A selection of intelligence documents, which shed light on Israel's strategic blindness leading up to the October 7 massacre, was published on Thursday by the Prime Minister's Office.
Some of the documents were also read aloud during the Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee meeting on Thursday.
The documents, spanning from February 2023 to an hour before the attack, indicate that Israel's defense echelon misread Hamas’s intentions, characterizing the terror group as deterred and seeking long-term economic arrangements.
The release of these documents by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to reinforce his narrative of a systemic failure that seemingly crossed all branches of the security establishment, as he refuses to establish a commission of inquiry into the October 7 massacre.
Members of the inquiry would be chosen by the Supreme Court's president and granted full access to the documents and protocols, unlike senior security establishment officials, who currently have no access to them.
One of the documents is a summary of a high-level security assessment held on September 27, 2023, just ten days before the massacre. According to the document, representatives from Military Intelligence (Aman) told Netanyahu that Hamas’s policy was one of "controlled pressure" meant to improve economic conditions in Gaza.
"Their understanding is that they do not want to reach an escalation," the representatives stated, according to the transcript, which also presented former Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) director Ronen Bar as framing the situation as Hamas's "partial satisfaction."
According to the document, he also noted that the group "very much does not want to enter a round of fighting."
Per the same transcript, former defense minister Yoav Gallant seemed to support moving toward a "long-term arrangement" with the terror organization.
"Hamas is signaling a desire for a long-term arrangement... my recommendation is to move forward on the arrangement path... to strive for long-term quiet," Gallant said, according to the document, and that his assessment was that Hamas "does not want" a war.
The documents also seem to present the belief that Israel's internal political divisions, which peaked in 2023 over the judicial reform, acted as a "restraining factor" for Hamas.
A military intelligence report published by the PMO from September 14, 2023, argued that Hamas viewed Israel as "unpredictable and dangerous" due to the internal situation, which supposedly justified Hamas’s strategy of "preserving the quiet."
Leading up to October 7
A summary from October 3, 2023, four days before the attack, claimed that "Hamas in the Gaza Strip continues to grow stronger, but at a moderate slope," and concluded that "the Palestinians will not be the driving force behind a multi-front campaign."
A February 2023 Shin Bet report noted that Hamas was investing in "force multipliers" to bypass the border fence, yet concluded that the group's "readiness for a raid" had remained "medium" and unchanged since 2021.
At 5:15 a.m. on October 7, just over an hour before the first rockets were launched and thousands of terrorists breached the Gaza border fence, the reports show that Bar conducted a situational assessment and said that the "chance of a broad campaign is low" due to a reported lack of intelligence indicators.
According to the published documents, the "leading assumption" among security officials at that hour was that Hamas was afraid of Israeli offensive activity.
The directive issued at dawn on October 7 was to maintain "medium readiness" covertly, so as not to create a "miscalculation" that might provoke Hamas, according to the transcripts.
In addition, Netanyahu claimed that the original documents allegedly contained no mention of informing his office of the overnight developments, and that any mention of such a thing was added after the fact.