An Israeli soldier patrols near Kibbutz Beeri in southern Israel on Oct. 12, 2023, close to the place where 270 revelers were killed by militants during the Supernova music festival on Oct. 7. (Credit: Aris Messinis/AFP)
Israeli intelligence obtained the blueprints for Hamas's Oct. 7 attack a year before they were carried out but failed to act on the information as the plans were deemed as being "totally imaginative," according to reporting and documents obtained by The New York Times.
In its reporting, The Times found that Israel's military and intelligence services obtained the plans, an approximately 40-page document that was codenamed "Jericho Wall," over a year before Hamas carried out its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
The plans that Israel obtained gave highly detailed plans of how Hamas sought to carry out the attack, listing everything from how they could overwhelm Israel's border fortifications, take over Israeli cities and storm some of the key military bases near the border.
While the document was circulated among Israel's military and intelligence units, the plans were considered aspirational at best with most assuming that Hamas did not have the capabilities of actually following through with such an attack. It is not clear if any political leaders saw the document.
Then, in July of this year, Hamas carried out a massive training exercise in which much of Jericho Wall was practiced almost exactly as it had been described in the plans obtained by the Israelis.
A veteran analyst with Israel's Unit 8200, a prestigious signals intelligence unit within the Israeli military, flagged the exercise and noted its similarity to that of the plans described in Jericho Wall.
The analyst's warnings were brushed off by their superiors.
