hell will rain down upon you like nothing you have ever seen before.”

Last Thursday, 80 people were killed in a series of US airstrikes on the Houthi-controlled, strategic port at Ras Isa, Hodeidah province, and the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. The strikes were the most intense yet in the US’s monthlong campaign against Houthi targets.

The US are uneasy over the Houthis' growing influence.
US concerns regarding the Houthis go beyond the immediate Yemeni context. Over the last six months, evidence has emerged of a growing connection between Ansar Allah and the al-Shabaab organization in Somalia. A February UN report noted that personnel of the two movements met in Somalia in July and September 2024.

During these meetings, according to the report, the Houthis committed to supplying al-Shabaab with weaponry and technical assistance, including drones and surface-to-air missiles. The prospect of the Houthis using the al-Shabaab connection to proliferate chaos and Iranian influence across the Red Sea and into the Horn of Africa is apparently helping to concentrate minds in Washington.

The US air campaign has hit the Houthis hard. It remains questionable, however, whether the volume of damage until now will be sufficient to persuade the Yemeni Shia Islamist movement to cease its attacks on Western shipping and on Israel.

Here, the US faces a dilemma similar to that which Israel faced vis-à-vis Hamas in Gaza. In both cases, the Islamist enemy is largely indifferent to losses of life among its own people, and unlikely to even be inclined to change direction as a result of losses among its own personnel or of its own equipment.

At this point, the US faces options regarding the Houthis similar to those that Israel faced regarding Gaza – namely, escalate or effectively concede. Either a decision must be taken to destroy or severely degrade the enemy, or it must be accepted that the Houthis, while they can be engaged in a tit-for-tat exchange of fire in which they pay the higher cost, cannot at present be defeated.

It is against this background that the recent reports of a possible ground offensive against the Houthis by Yemeni government and allied troops should be understood.

Reports suggesting that such an offensive may be imminent have surfaced in major US and regional media over the last two weeks. An article in The Wall Street Journal on April 15 noted that the idea of the ground action came because of a perception among elements of the official Yemeni government that the US bombing campaign had severely damaged the Houthis’ capacities, creating a window of opportunity.

Such an offensive, if it comes, is likely to be directed against Yemen’s western coastal zone. The Hodeidah port and the surrounding area is a crucial location for receiving imports for the Houthis. The coast is also essential for the prosecution of the Houthis’ campaign against shipping.

US air support would be vital for any such campaign. In the past, specifically in 2015, Saudi- and UAE-backed forces performed poorly and without great success against the Houthis. At that time, however, the US was ambivalent regarding the offensive and unconvinced at the danger of Iranian expansion represented by Houthi advances. This time around, the situation would be different, with the US likely to play an active role supporting any such offensive.

It may well be that the forces associated with the official Yemeni government observed the rapid success of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham in Syria, which derived largely from Israel’s prior weakening of the Lebanese Hezbollah organization. Without this, Hezbollah would almost certainly have intervened to save the Assad regime, very possibly stopping the advance of HTS before Homs or Hama.

Still, weakened by US bombing or not, the Houthis are a force very different from the hollow army of the Assad regime. Such an offensive, like actions of its type, would be something of a gamble.

For the US and its local allies in Yemen, the choice now is to increase the stakes, or to fold.

US President Donald Trump said on Friday that he pushed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow food and medicine into the devastated Gaza Strip.

No aid has been delivered into the strip since March 2. Israel has said it would not allow the entry of goods and supplies into Gaza until the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas releases all remaining hostages.

Earlier on Friday, the UN World Food Programme said it had run out of food stocks in Gaza.

Humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump was asked whether concerns about humanitarian aid access came up in his phone call with Netanyahu earlier this week.

"Gaza came up and I said, 'We've got to be good to Gaza ... Those people are suffering,'" Trump said.

When asked whether he raised the issue of opening up access points for aid into Gaza, Trump replied, "We are."

"We're going to take care of that. There's a very big need for medicine, food, and medicine, and we're taking care of it," he said.Asked how Netanyahu responded, Trump said: "Felt well about it."

"Hunger is spreading in Gaza, malnutrition is deepening in Gaza, injured people and other patients remain untreated in Gaza, and – as we have said before – people are dying," UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said on Friday.

Israeli ministers on aid in Gaza
A heated debate unfolded during a security cabinet meeting on Wednesday over the distribution of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, as ministers voiced conflicting views on how to prevent Hamas from benefiting from aid.

Defense Minister Israel Katz took a firm stance against traditional aid methods, arguing that sending aid through established channels would only strengthen Hamas. "This only strengthens Hamas. Aid will be distributed by IDF soldiers or American companies instead," Katz asserted.
He also stated that there was no immediate need for additional aid, claiming that sufficient supplies currently exist in Gaza. Katz expressed his opposition to any aid that might inadvertently support Hamas or be used to further its terrorist activities.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir disagreed with Katz’s proposal, telling ministers that the IDF would not be responsible for distributing humanitarian aid. "We will not starve the Gaza Strip," Zamir emphasized. His position raised tensions, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich accusing him of failing to follow government policy. "If you are saying you are incapable of appointing someone to do this, then you can be replaced," Smotrich remarked sharply.

Ministers within the cabinet, including Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Innovation Minister Gila Gamliel, expressed concerns that any aid reaching Gaza could fall into Hamas's hands. They demanded that aid be distributed only in areas under full IDF control, ensuring that it would not empower the terrorist group. "The principle must be that Hamas cannot get its hands on the aid," said one cabinet member. Some ministers even suggested that Gaza's civilians should relocate to areas under IDF control to access the aid.

The United States has hit more than 800 targets in Yemen since mid-March, killing hundreds of Houthi rebel fighters, including members of the group’s leadership, the US military says.

Washington’s forces have hammered the Iran-backed Houthi rebels with near-daily air strikes since March 15 in an operation dubbed “Rough Rider,” seeking to end the threat they pose to vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden and reestablish US regional “deterrence.”

“Since the start of Operation Rough Rider, USCENTCOM has struck over 800 targets. These strikes have killed hundreds of Huthi fighters and numerous Houthi leaders,” the military command responsible for the Middle East says in a statement.

“The strikes have destroyed multiple command-and-control facilities, air defense systems, advanced weapons manufacturing facilities, and advanced weapons storage locations,” CENTCOM says.

Despite the strikes, the Houthis — who control large swaths of Yemen and have been at war with a Saudi-led coalition backing the internationally recognized government since 2015 — have continued to claim attacks against both US vessels and Israel.

CENTCOM says that “while the Houthis have continued to attack our vessels, our operations have degraded the pace and effectiveness of their attacks. Ballistic missile launches have dropped by 69 percent. Additionally, attacks from one-way attack drones have decreased by 55 percent.”

“Iran undoubtedly continues to provide support to the Houthis. The Houthis can only continue to attack our forces with the backing of the Iranian regime,” the military command says.

“We will continue to ratchet up the pressure until the objective is met, which remains the restoration of freedom of navigation and American deterrence in the region,” it adds.

The Israeli military struck what it said was a Hezbollah precision missiles warehouse in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Sunday, after killing one of the Iran-backed terror group’s operatives in a drone strike in southern Lebanon earlier in the day.

There were no immediate reports of casualties in the Beirut-area strike, which came after after the military warned residents to evacuate.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a joint statement that missiles stored in the Lebanese capital “posed a significant threat to Israel.”

“Israel will not allow Hezbollah to grow stronger and pose any threat to it – anywhere in Lebanon,” the two men said.

They stressed that Israel will not allow Beirut’s southern suburbs — historically a Hezbollah stronghold — to serve as a sanctuary for the terror group.

The Lebanese government bears direct responsibility for preventing these threats,” they warned.

He called on “the United States and France, as guarantors of the ceasefire agreement, to assume their responsibilities and compel Israel to halt its attacks immediately.”

He also alleged that Israel was attempting to destabilize his country and warned that it would intensify tensions in the region.

The Hebrew word mechdal has no precise equivalent in English. It signifies a great catastrophe for which human beings are responsible by inaction, error, or irresponsibility. The Yom Kippur War of 1973, which began when an unprepared IDF was taken by surprise by simultaneous Syrian and Egyptian attacks, has often been referred to as a mechdal. The October 7, 2023, attack was an even greater mechdal.

The more you learn about the events of that day, the more it seems that almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong. In fact, things could easily have gone far worse.

That the attacks did not kill many more people, and have a vastly more destructive effect on the State of Israel, was largely thanks to the extraordinary heroism of civilian defense teams, local police units, and small groups of soldiers who fought Hamas attacks on communities, cities, and key junctions even as nearby IDF garrisons were overrun. The thanks also goes to special-forces teams that were the first to arrive in the south in response to the invasion.

All these defenders were both outnumbered and outgunned by the Hamas Qassam Brigades that formed the majority of the invaders. (The Israeli special-forces teams that raced to the south expected to confront five- to 10-man groups of terrorist infiltrators, not to be caught up in long, intense battles against 100 or more trained infantry with a vast supply of ammunition.) Many did not survive long enough to be rescued by the Israeli army when its battalions finally arrived that afternoon.

Then came Israel’s Dunkirk-in-reverse: the heroic response of hundreds of Israelis, many of them reservists and retirees, but also active-duty soldiers who did not wait for orders but raced down to the Gaza envelope in private vehicles, rifles and pistols in hand. The fact that these volunteers were able to get so quickly to Route 232 (the sole highway to the battle zone, and the road on which so many were killed by Hamas ambush) makes the many hours it took for sizeable IDF units to get to the combat zone look all the worse.

Errors and indiscipline on the part of otherwise disturbingly impressive Hamas invasion forces also prevented deeper disaster. At least two convoys of Hamas attack trucks got lost, including the one that came upon the Nova music festival while trying to get to the city of Netivot. Some Hamas Nukhba (elite) units that were apparently instructed to penetrate deeper into Israel after overrunning nearby posts and communities chose instead to indulge in hours of looting, rape, and corpse-mutilation alongside Gazan civilians, before eventually returning to Gaza with their material and human booty.

The Blame Game. Certain Israeli institutions and individuals share particular blame for the disaster, alongside the prime minister and his cabinet, who bear ultimate responsibility by virtue of their position. Among those individuals are the men (and they were all men) then in charge of the Military Intelligence Directorate, the Shin Bet security service, the Defense Ministry, and the generals and colonels who at the time headed the IDF’s Gaza Division and Southern Command.

But responsibility for the mechdal goes much wider. While conducting interviews for a British parliamentary report on October 7, one overseen by the historian Andrew Roberts and published this March, I and a small team of researchers from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on UK-Israel, were struck by evidence of deeper unpreparedness that could not all be laid at the feet of the current administration and the current senior leadership of the military and security services. The more people we spoke to, the clearer it became that October 7 was the product of vast systemic failure. Moreover, Hamas’s shocking, murderous triumph depended as much on relatively long-term trends that had led to the decline of the IDF as a conventional army as on the disastrous failings of the intelligence community and the policies of the Netanyahu administration.

This is why the instant historical analogies of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 may be less apposite than a comparison to the British loss of Singapore to imperial Japan in February 1942. That epochal defeat—the largest in the history of the British Empire after Yorktown during the Revolutionary War—was also accompanied and followed by atrocities and war crimes against both civilians and soldiers. It was enabled by willful strategic blindness, poor planning, foolish faith in the colony’s fortifications—and, once fighting began, by the poor performance of under-trained troops badly led by their commanders at every level, followed by abject failures of coordination and communication in battle. At bottom of the failure lay an attitude toward the Japanese that hubristically combined arrogance with unmerited and ill-informed contempt for the enemy’s military capability. Every one of those factors was present in Israel’s October 7 mechdal.

Most of the early examinations of the October 7 disaster have focused on what was self-evidently a colossal Israeli intelligence failure in the days and months before the invasion, or on the missteps made on the night before Hamas struck. During that night, key officials—including the chief of defense staff, the head of IDF Southern Command, and the prime minister’s chief intelligence adviser—were all notified of worrying intelligence data from Gaza, but they either failed to pass on those warnings or failed to act on them.

The warnings that were delivered that night by the Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security service) and the army’s Military Intelligence Directorate were mostly based on “anomalies” such as the sudden activation of dozens of mobile phone SIM cards by known Hamas commanders. Neither agency suggested any kind of mobilization or said it suspected an imminent major attack of any kind, let alone one of unprecedented size—this despite an accumulation of suggestive evidence over the previous weeks and months.

The Cassandras.Much has been made of IDF commanders choosing to ignore the concerns raised by the corps of young female observers whose job it was to watch footage coming from Gaza 24 hours a day. Many of the observers were stationed at the Nahal Oz post right next to the border. (Sixteen of these Cassandras were killed and seven others kidnapped when that strategically vital but thinly fortified and poorly guarded base was overrun in the first half hour of the attack.)

It was just one instance of the reflexive refusal by senior Israeli military, intelligence, and political leaders to engage with reports from their own observers and analysts that threatened to undermine their group shibboleth—the belief that Hamas was not and could not be an existential threat. From the very top of the political tree down to the relatively junior officers who commanded the observer units on the Gaza border, adherence to this shibboleth was so ingrained that it trumped all evidence that suggested Hamas might be preparing for an attack.

That evidence was abundant and unsubtle. It was noticed on many occasions, but only by people too low in the defense hierarchy to enjoy real influence. In July 2023, less than four months before the invasion, an experienced analyst in Unit 8200, the IDF’s signals-intelligence agency, warned her superiors that Hamas had conducted a daylong training military exercise that corresponded extremely closely to the captured Hamas invasion plan code-named Jericho Wall. After her commander chose to ignore her concern, the analyst, an NCO, went over his head and sent her concerns to more-senior officers. The only result was an official reprimand. At the beginning of October, the Gaza division commander was informed that six Hamas battalions—units of 600–800 fighters each—were engaging in twice-weekly training drills. He took no action with the information. Meanwhile, the female conscripts of the Combat Intelligence Collection Corps made frequent representations to their commanders about what looked like preparations for a large-scale Hamas assault between May 2023 and the morning of the actual attack. Their warnings were dismissed as hysterical, despite the fact that the observer corps had a sterling reputation. (One now-retired battalion commander told me, “I worked with these girls when I was in the infantry and we trusted them with our lives. They were our eyes. Not trusting is so counterintuitive.”)

The fact is that Hamas hid its invasion preparations in plain sight. In Spring 2022, Hamas TV broadcast a series that dramatized a mass attack of the October 7 type in which invaders captured the Reim Military Base as well as civilian communities. The series was praised by Hamas’s Gazan leader Yahya Sinwar as “an inseparable part of what we are preparing.” In 2023, Hamas’s propaganda arm released several videos of uniformed, masked Nukhba commandos training to overrun mock-ups of nearby Israeli bases and practicing with the weapons and breaching materials they would use on October 7.

All Hamas really kept secret was the precise timing of its attack—a date that, in hindsight, looks like an obvious choice given the traditional Islamist obsession with anniversaries and the State of Israel’s 21st-century practice of essentially disarming itself on religious holidays. (It is now known that the date was decided in May 2023, Sinwar having previously considered launching the “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack during Passover of that year.)

For hundreds of senior leaders coming from all sides of the Israeli political spectrum to dismiss the increasing tempo and size of Hamas military exercises, the captured plans, and the stated desire of its leaders to bring about Israel’s complete destruction required what now looks like a quasi-religious devotion to what Israeli analysts call the intelligence community’s conceptsia. This is the Hebrew term given to the overarching strategic narrative about the conditions holding between Israel and Hamas. The pre–October 7 conceptsia held that Hamas had, for the foreseeable future, been both deterred—thanks to its battering by Israel first in 2014 and then in 2021—and co-opted. The co-optation had supposedly come thanks to a huge influx of mostly Qatari money, growing prosperity in the Strip, and what Israel chose to see as a turn by leaders like the supposedly pragmatic Yahya Sinwar away from the organization’s core destructive goal and toward the quotidian challenges of governing Gaza.

Such self-delusion would be more understandable if Israel had not spent the previous year commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War—with dozens of conferences exploring how adherence to an incorrect strategic concept combined with underestimation of Arab military capability had almost destroyed the state in 1973. In that case, the conceptsia of the time—blasted into smithereens by the 1974 Agranat Commission that felled then–Prime Minister Golda Meir and led inexorably to the election of the first conservative government in Israel’s history three years later—was a dogged assumption that Egypt would never even consider attacking Israel until it had obtained long-range bombers and Scud missiles to take out the bases of the Israeli air force (IAF).

On-the-Ground Failures. The intelligence failure that preceded and enabled the October 7 attack was so enormous that rather less attention was paid in its aftermath to the many things that went wrong on the day itself, between the rocket barrages that began at 6:29 a.m. and the arrival in the Gaza envelope of sizeable IDF formations beginning around 2:30 p.m. Still less was paid to the troubling things that the day revealed about the IDF’s doctrines and operational readiness.

But each new internal investigation and outside study has revealed previously unreported command errors, gaps in training and equipment, inattention to basic security, inadequate coordination, and unwillingness to take initiative—as well as the extraordinary depth of Israel’s intelligence failure. While there were many incidents of individual heroism on October 7, IDF units in the army posts attacked that morning did not, as a general rule, perform well or even adequately—regardless of whether they were reservists or members of regular forces such as the storied Golani Brigade.

Take the Erez Crossing and its adjacent military liaison base. The latter was overrun by a force of just 20 Hamas Nukhba commandos (a further 100 terrorists arrived later in the morning to loot, burn, and take captives). While it is clear from the abundant video footage of the attack that the Nukhba attackers were highly trained and well-equipped infantry (Iran’s IRGC has claimed credit for Hamas’s military effectiveness), the base was home to an entire company of IDF backup troops. Moreover, those soldiers had almost half an hour to prepare a defense after the pedestrian terminal at the Erez Crossing was stormed at 6:42, but they failed to do so.

It did not help that, as an IDF report has pointed out, the Erez base, like the other posts in the region, was not fortified. (It lacked fighting positions, foxholes, berms, or machine-gun posts despite sitting up against the border.) Nine soldiers were killed and three kidnapped before air force drone strikes on Hamas vehicles prompted the terrorists to leave for Gaza or other targets in the area around 8:30 a.m. Two hours later, a second larger wave of attackers arrived at the now largely abandoned base and looted it. It was only at 3 p.m. that IDF troops arrived from the north. It is worth noting that it is only an hour’s drive to the Erez Crossing from Tel Aviv, and just two and a half hours from the Lebanese border.

For all the abundant heroism shown by individual Israeli soldiers and civilians that day, there were also incidents of unprofessionalism and worse. When the Nahal Oz observation base was attacked early on October 7, a group of staff officers, though armed, chose to take no part in the desperate fighting for the base and have been accused of actually abandoning the unarmed observers in the command center. In several other border posts, quite large groups of soldiers hid from the attackers rather than take the offensive, as has long been the doctrine and practice of the IDF.

There were also astonishing failures by IDF commanders to convey vital information. It turns out that none of the IDF ground units that raced down to the Gaza envelope on October 7 were even aware of the existence of the Nova music festival, let alone the need to rescue its attendees. The nearby IDF garrisons also did not know that the Friday–Saturday rave was taking place. This despite the fact that the IDF had itself approved the party at several levels, as with all such events in the Gaza envelope. (The IDF report into the massacre at the festival, released at the beginning of April, revealed that there should have been an army liaison officer at the police command post on the site, which is not far from the divisional headquarters at Reim.)

Ironically, it now seems that Hamas was also unaware of the festival’s presence but, on discovering it and its easy targets around 8:20 a.m., dispatched additional truckloads of gunmen to the site. They overcame the 31 police officers assigned to the festival for traffic and crowd control and the small units that arrived at the site over the next hours. Together with the Palestinian civilian attackers who came from Gaza by foot, the gunmen enjoyed free rein until midday. A total of 344 festivalgoers were murdered, either at the site or while fleeing for their lives, while 44 were kidnapped to Gaza. Taken separately from the other 40 attacks on the border that day, the assault on the Nova festival was the most lethal terror attack in Israel’s history.

The Failure of Imagination. During conversations with Israeli officials at various levels of seniority, I was told repeatedly that a mass incursion or invasion from Gaza had seemed so unlikely as to be almost inconceivable. That such an attack was near impossible was taken for granted by everyone—civilian and military—at the top of the Israeli state. It underlay not just the Netanyahu administration’s policies but the disposition and doctrine of the entire Israeli military and intelligence apparatus. But the inconceivable attack had in fact been conceived by various Israeli observers for more than decade and a half.

The earliest prediction of an October 7–style mass attack from Gaza was one made in an article entitled “How Arabs Plan to Fight Israel,” by Lieutenant Colonel Rubi Sandman, writing in an Israeli military journal in 2010.

The article, which has not been translated into English, won the IDF Chief of Staff Award for military and security writing but was apparently forgotten, at least by Israelis. It is possible that it was read and taken seriously by Hamas and Hezbollah planners. Hezbollah soon afterward developed a plan envisioned in the article to use tunnels to enable a mass incursion into Israel leading to the capture of the Galilee. It was to carry out that plan that Hezbollah set up its elite Radwan Force with the help of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Hamas’s Nukhba force was essentially a copy of Radwan, just as its invasion plan was copied from Hezbollah’s.

In 2014, soon after that year’s 50-day war against Hamas—a war that saw the first duel between Hamas rocket artillery and the Iron Dome system—the IDF discovered that Hamas had been planning and preparing for an assault from Gaza involving scores of attackers through subterranean tunnels.

Then in 2016, then–Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman—another October 7 Cassandra—wrote a secret memo sent to then–Prime Minister Netanyahu in which he said that “Hamas intends to take the conflict into Israeli territory by sending a significant number of well-trained forces (like the Nukhba for example) into Israel to try and capture an Israeli community (or maybe even several communities) on the Gaza border and take hostages.”

The memo went on to point out that the high-tech Gaza security barrier, then in its infancy, “cannot constitute a strategy in itself. Modern history and past precedents (the Maginot Line, the Mannerheim Line, and the Bar Lev Line) have proven that fences and fortifications do not prevent war and do not constitute a guarantee for peace and security.”

Lieberman’s 2016 memo was inspired by the capture in the summer of that year of a Hamas plan for a mass incursion into Israel. The plan envisaged the capture of bases and communities in the Gaza envelope. A second, more detailed version of this Hamas blueprint, code-named Jericho Wall, fell into Israeli hands in 2022 but was taken even less seriously.

The original Hamas concept for a major incursion envisioned making use of infiltration tunnels of the type that had been used to kidnap the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006—whose five-year ordeal as a hostage led to the deal that featured the release of 1,000 Palestinian terrorists in exchange for his return, including Hamas’s October 7 mastermind, Yahya Sinwar. By the run-up to the 2014 war, Hamas had built 14 such attack tunnels, but after Israel developed expensive high-tech means of detecting them and preventing their construction, it gave up on the idea.

We don’t know when Hamas leaders Sinwar and Mohammed Deif realized that they could more easily get large numbers of gunmen into Israel simply by knocking down sections of the border fence with bulldozers, given the right timing—i.e., on a religious holiday—or when they developed the ability to blind or otherwise cripple the IDF’s automated security systems.

According to the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, who was allowed to read the Jericho Wall Hamas invasion plan after it was obtained in 2022, the revised plan included astonishingly precise details about Israel’s defenses. Not just the whereabouts and complements of specific army units, but exact placement of cameras and antennae, the timings and scope of patrols and guard changes, the numbers of troops around on weekends, and the location within army bases of control rooms and shelters. Collecting all that information, plus the detailed knowledge of the layouts of the communities attacked on October 7, took years of patient work. The Hamas maps and diagrams captured that day were made using commercial satellite imagery and drone photographs as well as information gleaned from Gazan workers employed by Israelis in the envelope. At kibbutzim such as Kfar Aza and Be’eri, the attackers knew precisely which houses the civilian security volunteers lived in, as well as the locations of the armories. The attackers’ knowledge of how under-strength the border garrisons were that weekend was enabled by careful, extensive study of Israeli social media. Sinwar was far from the only Hamas leader to have become fluent in Hebrew in Israeli prisons.

As a result, Sinwar and his gunmen understood the disposition and capabilities of their enemy far better than the Israelis knew and understood theirs, for all the boasting by Israeli officials over the years that a cockroach couldn’t move in Gaza without the IDF knowing about it.

It is now clear that some of Hamas’s rocket barrages in the months and even years before October 7 were part of a program of intelligence-gathering, in accordance with the old Soviet military doctrine of Razvedka Boyem, or “reconnaissance through battle.” The bombardments not only offered a means by which Hamas could assess the capabilities and limitations of the Iron Dome system, they led to the discovery of an enormous Israeli vulnerability. This was a civilian and military safety measure without which the October attack would have been much harder to pull off. It had somehow become standard operating procedure for all IDF personnel, as well as the Kitat Konenut guards on the Kibbutzim, to go into their rocket shelters on hearing rocket alarms, leaving the posts and communities for which they were responsible completely open to attack.

This was not previously the norm in the IDF. And for an obvious reason: Attacking armies have advanced under cover of artillery fire since at least the invention of the ballista in the fifth century B.C.E. As one retired IDF officer reminded me when despairing of this contemporary Israeli practice, “During the First World War, the armies on the Western Front kept soldiers on the fighting steps of their trench systems even during the heaviest artillery bombardments, bombardments vastly more intense and destructive than the rocket barrages of October 7.”

At 6:30 a.m. on October 7 in Kibbutz Magen, an ornery resident who habitually refused to go into the shelters when the alert sounded caught sight of a convoy of Hamas attackers approaching the community and warned the community defense squad, who were able to get their weapons and mount an effective response. A single observant human presence above ground can be all it takes to save an entire community.

Worshipping High Tech. Had there been human sentries backing up or supplementing the electronic systems on which IDF border security relied, they would likely have spotted either the Hamas drones taking out cameras and gun towers, or the Hamas fighters cutting holes in the border fence, in time to call out whatever quick-reaction forces were available. There were none because of the IDF’s excessive, even idolatrous, faith in high tech. Its planners seem genuinely to have believed that Israel’s cyber-age Maginot Line along the Gaza border—with AI-assisted sensors and automated machine guns—was unbreachable. That those expensive, complex systems could be neutralized by $50 mail-order drones carrying hand grenades never occurred to them. It did not help that unlike most of the world’s militaries, and unlike Hamas’s leaders, the IDF unit tasked with learning from foreign conflicts apparently paid minimal attention to the war in Ukraine, a war that had already seen several revolutions in computer-age warfare in the 18 months between its start and October 7.

Analysts of the Yom Kippur War mechdal have pointed out that behind the incorrect assumptions of the then current “concept” was a tendency to underestimate the Arab enemy. Fifty years later, a whole host of IDF doctrines and practices rested on a similarly reflexive, ill-informed, and perhaps even bigoted underestimation of enemy capabilities, combined with a regrettably sabra-like conviction of inherent superiority and invulnerability.

You can see this in the Israeli intelligence agencies’ assumption that Hamas’s leaders were inherently incapable of learning from harsh experience. But while it took a long time and many losses to Israeli strikes for Hamas commanders to stop using mobile phones that the Shin Bet could listen to and track, they eventually did so.

In any continuing war, both sides learn from each other, and the side that learns the quickest gains substantial advantage. The Allies in World War II eventually became as competent at modern combined-arms warfare as their German opponents; just as the Russian army in Ukraine has learned how to deal with the drones and modern tanks that were fielded with such initial success by the defenders. It was surely inevitable that Hamas would one day turn to alternate means of communication and find ways of defeating even Israel’s most advanced surveillance technologies after being defeated in four minor-to-major direct confrontations between 2009 and 2021—and, as October 7 was to prove, they did.

Hamas was aided in this by at least two peculiar Israeli decisions, both redolent of excessive self-confidence. One was the Shin Bet’s 2010 abandonment of its human-intelligence program in Gaza. Essentially, it gave up recruiting new spies and sources. Another was the decision in the summer of 2022 by Unit 8200, the IDF’s famous signals-intelligence agency, to stop eavesdropping on the Hamas network of hand-held radios.

Less than a year later, more than 40 Israeli targets adjacent to Gaza were attacked by some 3,000 Hamas fighters. Having breached the border fence in more than a hundred places, they arrived in units ranging in size from 40 to 200 men. They were led by Hamas’s Nukhba forces, who were as well armed and at least as well trained as most of the defenders they encountered. In Israel it has become the norm to refer to all Hamas operatives as Nukhba and all the attackers who crossed the border as “Hamas terrorists,” but in fact, the 2,000–3,000 intruders who came in the second and third waves were mostly made up of allied militias, criminal gangs, and civilian opportunists.

In normal times, the Gaza envelope was protected on paper by three IDF infantry battalions and one armored battalion, totaling about 1,5001 combat troops. It used to be four infantry battalions, but one was removed after the construction of the celebrated high-tech border fence.

The IDF’s 21st-Century Holiday. On October 7, there were fewer than 800 IDF combat troops guarding the entire 40-mile-long border region, with its 30-odd agricultural communities and 12 military installations, most of which lacked basic fortifications. Many of the army posts were at just 40 percent strength. When we asked active-duty IDF commanders why troop numbers had been so low, they replied, with evident surprise at the question, that it was both the Sabbath and Simchat Torah, and the troops were with their families for the holiday. It was as if the IDF as an institution had somehow forgotten that there was a quite significant precedent for an enemy to attack Israel on a religious holiday, or it simply assumed that Israel had no enemies willing and capable of carrying out such a deed.

The holiday absence of more than half the standing force on October 7 was not unique to the Gaza border region. It turns out to have been standard procedure for the military throughout Israel, with the air force stripped down by an even greater proportion.

According to one serving colonel I spoke to in the course of researching our report, this mass holidaying had much to do with the Israeli military’s adoption of a practice common in private Israeli business: the use of “concentrated vacations” to save on electricity, bureaucracy, etc. As he sadly admitted, the policy reflected a certain complacency about the country’s security threats.

The same complacency, along with what many older former IDF officers see as general decline in professionalism, can be seen in the way that almost all of the IDF installations in the Gaza envelope had abandoned the standard Western military practice of holding a “stand-to” before sunrise. During the daily stand-to at a military base or camp, soldiers take up defensive positions as if expecting an enemy attack. (The idea behind is to ensure that troops know what to do and where to go in case of attack, and for an outpost to be ready at the time that attacks are most likely.) The procedure is theoretically required at dawn on all IDF bases, and had it been followed on October 7, the day might have gone very differently. It would have made a particular difference at bases such as Nahal Oz, which had had no sentries on gate duty that morning, and whose complement of 90 combat soldiers did not have time to get their machine guns out of a locked armory when Hamas attacked.

A retired colonel who commanded an IDF battalion during the second intifada assured me that, in his time, there was always a stand-to on every base he was ever stationed at. It is not clear when or how it became normal or acceptable for IDF units to drop the practice, especially in inherently dangerous locations like posts abutting the Gaza border. (That Hamas was watching and targeting Nahal Oz was no secret. It had built a mock-up of the base and made films of its troops practicing its capture.) Hamas operatives knew the base so well that, earlier in the year, one of them held up a poster at the fence wishing one of the female observers happy birthday—with her full name and age.

Another shocking dereliction at Nahal Oz, at least for anyone used to American military practice, was that the young female soldiers monitoring the surveillance systems were unarmed and had no combat training. During the War on Terror, I visited or stayed at dozens of U.S. and allied military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in all those installations, even those deep within the “Green Zones” of Baghdad and Kabul, almost everyone, male or female, from generals to radio repairmen, carried a sidearm.

When I asked a young Israeli who had recently served as an intelligence officer at a nearby base about the presence of unarmed soldiers on a post so close to Gaza, he told me that during his year on the border he had never worn the pistol he had been issued, adding that “it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.” He then explained that he didn’t really know how to use it, having had only a few hours on the range during his training: “Some [conscripts] don’t get any training on weapons, if you’re ill that day, then you can be deployed without ever having fired a weapon.”

Of course, conscripts headed for elite units and soldiers in combat units in the regular army are given proper weapons instruction, but apparently in the 21st-century IDF, the great majority of citizen soldiers receive minimal training in weapons handling or other basic combat skills. It is the very opposite of the approach taken by the U.S. Marine Corps, with its doctrine of “every Marine a rifleman”—which ensures that every person in the entire service from pilot to mechanic to driver to medic to cyber warrior can fight if need be. It is also the opposite approach to that of the early IDF and its predecessor organization, the Haganah. The potential cost of not bothering to train noncombat troops was made all too clear on October 7.2

This is part of a larger, long-term phenomenon that began at the start of this century. Successive Israeli defense ministers and chiefs of defense staff from 2002 onward cut expenditure on the IDF’s ground capabilities, underfunding training, maintenance, transport capacity, and combat logistics, in the belief that the country could rely on air force jets, intelligence agencies and special forces to keep its enemies at bay and protect its citizenry. In 2015, it gave an entire squadron of its helicopter gunships to Jordan. Close air support of ground troops was no longer viewed as a priority, now that the focus had shifted to Iran and cyberwarfare. The belief that substantial conventional ground forces were no longer that necessary underlay the cutting of compulsory national service from three years to just over two and a half and also a new policy of ending reservist duty at age 40 instead of 54, even though this deprived the IDF of a great many combat-experienced troops.

The Kibbutz civilian-security teams, supervised by the IDF, were also allowed to deteriorate in the years before October 7. Many had minimal training. It did not help that the IDF, more concerned about weapons thefts than readiness, ruled that the squads had to keep all their rifles and ammunition in locked armories. This meant that on October 7, many of the security squads were not able to get their weapons in time to confront Hamas attackers—who knew not just the armories’ locations but which residents held keys for them. (Fortunately, at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, but only there, the security coordinator not only disregarded the IDF’s order to store all weapons centrally but had drilled his team, for whom he had purchased modern helmets, body armor, and gunsights for their rifles. They were able to drive the attackers off and save their fellow residents.)

The neglect of ground forces combined with complacency about the Hamas threat had many dire consequences on October 7. Some of the tanks that should have protected the attacked army bases had had their .50 caliber machine guns removed for maintenance or because of fear that they might be stolen. Armored vehicles were not kept fully fueled: The tank that stopped at the Nova festival and provided shelter for some of the partygoers did so because it had run out of gas. A shortage of working jeeps meant that some IDF outposts could only send out foot patrols. Several of the cameras on the aerostat balloons that were a key part of Gaza border surveillance had been out of order for some time.

A retired reservist colonel told me that, after 2003, his infantry battalion engaged in just one whole-unit exercise in the next decade. If it had had to cope with a real ground war rather than constabulary or counterinsurgency work in the territories, it would have been in terrible trouble. Even regular army combat battalions no longer train sufficiently to be combat-ready. This was one reason why it took three weeks after October 7 for IDF ground forces to enter Gaza: The IDF lacked soldiers who were ready to take part in intense urban warfare—and had to train up infantry and armor battalions so that they could carry out the mission.

Hours to Kill. In several of the places attacked on October 7, Hamas operatives and Gazan civilians who followed them across the fence enjoyed more than five uninterrupted hours of opportunity to kill, rape, and kidnap. Given Israel’s small size, and the fact that there are large army bases like the giant Ariel Sharon complex even closer to the attacked area, the failure of the country’s armed forces to arrive in sufficient numbers in time to save the residents of Negev communities has provoked confusion and anger.

It was not until after noon that sizeable units of IDF troops arrived at the Nova site. One survivor of the attack there, a capable female army reservist who led several others to safety, told interviewers that by mid-morning she had become convinced that Israel had collapsed under a massive multifront attack and that her family in Tel Aviv was likely dead. It was the only way she could understand the failure of the IDF to arrive in the region.

At Kibbutz Nir Oz, where the IDF didn’t arrive until 1 p.m., 40 minutes after the last terrorists and camp followers had left, one in three of the residents present that morning was killed or kidnapped—including the entire Bibas family.

Some of the “where was the army?” expectations and criticism are unfair. It takes more than a few hours to mobilize ready reserve forces even in a country as small as Israel, and even with the benefit of mobile phones. To put the challenge in context, the minimum time for the British army’s rapid-reaction force, 16 Air Assault Brigade, to be ready to deploy is five days. Moreover, Israel has a much smaller regular army than is often realized, and of necessity much of it had to be kept on the northern border in case of invasion by Hezbollah. That said, there does seem to have been paralysis at the center—both at the Kiriya in Tel Aviv, Israel’s equivalent of the Pentagon, and in the prime minister’s office.3

Some foreign intelligence agencies have suggested that an additional explanation for both the total surprise Hamas achieved, and the apparent paralysis that followed, was a successful hacking of the IDF’s command-and-control networks—possibly by Iran using its Chinese-supplied technology. A hacking would go some way to explain otherwise mysterious logistical derelictions, among them the failure of the Ministry of Defense to organize buses to get reservists to their posts, the IAF’s failure to get helicopters out of repair shops and ready for use, and the Kiriya’s odd failure to send armor units to clear route 232. (A reservist who drove down to Gaza on the evening of October 7 told me how astonished he was not to see long convoys of military vehicles heading south.) If such a hacking took place, the IDF is not only not admitting it but is actively discouraging any speculation on the matter.

One of the more likely explanations for the apparent chaos is the effectiveness with which Hamas hamstrung the IDF’s command-and-control infrastructure in the south. It did this by destroying cellular towers of the army’s communication system along the border and by taking control of Reim Base—the headquarters of the IDF’s Gaza Division and its two brigades.

Despite its strategic importance, Reim Base had been all but unguarded when 120 Hamas Nukhba troops arrived there in 10 pick-up trucks at about 7 a.m. At 7:30, there were still many soldiers in their beds. That it was not completely captured was thanks in large part to a Bedouin tracker unit that had been warned of the coming attack by civilians fleeing the Nova site and that set up a fighting position near the entrance.

The overrunning of Reim Base was arguably Hamas’s most important military success on October 7—one that seems especially impressive given that in all of Israel’s wars, including that of 1973, no Arab army ever succeeded in overrunning and capturing even a small IDF post, let alone a divisional headquarters. The virtually unguarded Reim Base was not only the coordination node for IDF forces in the Gaza region, but the HQ on which the Kiriya (again, Israel’s Pentagon) depended for information about the entire area of operations. As a result of Reim’s conquest and Hamas’s earlier destruction of the IDF’s communications antennae on the border bases, Israel’s top brass had no conception of the depth, ferocity, and success of the Hamas invasion, and did not know where it should be sending reinforcements for most of the day. Even when the Gaza Division commander, besieged in his own headquarters, was able to get a message to the Kiriya in Tel Aviv that his base and the surrounding area were under heavy attack, the national HQ sent only small units of special forces prepared for short encounters with small units of infiltrators—many of Israel’s best elite troops were killed as a result.

For reasons as yet unexplained, the country’s satellites and also the IAF’s reconnaissance aircraft were either unavailable or incapable of providing Israel’s leaders with a timely picture of what was going on in the south of their own country. For several hours, the small forces that made it through the Hamas ambush positions on Highway 232 were also unaware which communities or bases had fallen or where they were most needed.

Although citizens and soldiers under attack made thousands of phone calls to relatives, friends, and government connections in the hours after the attack began, there was no agency collating or collecting the information they provided. Again and again, five- or 10-man special-forces detachments arrived at kibbutzim expecting to be fighting an incursion by a handful of terrorists and found themselves outnumbered by a factor of 10 or 20. Many died because they ran out of ammunition.

Although there were several thousand IDF troops stationed within a 40-minute drive of the Gaza envelope, their arrival was hindered by the lack of roads leading from their bases to the combat area and the fact that Hamas controlled the one highway through the western Negev that links every attacked community and post. Even if some of those Hamas ambush positions had been neutralized, there was also, it turns out, a severe shortage of working trucks in the IDF’s Southern Command. The obvious alternative to moving those troops by road—moving them by air—was not an option, because, as an Israeli military spokesman told me, working transport helicopters were simply not available. Just why this was the case remains one of the mysteries of October 7, but it seems to have to do with the great shift in the IDF’s spending priorities since the beginning of the century.

Willful Blindness. No military or political establishment has ever been immune to confirmation bias. Even the strongest and most effective military powers have endured intelligence failures owing to strategic blindness, wishful thinking, or underestimation of the enemy. It is harder to understand, or forgive, the bread-and-butter unreadiness of the IDF in the south. It is not Monday-morning quarterbacking to expect that army posts on a violent frontier would have (human) sentries on duty at all hours, that all personnel would be armed, that somewhere in the Gaza envelope there would be a well-trained, quick-reaction force of at least battalion strength.

Apart from a handful of anti-aircraft machine guns mounted on the unarmored pick-up trucks that carried them around the Gaza envelope, Hamas’s thousands of invaders carried only small arms. Their limited routes to the communities they attacked left them highly exposed. Had they come up against a reasonably well-trained battalion of heavy infantry with its full complement of machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars, and armored fighting vehicles (let alone an armored unit or a pair of helicopter gunships) before reaching the kibbutzim, the entire invasion force would likely have been wiped out in minutes. For that matter, had any of the Nukhba companies arrived at an IDF base that was fortified and manned, like a U.S. combat outpost in Afghanistan or Iraq, it would not have lasted long. That Hamas’s leaders were so confident that the attackers faced no such obstacles is itself an indictment of IDF doctrine and practice.

What Happens Now. The UK All-Party Parliamentary Group report was intended to provide a clear-eyed and historically accurate account of an important moment in contemporary military history. The question now is how Israel is going to handle these matters.

At the time of this writing, several internal reports have been made public. There will eventually be more than 40 such reports just from the IDF alone, dealing with the attacks and battles that took place in as many locations in the Gaza envelope.

There have been many calls for an official government investigation akin to the Agranat Commission. The Netanyahu administration has resisted this, saying any such inquiry should begin only after the end of the current conflict. Benjamin Netanyahu’s critics say he is stalling, and not only that, but that he has unnecessarily and selfishly prolonged the war in Gaza—refraining from finishing off Hamas in order to avoid the fallout that would inevitably accrue from such a commission. Netanyahu likely needs such a commission, even if its judgment of his leadership proves harsh, partly to answer charges that may unfairly lay all or most of the blame for the debacle on his shoulders, but mostly to make sure that the systemic failures of the day are properly examined and the right lessons are learned from those failures.

However, one Israeli senior officer, who is not a Likudnik, told me there are valid reasons for not having such a commission—the main one being that in Israel these are traditionally run by Supreme Court judges. That court, he pointed out, is now more politicized than at any time in Israel’s history and might not be able to conduct such an inquiry with even a minimum of fairness. Moreover, as he pointed out, the High Court itself played a role in the disaster, not least in rulings that serve to undermine border security in Gaza. One ruling forced the IDF to allow Gazans to gather at the border fence unless the latter were actually firing on Israelis. This not only enabled Hamas to test the barrier and make accurate preparations for 130 breaches on October 7, but it “habituated IDF observers to the sight of Gazans at the fence,” making it harder to spot those preparations or the attack itself.

We still do not know the true extent of mastermind Yahya Sinwar’s hopes and plans for the October 7 attack. The fact that the invaders brought with them such large stores of food and ammunition persuaded some observers that Hamas actually intended to hold and fortify the positions it had seized in the envelope and use hostages to hinder their retaking by the IDF. Many Israeli analysts believe that the attack was not intended to be a terrorizing raid in the medieval Arab tradition, or a provocation that would goad Israel into a militarily and diplomatically disastrous counter-invasion that would bring normalization to an end. They think it was intended to be the beginning of the end of Israel as a state—a devastating first strike that would demonstrate beyond doubt its brittleness not just to its Arab enemies on all sides but to the Israeli population.

As awful as things were, they could have been worse. It was fortunate that, unlike the army, the often maligned Israel Police Service not only had a contingency plan for a large-scale Hamas attack, but practiced dealing with one, holding one such exercise in September 2023. As a result, the Hamas attacks on the towns of Netivot and Sderot were contained by 8 a.m. Moreover, if the Israel Police had not prevailed in three little-known battles—at the Reim junction, the Black Arrow Monument, and the Yad Mordechai junction—then large convoys of Hamas pick-up trucks could have headed east and north. Nothing stood between them and the civilian populations of Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. Had even a few pick-up trucks reached those cities and wrought just the limited slaughter achieved in Sderot and Ofakim, the impact would have been enormous. A senior commander I spoke to believes it would likely have inspired copycat attacks on Israeli communities in the West Bank, uprisings in Israel’s majority-Arab cities and neighborhoods along the lines of the upheaval in May 2021, and, deadliest of all, a massive ground invasion of the north by Hezbollah.

It is far from clear how the Israeli state as it was constituted on October 7—a nation that struggled to deal with the Hamas invasion alone—would have coped with simultaneous attacks on multiple fronts. The fall of the Assad regime in Syria shows just how quickly and how easily military defeat and panic can cause a state to collapse. It is now up to Israel’s people and leaders, traumatized and politically divided as they are, to ensure that the country’s military and intelligence institutions will never again be as unprepared and complacent and unable to protect its citizenry as they were on October 7.

The article represents the author’s opinions only and not those of the APPG UK-Israel.

1 Israeli brigades, battalions, and companies tend to be smaller than their U.S. and NATO equivalents.
2 Apparently, the IDF has still not learned its lesson with regard to giving ordinary conscripts basic military training sufficient to keep them alive in case of a surprise attack. A retired lieutenant colonel told me that his recently conscripted daughter, currently assigned to guard duty at one of the abandoned kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope, was sent there having fired just 15 rounds from an M16 during her training. (Fortunately, he assured me, she is a crack shot, having spent a great deal of time with him on the range.)
3 It must be said that rumors suggesting Benjamin Netanyahu suffered some kind of psychological breakdown and was unavailable for several hours—like Stalin on the night of Hitler’s invasion—have not been substantiated in any way.

The security cabinet agreed on Friday night to expand operations in Gaza.

Several IDF reserve brigades will be mobilized and the 8th Infantry Division will be deployed.

Israel is currently not planning a full-scale maneuver in hopes of securing another hostage deal to see the 59 captives returned home. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier in the week that it is currently believed that fewer than 24, less than half the number of hostages being held, are still alive.

Negotiating a hostage deal
A source told N12 earlier that the war would likely continue throughout 2025 and the military was short 10,000 soldiers.

The security cabinet's decision came hours after the Prime Minister's Office issued a statement denying Arab reports and Hamas's claims that Israel had reneged on the terms of a proposed agreement.

The terms, according to the Arab reports, were related to an IDF presence in Gaza over the next year.

A Gaza-bound activist aid ship caught fire and issued an SOS, after what its organizers claimed was an Israeli drone attack off the coast of Malta in international waters in the early hours of Friday.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), which is campaigning to end Israel’s blockade of Gaza, told CNN activists were aboard its ship carrying humanitarian aid when the alleged attack happened just after midnight local time (6 p.m. ET Thursday).

The group is yet to provide evidence that the drone was Israeli, while the Israeli military has declined to comment on the alleged attack.

“There is a hole in the vessel right now and the ship is sinking,” Yasemin Acar, the coalition’s press officer, told CNN by phone from Malta on Friday morning.

Malta’s government said the 68-foot-long ship was carrying 16 people – 12 crew members and four civilian passengers. But FFC earlier gave CNN a higher figure of 30 people on board the vessel.

The Armed Forces of Malta confirmed there was a fire on a ship that was later extinguished. “We are monitoring the situation closely,” a spokesperson told CNN, adding that there were no injuries onboard.

In a later statement, Malta’s government said a tug boat had been sent to assist the vessel.

“All crew were confirmed safe but refused to board the tug. Assistance was provided to support interior firefighting efforts,” the Maltese government statement said.

The ship, the Conscience, was heading to Malta, where a large contingent of activists were due to board before it departed for Gaza, more than 1,000 miles away, but had not made it into port, the group said.

FFC told CNN that climate activist Greta Thunberg and retired US Army Colonel Mary Ann Wright were among those who were expected to board the vessel in Malta, but were not onboard at the time of the fire.

“Volunteers from over 21 countries traveled to Malta to board the mission to Gaza, including prominent figures,” FFC said in a statement.

Thiago Avila, the flotilla’s lead organizer, told CNN that he and other activists took a boat out to the flotilla to try and provide assistance to their colleagues late Friday afternoon, but Maltese sea guards surrounding the vessel prevented them from getting near it.

“We will try to go back again tomorrow morning,” Avila said.

When asked by CNN for comment, the Maritime Squadron of the Armed Forces of Malta said the vessel and the crew are secure, and that the ship remains outside territorial waters and is being monitored by authorities.

Late Friday, the FFC said the flotilla was still trying to enter Maltese territorial waters, but was being prevented by the coast guard. It urged the Maltese government to provide safe passage for the boat, citing the risk of a new attack.

‘Craziest thing in the world’
Speaking to Reuters from Malta, Thunberg said she was part of the group that was supposed to board the boat and “continue the voyage towards Gaza, which is one of many attempts to open up a humanitarian corridor and to do our part to keep trying to break Israel’s illegal siege on Gaza,” adding that “for two months now, not a single bottle of water has entered Gaza, and it’s a systematic starvation of 2 million people.

The activist said that the ship is currently at anchor, as moving it risks water flooding in. “If it were to move, too much water would come in, and it would sink,” she said.

“What is certain is that we human rights activists will continue to do everything in our power to do our part.”

Speaking to CNN from Malta, Wright said activists “were ready to get on the boat. Anyone could have been on the boat,” adding that there are currently Turkish and Azerbaijan citizens on the ship.

“We didn’t even think that this would happen. It’s the craziest thing in the world. The ship was in an anchor there, waiting for us to come. Who would send drones to bomb a ship that is anchoring off Malta?” Wright said, adding that “this should be a warning to all European countries.”

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition describes itself on its website as an international network of pro-Palestinian activists working to end Israel’s blockade of Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid to the besieged enclave by taking direct, non-violent action.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said this week its warehouses are now empty; soup kitchens that are still running are severely rationing their last stocks; and what little food remains in Gaza’s markets is being sold for exorbitant prices that most cannot afford.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, said on X that she “received a distressed call from the people of the Freedom Flotilla that is carrying essential food and medicine to the starving Gaza population.”

Loud explosions
FFC said it had been operating under a media blackout over the mission because it wanted to avoid potential sabotage.

“Our vessel is 17 kilometers off the shores of Malta right now in international waters, and they have been subjected to a drone attack twice,” said Acar, adding that the generators at the front of the vessel were the apparent target.

The group pointed the finger of blame at Israel, without providing evidence. “Israeli ambassadors must be summoned and answer to violations of international law, including the ongoing blockade and the bombing of our civilian vessel in international waters,” FFC said in its statement.

An Israeli Air Force C-130 Hercules was picked up leaving Israel early Thursday afternoon and flying to Malta, according to flight-tracking website ADS-B Exchange. The Hercules did not land at Malta’s international airport, the data shows, but the cargo aircraft did fly at a relatively low altitude - below 5,000 feet - over eastern Malta for an extended period of time. The Hercules flew over several hours before the Freedom Flotilla Coalition says their vessel came under attack. The plane returned to Israel about seven hours later, flight-tracking data shows.

Trevor Ball, a former US Army senior explosive ordnance disposal team member, told CNN that the photos are consistent with two smaller blast munitions being used.

A ballistic missile launched from Yemen by the Iran-backed Houthis struck near Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport on Sunday, briefly grounding flights, halting train service and forcing the closure of access roads covered in debris.

"Following the sirens that sounded in a number of areas in Israel, several attempts were made to intercept the missile launched from Yemen," the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement. "A fall was identified in the area of Ben Gurion Airport. The incident is under review."

The incident marks the first time the Israeli Army has claimed it failed to intercept an incoming ballistic missile since the collapse of the ceasefire in Gaza in mid-March. The Houthis have fired over two dozen missiles and drones on Israel recently according to the IDF.

According to a spokesperson for Ben Gurion International Airport, flights were grounded for nearly an hour after the Houthi missile struck a grassy area near the main highway leading into the airport at approx 9:30 am local time.

The blast damaged parts of the entrance to Terminal 3. Israeli police said officers and emergency workers are still clearing the closed highway; bulldozers were brought in to remove debris. Several airlines have cancelled their flights to Israel today, including Lufthansa and British Airways.

Trains leading to and from the airport, which were halted initially after the strike are now running again, providing the only way into the airport.

Magen David Adom, Israel's emergency services, said in a statement that eight people had been transported with injuries to two local hospitals. Most of the injuries were sustained from running for cover during the aerial siren.

Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened to respond to the Houthi strike, saying on X, “Whoever harms us will be harmed seven-fold.”

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will convene his top advisors and the defense officials later today to weigh Israel’s response, according to an Israeli official.

The Houthis claimed responsibility for the attack.

Israel's Security Cabinet has unanimously approved a plan to seize all of the Gaza Strip in what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said would be an intensive military operation aimed at defeating Hamas.

Palestinian civilians will be moved during the “powerful” new operation in Gaza, Netanyahu said in a video posted on social media, adding that his forces would not launch raids inside the enclave and then retreat.

The Security Cabinet took the decision on the recommendation of Israeli military chief Eyal Zamir, Netanayhu said.

Israel, before the last ceasefire went into effect, had already taken full control of a third of Gaza.

The besieged enclave has been under the longest blockade of humanitarian aid since the war began in October 2023, as Israel’s total ban on the entry of all goods, including food, fuel and medical supplies, enters its third month. As a result, the risk of famine hangs over Gaza’s population, prompting alarm even among some of Israel’s closest allies.

The United Nations on Sunday rejected an Israeli proposal for aid distribution, describing it as “Israeli hubs under conditions set by the Israeli military.” It added that the plan was “dangerous” and appeared to “reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic,” and would mean that large parts of Gaza, including the less mobile and most vulnerable people, would continue to go without supplies.

But a senior Israeli security official said in a statement Monday that the “humanitarian blockade will continue, and only later — after the operational phase begins and a large-scale civilian evacuation to the south is completed — will a humanitarian plan be implemented.” They added that unlike in the past the military “will remain in every area it secures to prevent the return of terror.”

The Israeli army has begun calling up tens of thousands of reserve soldiers to “intensify and expand” its fight against Hamas in an attempt to get the militant group to return hostages still being held since the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack.

“We are increasing the pressure with the aim of returning our men and defeating Hamas,” Israeli military chief Zamir said in a statement, adding that the troops would “operate in additional areas and destroy all infrastructure above and below the ground.”

However, some reservists have indicated they will refuse to serve in a war they increasingly view as politically motivated and at a Knesset committee meeting on Monday, Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan is being held hostage, called on soldiers “not to report for reserve duty for moral and ethical reasons.”

Meanwhile, the families of the 59 remaining hostages under Hamas' captivity issued a "red alert" Monday over the impending expansion in Gaza.

“The expansion of military operations puts every hostage at grave risk,” the Hostages Families Forum Headquarters, said in a statement, adding, “It also threatens the lives of our soldiers and deepens the toll on countless Israeli families already carrying the burden of this war.”

The ceasefire and hostage release talks could resume before a planned visit by President Donald Trump to the region next week, Israeli Minister Ze'ev Elkin told the public broadcaster Kan on Monday.

“There is still a window of opportunity until President Trump concludes his visit to the Middle East, if Hamas understands we are serious,” Elkin said.

Gazans are fighting over the last cans of food, malnourished mothers are struggling to make milk for their thinning babies, and doctors have begun counting down the days before the slow deaths by starvation begin to happen en masse.

“Within one week, we will see a severe starvation,” Dr. Ahmad Al-Farra, head of pediatrics and obstetrics at Nasser Hospital, told NBC News.

The besieged enclave is under its longest blockade of humanitarian aid since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023, as Israel’s total ban on the entry of all goods, including food, fuel and medical supplies, enters its third month. Despite international outrage, Israel has not only kept the gates shut past 63 days, but the security Cabinet is voting Sunday night to expand its offensive in Gaza.

For weeks, families were surviving on very little — fewer meals and smaller spoonfuls — and each day has brought a new low of deprivation

Parents are now watching their vulnerable children starve, with warehouses now empty and community kitchens forced shut. In a place where 80% of the population relies on aid, according to the United Nations, those aid agencies no longer have much to supply. What little food is left in the markets is sold at exorbitant prices.

Ossama Al-Raqab was lying in the pediatric ward of Nasser Hospital, unable to sit up properly. The 5-year-old suffers from cystic fibrosis and is so starved that he can barely lift his gaunt head. His cheeks have sunk into the hollows of his face, his ribs are protruding, and his scrawny limbs are little more than bone. His facial muscles have wasted away so much, he can no longer close his mouth.

Mommy, Mommy, I want to go back,” he whimpers, unable to speak for long.

His mother, Mona Al-Raqab, sits next to him, showing a picture of her once healthy and smiling son, at a time when his diet included eggs, avocados, cashews and almonds. “He needs food and food that contains protein and fat,” she says. “But these things are not available now, and if they are, they are expensive.”

Young Ossama is among the thousands of people already being treated for malnutrition, and for months, doctors like Al-Farra have been warning that the hunger will one day turn fatal.

That warning is now a reality.

“We are talking about 57 deaths from starvation for pediatrics,” Al-Farra told NBC News, adding the cases were not only expected to rise in number, but also severity. “We are talking about increased cases of malnutrition and anemia.”

Those who survive malnutrition in Gaza also have to survive Israel’s ongoing bombardment. But in Gaza’s barely functioning health care system, even the most critical injuries are not being treated and the simplest injuries are turning fatal without blood supply, which is also being depleted by hunger.

Even when there is an available donor, Al-Farra said, “unfortunately a lot of them already have anemia,” which disqualifies them from donation.

The blockade’s resumption has resulted in a sharp increase in acute malnutrition among children, according to UNICEF, which said the number of such cases doubled in March from the previous month. More than 9,000 children have been admitted or treated for acute malnutrition since the start of the year, it said.

With bakeries shut, fishing restricted and farming land destroyed or taken over by Israeli forces, “humanitarian aid has provided the only lifeline for children, and now it is close to running out,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said in a statement Friday.

Starvation begins with the most vulnerable, and newborns and children already suffering other conditions are especially prone.

Siwar Ashour, a 5-month-old child from Al-Nuseirat refugee camp, has lost half of her weight, her mother, Najwa Aram, 23, told NBC News.

“I can’t even afford milk. I beg for clothes for her,” Ashour said, crying. Ashour said her daughter first contracted intestinal flu, which worsened with the lack of clean water and food.

“Every day his condition worsens,” Al-Raqab says, looking at her son, Ossama, who was so frail he now appeared swallowed by the clothes that once fit him. “I want him to be like a normal child, play with children and go out and finish kindergarten.

Bombarded on a near daily basis and with food and medicine increasingly scarce, Gaza has effectively shrunk for its Palestinian population since Israel resumed its military campaign in March and has taken control of more territory.

An NBC News analysis of maps, evacuation orders and statements released by the Israel Defense Forces, as well as interviews with experts, humanitarian workers and civilians, shows that people have been pushed into increasingly crowded areas, and that a humanitarian zone once deemed safe is no longer designated as such.

Israel broke its fragile truce with Hamas on March 18, just over two weeks after the first phase of the three-part ceasefire deal came to an end. Negotiations on the second phase of the deal, meant to establish a permanent end to the fighting, have since stalled, with Israel also blocking the flow of aid and goods into Gaza for more than 60 days.

Along with regular airstrikes and ground operations, its military has also moved to secure more of the enclave, while nearly half a million Palestinians in Gaza have been newly displaced, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, recently warned.

After launching its offensive following the Hamas-led terror attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel created a sweeping buffer zone along the entirety of its western border with Gaza, while cutting off the north from the rest of the enclave with the establishment of the Netzarim Corridor. Sitting to the south of Gaza City it stretches from Israel’s western border with Gaza to the Mediterranean Sea.

But since March 18, maps released by the IDF indicate an expansion of its security zone around the corridor.

To the south, it has stationed its forces along the Philadelphi Corridor along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt and taken control of the border crossing in the city of Rafah, once designated a safe zone for Palestinians.

On April 12, Israel said it had completed what it calls the “Morag Corridor” to the north of Rafah and south of the city of Khan Younis, effectively sealing Rafah off from the rest of the enclave.

’No longer protective'
As well as taking territory, the Israeli military routinely issues evacuation orders or designates areas as “no-go zones.”

But the United Nations estimated in mid-April that around 70% of Gaza was under one or both of these. This has left “Palestinians in Gaza with no safe place to go and little to survive on,” it said in a statement.

Yaakov Garb, an environmental studies professor at Ben Gurion University in Israel who has been studying the Israeli military’s maps, told NBC News in a phone interview last month that he estimated Israel’s buffer zones and other restricted areas now account for around 48% of the Gaza Strip.

“These buffers are no longer protective of Israel,” Garb said. “They’re more kind of moats around enclaves,” he said, referring to the increasingly packed areas that Palestinians are being ordered to evacuate to.

Humanitarian zones have vanished
The majority of the evacuation orders issued by the IDF since March 18 have seen Palestinians in northern Gaza ordered to move to Gaza City, while those under evacuation orders in central and southern Gaza have been funneled toward “known shelters” in Khan Younis and Al-Mawasi.

Prior to the ceasefire that began on Jan. 19, the IDF would frequently refer to Al-Mawasi as the “humanitarian zone” in its evacuation orders. But after it resumed its offensive, those references appeared to vanish.

The IDF told NBC News in a statement last week that Al-Mawasi was “currently not defined as a safe zone.” It added that evacuation zones would also change “in accordance with IDF operations” in the enclave. Asked if anywhere in Gaza was considered a “safe zone,” the IDF did not respond.

However, Palestinians in Gaza have said nowhere in the enclave has been “safe” throughout the war, which began after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks in which 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies.

Palestinian health officials say the Israeli offensive has killed more than 52,000 people in Gaza since then.

Even when Al-Mawasi was designated as a humanitarian zone, repeated Israeli strikes were reported in the area.

“They used to drop leaflets telling us to head to ‘safe zones,’” Ahmed Alam Sobhy Abou Nama said in an interview last week at the camp in Al-Mawasi where he sheltering. He added that they didn’t go “because in Gaza, there is no ‘safe zone.’”

Hany Daboor, a member of Gaza’s Civil Defense, said civilians were increasingly calling the agency to express concerns over what they believed was the targeting of safe zones in Israeli strikes. Echoing Abou Nama, he said, “There is no ‘safe zone.’”

Now, as Israel continues to expand its security zones in the enclave, fears are growing about the increasingly limited space within which civilians can seek relative safety.

“We feel that we are all been blockaded in a small zone,” Abou Nama said.

The Israeli military carried out an airstrike on Yemen's main airport in Sanaa on Tuesday, its second attack in two days on Iran-aligned Houthi rebels after a surge in tensions between the group and Israel.

Israel warned people to leave the area around Sanaa International Airport before Tuesday's attack, which it said targeted Houthi infrastructure and "fully disabled the airport". Witnesses later reported four strikes in the capital.

Tensions have been high since the Gaza war began, but have risen further since a Houthi missile landed near Israel's Ben Gurion Airport on Sunday, prompting Israeli airstrikes on Yemen's Hodeidah port on Monday

Three airport sources told Reuters that the strikes targeted three civilian airplanes, the departures hall, the airport runway and a military air base under Houthi control.

The Israeli military said the airport had been "a central hub for the Houthi terrorist regime to transfer weapons and operatives."

Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Houthi political bureau, told pro-Iran Al-Mayadeen broadcaster that the movement would hit back.

"Our military operation in support of Gaza will continue and will not stop," he said. "Wait for the Yemeni response."

The Houthis said on Sunday they would impose a "comprehensive" aerial blockade on Israel by repeatedly targeting its airports.

Sixty percent of Yemenis live under the control of the Houthis, a resilient group that withstood years of Saudi-led bombing during the country's devastating civil war.

The Israeli strikes around Hodeidah on Monday killed four people and wounded 39, the Houthi-run health ministry said.