The New York Times published a comprehensive investigation by journalist Ronen Bergman tonight (between Friday and Saturday), focusing on the chain of failures that took place on October 7 regarding the conduct of the IDF and the security forces, their conduct at the beginning of the incident, and the time it took them to digest its magnitude.
Two days ago, the newspaper's editorial board also published an investigation with testimonies of many sexual atrocities that took place in the terrorist attack, as well as numerous intelligence documents showing that in the morning many in the chain of command did not understand the magnitude of the incident and accordingly were not prepared for such a scenario when it came to responding.
Many of the interviewees in the article, including officers and soldiers in elite units in the past and present, reiterated that the main failure was that the army had no plan of action that dealt with an initial response to a terrorist attack of such magnitude.
The IDF did not believe that Hamas could carry out a comprehensive offensive that included the infiltration of terrorist squads at 30 points simultaneously, but at most a limited number of squads simultaneously firing missiles. This is the magnitude of the attack we were preparing for, and this is the magnitude of the attack to which the alert squads were prepared, if necessary, for which they were not even trained or possessed the necessary equipment for such a thing.
Unbelievable testimonies that appear in the investigation indicate that on the day of the attack, in many of the bases from which the soldiers who were preparing to respond initially to the attack, there was a great shortage of weapons and equipment, and even the soldiers who left did so with a quantity of equipment suitable for short combat, due to lack of knowledge of the number of terrorists and the arenas on the ground. Another testimony by fighters relates that soldiers were forced to communicate in improvised WhatsApp groups they opened on the day of the incident, and worse, the pilots of the combat helicopters, who were dispatched first to the incident, were asked to keep up to date in ways that were not the way to reach which arenas to reach, that is, news reports and Telegram channels.
A significant part of the investigation also deals with the conduct and omissions that occurred in real time in the Kirya pit and the instructions that came out of it. It was written that only at 7:43 A.M. did the first order come out of the pit to bounce anyone available to the envelope area, an order that came only when emergency calls were received from one of the bases about a terrorist attack on it. The commander who warned about the terrorist attack could not say at the time the magnitude of that terrorist attack, so the response was in accordance with previous warnings and preparations, which were not at all based on Hamas being able to carry out such a large, but much smaller.
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