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A few days after thousands of Hamas-led terrorists burst through Israel’s largely unprotected border with Gaza, blowing holes in the puny, high-tech fence and carrying out an unprecedented slaughter in southern Israel, the head of the IDF’s southern command, Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman, convened the editors of Israel’s main media outlets for a briefing on what had gone so terribly wrong and how the IDF intended to destroy Hamas and ensure no recurrence.

On the wall of the room where we gathered, at the IDF’s Southern Command headquarters in Beersheba, was a chart detailing the locations of the 24 military battalions Hamas had spent years recruiting, arming, training and deploying in Gaza, complete with pictures of the battalion commanders.

That wall chart was just one minor but glaring indication of Israel’s familiarity with the Hamas war machine, on one hand, and Israel’s abject failure, on the other, to internalize how Hamas was intending to use it.

IDF intelligence had tracked Hamas preparations for an invasion for five years, obtaining an early version of the attack plan in 2018 that stated that “forces from five Nukhba companies should attack and destroy the posts belonging to the [IDF] Gaza Division… Everything will be done above ground… with [rocket] fire.” This plan also referenced the intention to “attack the kibbutzim in order to take hostages… focus on critical sites… livestream from the posts and kibbutzim.”

In May 2022, IDF intel obtained a later version of the invasion blueprint, which similarly described a large number of Nukhba Force gunmen breaking through the Gaza Division’s defenses and reaching cities in southern Israel. This material was put together in a document known as “Jericho’s Walls.”

Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar made no particular secret of his intention to invade and massacre Israelis, en route to destroying Israel, including referencing strategic and tactical specifics. A year before he ordered the onslaught, Sinwar handed out prizes at a televised award show for a drama series broadcast on Hamas TV that showed terrorists infiltrating into Israel using white pickup trucks, disabling Israeli communications, and targeting kibbutzim and IDF bases. “This series is an inseparable part of what we are preparing,” the October 7 architect boasted.

In the months before the attack, surveillance soldiers at the border issued increasingly agitated warnings about Hamas training at the border, sending drones to destroy border cameras, detonating explosives at the border fence.

And in the hours before the invasion, Israeli intel registered that hundreds of Hamas operatives had put Israeli SIM cards into their mobile phones.

And yet Israel’s vaunted military........

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