On Friday, the New York
Times published a report establishing conclusively that Israel
was fully informed, in detail, of plans by Hamas to attack its border that were
executed on October 7. These revelations make clear that Israeli officials,
knowing full well where and how Hamas would strike, made a deliberate decision
to stand down in order to facilitate the attack.
These revelations mean that the Israeli government allowed and abetted
the killing of their own citizens and that the Israeli government is
responsible for the deaths that took place that day. This criminal conspiracy
was aimed at establishing a pretext for a long-planned genocide against the
people of Gaza.
Moreover, it is impossible to believe that the United States was uninformed of Hamas’s plans,
under conditions where not only Israeli intelligence but also Egypt, had advanced warnings of the
attack. Everything points to a plot that involved Israel, the Biden administration and
likely British and European intelligence agencies.
The Times published
this report Monday as Israel launched a new wave of attacks on
Gaza during a visit by Antony Blinken.
The presence of the US Secretary of State was meant not
only to express the United States’ support for the renewed onslaught
but to manage the response to the exposure of this conspiracy.
The Times reported that
The approximately 40-page
document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined,
point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths
of about 1,200 people.
The document obtained by Israeli intelligence forces
“meticulously described the attack method, mirroring the actual events,”
the Times reported.
“It outlined an intense assault aimed to breach Gaza Strip fortifications,
seize Israeli cities, and target key military bases. This plan was implemented
with alarming accuracy, involving a coordinated use of rockets, drones, and
ground forces.”
The Times reports,
Hamas followed the blueprint with
shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset
of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine
guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on
motorcycles and on foot—all of which happened on Oct. 7.
Moreover, the Times reported,
Israeli military and intelligence officials knew Hamas carried out an
exhaustive, day-long training mission to practice the plan in detail just three
months before the attack. The Times states,
The training included a dry run of
shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military
training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used
the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall
attack plan.
Even while acknowledging that Israel was fully informed of Hamas’s
plans, the Times seeks
to package the revelations with an alibi, asserting, without any
substantiation, that Israeli officials simply made a mistake. The Times writes,
Underpinning all these failures
was a single, fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to
attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so ingrained in the Israeli
government, officials said, that they disregarded growing evidence to the
contrary...
The failures to connect the dots
echoed another analytical failure more than two decades ago, when the American
authorities also had multiple indications that the terrorist group Al Qaeda was
preparing an assault.
No, Israel’s stand-down on October 7 was not
a failure to “connect the dots” because there were no dots to connect. The
Israeli intelligence forces had obtained the entire operational plan of the
October 7 attack, then witnessed Hamas carry out a major, high-level training
exercise for that plan. They knew exactly what was planned and decided to let
it go ahead.
The Times writes,
“Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as
aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.” It adds,
“It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political
leaders saw the document.”
This presentation is absurd. It is impossible to believe that
information of this character could come into the possession of the
intelligence agencies without provoking the most intense analysis. The
idea that, after 9/11, such high-level plans would be kept from the prime
minister is unbelievable.
Such a document would have come from a source at the highest levels of
Hamas. Once this valuable information was obtained, it would have been vital to
take action to protect the source, including countermeasures to make Hamas
believe Israel did not possess the information.
The stand-down could have been a means to send a signal that Hamas’s plan had
not been exposed.
Ultimately,
a choice was made to allow Hamas’s operation to go ahead, in order to provide Israel with a pretext for a massive,
long-planned military assault on Gaza. Only Netanyahu could make such a
decision. The United States, meanwhile, instantly sent a
massive military force to the region, announcing the deployment of its largest
aircraft carrier and escort ship to the region within 24 hours of the attack.
The Times’
claim that Israel’s stand-down was an “intelligence
failure” makes no sense because it is a lie from beginning to end. No, the
events of October 7 were not an intelligence failure: Israel was remarkably successful in
exactly predicting Hamas’s military operation. Instead of acting on this
intelligence, Israel orchestrated a stand-down of
troops and intelligence-gathering at the precise moment when the attack took
place.
Four days after the October 7 attack, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh
reported that in the days ahead of the attack, “local Israeli military
authorities, with the approval of Netanyahu, ordered two of the three Army
battalions, each with about 800 soldiers, that protected the border with Gaza
to shift their focus to the Sukkot festival” taking place near the West Bank.
Hersh quoted a source who told him, “That left only eight hundred
soldiers … to be responsible for guarding the 51-kilometer border between the
Gaza Strip and southern Israel. That meant the Israeli citizens
in the south were left without an Israeli military presence for ten to twelve
hours. They were left to fend for themselves.”
The stand-down not only left the border vulnerable to attack, it
created the conditions where military forces had to be transferred to intercept
Hamas attackers in civilian areas, creating conditions in which Israeli tank
and helicopter forces shot indiscriminately into civilian areas, further
swelling the Israeli death toll.
In addition to the military stand-down, Israel made a decision to
put its vaunted 8200 signals intelligence unit off duty on weekends, meaning
that the signals intelligence unit that detected the training exercise three
months ago was not on duty at the time of Saturday’s attack.
The exposure of Israel’s advanced foreknowledge of the
attack likewise exposes the US media and political
establishment, which have fully embraced Israel’s claims to have been caught by
surprise by the attack, and claimed that the events of October 7 justify the
genocide now being unleashed in Gaza.
These revelations expose the Gaza genocide to be a criminal
conspiracy by the Netanyahu regime and its imperialist backers, whose victims
include not only 20,000 slaughtered Palestinians but the Israeli population
itself.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/02/klox-d02.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
