Israeli newspapers published today, Friday, criticized the results of the investigations into the army’s failures on October 7, 2023, which were published by the Israeli army yesterday. A senior officer in the reserve forces in the Southern Command described these investigations as “tainted by the actions of an agent, by the Chief of the General Staff and a section of the General Staff officers.”

"The investigations deliberately investigated certain issues in advance, and deliberately ignored other issues. Even when they investigated certain issues, it was clear that the investigators ignored facts and covered up results," the officer was quoted as saying by the Israel Hayom newspaper.

According to him, "the investigations did not address the central issues required and were presented as a story and not as an investigation whose goal was to reach a real study, that is, to extract the required lessons and a moral commitment towards the public and all soldiers in the Israeli army."

Reserve Brigadier General Hezi Nehama said, "Senior officers in the Gaza Division believe that the Chief of Staff (Herzi Halevi) threw them under the train. According to them, the investigations paint a false narrative according to which the lower echelons of the army failed, the division did not convey the situation, and therefore the General Staff did not know how to operate. According to the investigations that were presented, when the General Staff understood the true situation, they operated well." He added that "it is impossible to accept the claim that the General Staff did not receive the situation until noon."

Nechama continued that the army command, the air force and the General Staff did not provide a response to the attack by Hamas' elite forces on October 7, "and the response at the level of the General Staff did not fit the picture of the situation, neither by starting the battle nor by mobilizing the battalions." He considered that "there is no escape from forming new investigation teams appointed by the new Chief of General Staff (Eyal Zamir), and managing all the investigations again without contamination. There are investigations that have not yet been published, and they will shake the army and the state."

Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel pointed out that one of the problems with military investigations relates to the selection of those who conducted the investigations. After Halevi appointed an investigation team headed by former IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu forced him to cancel the decision, because the team members are political figures. "The result was that a large portion of the investigators appointed are reserve officers, who belong to the branches or commands they investigated, and they hold low ranks."

He added that in conclusion, "intellectual stagnation prevailed in the army. The intelligence services, the Israeli army and the Shin Bet in particular, were not convinced that Hamas was capable of carrying out a coordinated attack by thousands of terrorists, in more than a hundred points of penetration, and of succeeding in defeating the Gaza military division and controlling a large part of the area under its responsibility."

Harel continued, "The Israeli officers convinced themselves that if a change occurred, the Israeli intelligence, which is capable of everything, would uncover it and provide early warning, allowing them adequate time to prepare."

According to him, "the investigations document lengthy conversations and inquiries about the accumulated indications that something is not right. But Halevi, who conducted these conversations in their final part in close coordination with the Shin Bet headed by Ronen Bar, also heard that there was a complete consensus according to which a large-scale attack is not planned, and most of the indications are that Hamas is operating in a normal state, and there is no immediate warning at all."

“There is no explanation in the investigation for one of the most surprising failures,” Harel noted, “which is the fact that no agent (of Israeli intelligence) warned his Israeli handlers of what was to come. Shortly after the telephone consultations headed by Halevi ended, at 4:50 a.m. before dawn, preparations for the attack began in the Strip. Thousands of Hamas operatives said goodbye to their families, left their homes, and gathered at an assembly point. How did any Israeli intelligence gathering system, of the kind that the Military Intelligence Directorate boasted about, not detect an accumulation of unusual activity?”

Veteran Yedioth Ahronoth military analyst Ron Ben-Yishai wrote, “This week I became much more worried about our future here than I have been in the entire past year. The results of the military investigation into the failures of October 7, 2023, shocked me once again with what happened in the past.”

He added, "The initial similarity between the results of the current investigations and the results of the Agranat Commission, which investigated the failures at the beginning of the Yom Kippur War (October War 1973), made me realize that what happened to us 51 years ago and 17 months ago, could happen to us again, and in a more serious way, after 10 or 20 years."

Ben-Yishai believed that “the results of the military investigation prove that the security-political establishment in the 21st century simply ignored the lessons of the Yom Kippur fiasco, whether because the lessons were forgotten in a deep drawer and no one bothered to read them, or because these lessons were eroded over time. And so in October 2023 we got a much worse version of the 1973 surprise.”

"This time, this did not happen more than 120 kilometers from the Israeli border, and while the depth of the Sinai Peninsula separates us from the enemy; this time, this happened to us at home, and only thanks to the initiative, quick thinking, and courage of a small number of citizens, officers, and soldiers, Hamas did not reach the Tel Nof base (southern Israel), Kiryat Gat, and Ashkelon," he continued.

He stressed that "there are quite a few flaws in the investigations, especially from the point of view of ordinary citizens and politicians for whom security issues are not their primary concern, and it is doubtful whether they understand the vague and unclear language of the Israeli army used in the investigations."

Ben-Yishai noted that “another flaw in the investigations is the excessive caution and twisted formulations in which the most serious failures were described, and of course the IDF condensed the lines and did not point to the central officials responsible for these failures. The strategy imposed by Halevi is that we do not prosecute individuals, at all military ranks, but only draw professional lessons in the field of intelligence and the exercise of force so that we do not fail in such a serious failure the next time.”

He added that "if you delve into the Israeli army's investigations, you will find clear evidence of direct responsibility of the political echelon, i.e. the prime minister and the security ministers of the past ten years, for what happened in the massacre of the holiday of Shavuot Torah (October 7, 2023). There were not only army chiefs of staff and army officers with the rank of brigadier general, but also politicians."

According to him, "the military investigation is very detailed and loaded with technical details and descriptions of events in a way that makes it difficult to draw clear conclusions and lessons. These extra details are dangerous, because no one in the Israeli army will bother to read the thick investigation books."