Israeli officials had obtained Hamas’s plan to carry out an unprecedented attack on Israel more than a year in advance, but deemed the scenario unrealistic, the Palestinian Authority said Thursday. New York Times based on secret documents.
Israeli military intelligence had got its hands on a document of around forty pages from the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas detailing, point by point, a vast attack like the one perpetrated by commandos on October 7 which left around 1,200 dead in Israel, according to the major American daily.
This document, which circulated in intelligence circles under the code name “Jericho Wall”, did not give a date for a possible attack, but defined precise points to saturate the Israeli security system and then attack cities and military bases.
More specifically, the document reports a barrage of rockets, drones destroying security cameras and automated defense systems, then fighters crossing to the Israeli side by paraglider, by car and on foot, elements at the heart of the attack of October 7.
But it was “not possible to determine” whether this plan had been approved “completely” by the Hamas leadership and how it could translate into reality, underlines an internal Israeli army document obtained by the Times.
However, in July, an analyst from the elite intelligence unit 8200 warned that a military exercise that Hamas had just conducted resembled in several points the attack plan planned in the “Jericho Wall” document. But a colonel in the military division in charge of Gaza dismissed this scenario, calling it “totally imaginary.”
“I categorically refute the idea that this scenario is imaginary […] it is a plan for a war” not simply for an attack “against a village”, writes this analyst in encrypted emails consulted by the newspaper.
“We already had a similar experience 50 years ago on the southern front about a scenario that seemed imaginary. History could repeat itself if we are not careful,” the analyst wrote almost prophetically to his colleagues, referring to the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
According to the Timesif the “Jericho Wall” document circulated within the Israeli military hierarchy, it is unknown whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet consulted it.