A routine inspection of Israel Defense Forces posts along the Gaza border carried out 72 hours before Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught showed a severe lack of preparedness, Channel 12 reported this week.
According to the Israeli broadcaster, only one IDF base managed to get a passing mark on the Oct. 4 audit. Aside from the Yiftah outpost near the seaside Zikim training base, all other positions failed the inspection.
Channel 12 detailed the results of an assessment of the Nahal Oz base, where Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 killed 66 soldiers and kidnapped six.
Troops failed to prevent unauthorized people from entering the base on foot or by car, entering the operations rooms, taking sensitive materials, stealing the keys to the armory and leaving with weapons.
The IDF in response to the report said the inspection was a “routine defense inspection that was carried out with the aim of improving the security of the bases, and not an examination of a scenario simulating a sudden attack of thousands of terrorists, as had occurred on Oct. 7.”
“The IDF has started the investigation into the events of Oct. 7 and what preceded them, and when this is concluded, the findings will be presented in a transparent way to the public,” added the statement.
Earlier this year, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi announced an internal probe into the military’s failures leading up to Oct. 7, calling the investigation a “duty and not a privilege.”
In January, Israel’s Walla news site cited military sources as claiming that while the IDF was aware of Hamas’s repeated attempts to blow up the security fence on the Gaza border in preparation for the Oct. 7 attacks, it opted to dismiss the rehearsals as a “provocation.”
Hours before Hamas’s attack, IDF intelligence learned that hundreds of terrorists in Gaza activated Israeli SIM cards in their phones.
The activations were detected around midnight on the night of Oct. 6, some six and a half hours before thousands of Palestinian terrorists breached the fence.
In October, The New York Times reported that Unit 8200, the IDF’s signals intelligence unit, stopped listening to Hamas’s handheld radios a year before the attacks, deciding it was a “waste of effort.”