Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: After more than 38,000 deaths and wanton destruction during the ongoing Gaza Conflict, it has emerged that the Israeli intelligence had forewarned officials about a month before the October 7, 2023, attack by the Gaza Strip-based Hamas terrorist group, the media reported.
An Israeli intelligence brief prepared weeks before Hamas’s attack had warned military officials of the Palestinian group’s preparations for an assault, according to Israeli public broadcaster Kan.
The Israeli military’s signals intelligence unit drafted the brief in September 2023, less than a month before the Hamas attack that sparked the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip, Kan reported on Monday.
It said the Unit 8200 intelligence document included details of elite Hamas fighters training for hostage-taking and plans for raids on military positions and Israeli communities in southern Israel.
The Palestinian groups were aiming to take hundreds of hostages, Kan reported.
“The expected number of hostages: 200-250 people,” the brief said, according to Kan.
The unprecedented Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,194 Israelis, mostly civilians, as Hamas also took 251 people hostage, 116 of whom remain in Gaza including 41 the army says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive since October 7 has killed at least 37,347 people in the Gaza Strip, also mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
According to Kan, citing unnamed security officials, the brief was known to intelligence officials in the military’s Gaza Division and Southern Command.
Israeli politicians have rebuffed calls for a thorough investigation into intelligence failures surrounding the Hamas attack, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted any official probe should wait until after the war, now in its ninth month.
The Israeli military, however, said it was “investigating the events” of October 7, with a probe being “actively carried out” and would later be made public.