IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir fought to keep his eyes open deep into the night until around 2 a.m. to finish his formal determination about the October 7 massacre. That followed the report by the Turgeman Committee, which he established to probe the original investigation.
The Jerusalem Post has learned that Zamir felt this was one of the most important decisions and documents of his career.
While many see the October 7 massacre as a backward-looking saga for politicians to attack each other over the past, Zamir views his own report and decisions as the most important strategic moment for avoiding such a disaster in the future.
The Post understands that Zamir was disappointed that when his report came out last week, much of the media jumped on his call for a probe into the October 7 massacre that would include the political echelon, ignoring a significant portion of his diagnosis about the failures and prescriptions for preventing the next catastrophe.
IDF was not prepared for a large invasion scenario
Some of that is understandable – not just because of how the media makes its headlines, but also because few observers have read all of the prior October 7 probes sufficiently to know that Zamir has actually added some critical new components.
The first has to do with how ready and deployed IDF troops were on the Gaza border.
Prior investigations have said the IDF did not have enough soldiers deployed, and that those troops were not prepared for a large invasion scenario.
But Zamir’s document adds: “The troops along the line were not deployed to their battle positions and were not prepared as required along its length.”
This is a major addition by Zamir.
It is not just that 600 soldiers on the border was not enough, as prior probes said. It is that even the 600 troops “on the border” were either not actually on the border or not deployed in defensible battle positions.
The 600 troops would not have stopped Hamas’s 5,600 invaders. But could they have held the initial invasion force of 1,000-2,000 for longer?
Could “longer” have been long enough to get more reinforcements there and to evacuate more civilians?
If Zamir succeeds not only in upping the number of troops near Gaza, but also succeeds in having them actually deployed on the border and in defensible positions, he will have accomplished one part of the revolution to create a more capable border defense.
Another issue where Zamir has made his mark is the “silent” army of the Jewish High Holy Days and festivals, when the military used to cut in half how many soldiers it had on duty.
While the IDF under Zamir’s predecessor, Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Herzi Halevi, had called up at some point up to about 500,000 troops, reservists, and mandatory service soldiers for very extended periods, the Jewish “silent” period formally remained in place.
One of Zamir’s first acts as IDF chief of staff was to cancel the policy.
This will likely provoke anger among soldiers and their families over time, but the cancellation, at least for now, has shifted the military’s attitude about how ready it needs to be 365 days a year.
Next, Zamir’s document says: “An examination will be conducted of leave cycles, armored-vehicle readiness, the security of bases, staffing of headquarters and command posts, outpost drills, and ‘dawn alert.’ As part of these norms, it is necessary to develop monitoring, control, and implementation capabilities aimed at establishing the required culture.”
Each of the prior IDF probes describes some amount of IDF checks in the field of the operational situation taken during “dawn alert” on the morning of October 7, 2023.
But some of the checks did not even meet the regulations at the time, and even those that did were obviously inadequate to detect a possible invasion.
Zamir’s document says: “War by Surprise” must be “the compass for the IDF’s operational readiness – determining severe and reasonable reference scenarios for war that will primarily reflect the enemy’s capabilities.”
If war by surprise is the standard for readiness, then Zamir may achieve another revolution in preparedness by having a completely different and much more serious approach to “dawn alert” reviews, which is the time of day when any country is literally most asleep.
Prior media or IDF reports have dealt with failures of intelligence by both the political echelon and the military.
For example, the military failed to take Hamas seriously as a threat, presuming it was deterred, and ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
Despite that, Zamir recalls that the IDF during 2023 had sent several warnings to the “political echelons… The warnings were general and addressed the emerging conception among our enemies (Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas) that the State of Israel was undergoing internal weakening, undermining its deterrence, and increasing the likelihood of escalation. It is necessary to examine the interface between the political and military echelons regarding the warning.”
None of that is new, nor is the problem that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the rest of the political echelon had ignored the warnings. In July 2023, they even refused to meet with the IDF Intelligence Corps commander when he came to the Knesset for an emergency meeting relating to the impact of the judicial overhaul on the IDF.
What is new is that Zamir has determined that the IDF must “examine why the military echelon, which had issued them [the warnings], did not prepare the troops and readiness levels accordingly.”
In other words, the IDF could have prepared for greater threats and aggression even if the political echelon failed to stop the judicial overhaul, which was destabilizing the military.
The military would have been weaker in many ways due to the government ignoring it, but if the IDF had sent more soldiers to the border because it knew Hamas saw it as weaker, October 7 might have looked very different.
Additional conclusions that Zamir reached included assessing more blame to IDF Southern Command and Operations Command for the October 7 massacre. Halevi had placed greater blame on the IDF Intelligence Corps’ failure to warn everyone else.
The conclusions have included Zamir restoring a larger volume of tanks to IDF Southern Command after decades of Netanyahu and other IDF chiefs of staff reducing the military to a “smaller, smarter” army.
Zamir does criticize the IDF Intelligence Corps for many of the same things that Halevi did, such as not having enough human spying and field intelligence while relying too much on cyber, signals, and other technological intelligence.
Zamir has added a deeper dive into the mishandling of the IDF’s ignoring the “Walls of Jericho” Plan – Hamas’s invasion plan, which was intercepted by the military in 2018 and 2022 but disregarded by higher-ups as a fantasy.
Zamir’s new initiatives could help Israel better prepare and stave off an invasion in the short and medium term.
But what about the longer term?
For example, how will Zamir ensure that the IDF retains better human spying in Gaza into the future?