On the morning of October 7, 2023, over 180 terrorists swarmed into the unsuspecting Gaza border community of Kibbutz Nahal Oz in three waves, murdering and abducting residents.

The community’s local security team and police officers managed to fight back and stop the first wave of terrorists before being overwhelmed.

The army — plunged into complete disarray by the shock attack on dozens of towns and military posts simultaneously — failed to come to the rescue for around seven hours as terrorists moved from home to home, brutalizing, massacring and kidnapping civilians.

On Tuesday, the Israel Defense Forces presented its probe into the battle at the kibbutz — among its detailed investigations of some 40 battles that took place during Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, when some 5,600 terrorists stormed across the border, massacred some 1,200 people, and took 251 hostages to Gaza.

It highlighted the heroism of Nahal Oz’s local security team and other Israeli forces that participated in the fighting, as well as the army’s colossal failures that allowed throngs of terrorists to overrun the kibbutz.

The probe concluded that the IDF “failed in its mission to protect” the residents of Nahal Oz, largely because the military had never prepared for such an event — an Israeli community being captured by terrorists, as well as a widescale attack on numerous towns and army bases simultaneously by thousands of terrorists.

In all, 13 residents — including two members of the local security team and two foreign nationals — and four security personnel were killed in Nahal Oz on October 7, and a further eight civilians were taken hostage by the Hamas terrorists. Many homes were damaged or destroyed amid the fighting, as were the kibbutz’s agriculture fields.

Six of the eight hostages were returned to Israel in a ceasefire deal with Hamas, including one, Tsahi Idan, who was murdered in captivity. Another two remain held by the terror group: Omri Miran and Tanzanian national Joshua Mollel, the latter of whom was killed during the attack.

The probe into what happened at Nahal Oz, carried out by Col. (res.) Yaron Sitbon, covers all aspects of the fighting in the kibbutz that began October 7.

Sitbon and his team spent hundreds of hours investigating the onslaught and battle at Nahal Oz. The IDF said they reviewed every possible source of information — footage taken by terrorists with body-mounted cameras, residents’ WhatsApp messages, surveillance videos, and interviews with survivors, former hostages, and those who fought to defend the kibbutz — and made visits to the scene.

The Nahal Oz probe was aimed at drawing specific operational conclusions for the military. It did not examine the wider picture of the military’s perception of Gaza and Hamas in recent years, which was covered in separate,

© The Times of Israel