Reports: Hours before Oct. 7 assault, Shin Bet warned Hamas seemed readying to attack
Alert was reportedly sent to Mossad, National Security Council and Israel Police; noted suspicious activity indicating possible assault but did not give estimate of nature or scale
By TOI STAFF
21 October 2024, 11:49 am
Palestinians on the Israeli side of the Gaza border fence during a Hamas-led invasion and slaughter in southern Israel, October 7, 2023. (Reuters/Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa)
Palestinians on the Israeli side of the Gaza border fence during a Hamas-led invasion and slaughter in southern Israel, October 7, 2023. (Reuters/Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa)
Hours before Hamas launched its invasion and brutal massacre in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, the Shin Bet security agency sent out an urgent warning to several top security bodies, including the Israel Police and the National Security Council, Hebrew media outlets reported Sunday.
According to reports by the Kan public broadcaster and Channel 12 news, the Shin Bet released an automatically generated alert on the matter at 2:58 a.m., around three hours before the Palestinian terror group led thousands of terrorists to breach the Gaza border fence and begin their murderous rampage through southern Israel that killed 1,200 people and resulted in 251 hostages taken to Gaza, triggering the ongoing war.
The warning was triggered when a significant number of Hamas members simultaneously activated Israeli phone SIM cards that the Shin Bet had managed to circulate within the group, Kan reported, noting that the operation to distribute the cards was aimed at providing early warning of a Hamas operation against Israel.
It was addressed to the National Security Council, to the Mossad, and to the Israel Police. The warning reportedly arrived at situation rooms that are staffed 24 hours a day.
Both networks noted that police in the past have said they had no warning at all of a possible Hamas attack. The Nova music festival, held near the Gaza border, went ahead as planned. Terrorists would later slaughter 360 people at the event.
Police dismissed the details of the reports in a statement Monday, saying they “are not anchored in reality and facts.”
The statement said police have provided the State Comptroller, which is investigating the October 7 events, “with all the material it has and is fully cooperating with its probe.”
Police sources told Kan that if the warning was so significant, the Shin Bet should have raised a bigger flag, while other security officials countered that police should have paid more attention to the alert.
Marked “Top Secret,” the short warning declared that information held by the Shin Bet indicated “activation and use of [the SIM operation’s redacted name] in a number of Hamas battalions. We have no information indicating the significance of the activities.”
The alert did not specifically mention SIMs or give a number of cards involved, though Hamas battalions would presumably each have hundreds of members.
It continued that nonetheless, it was noteworthy that the activity showed an “unusual accumulation and, given additional suspicious signs, could be an indication of Hamas attack activities.”
Among the other indications noted at the time were that Hamas leaders had hunkered down in their tunnel bunkers in the lead-up to the attack, Kan recalled from previous media reporting.
However, despite the warning, the security establishment maintained an outlook that Hamas was not capable or interested in carrying out a massive attack on the country, both Kan and Channel 12 reported.
No action was taken as a result of the alert, according to the reports. The Shin Bet declined to comment.
An unnamed senior police official on duty the night the warning was sent told Kan: “For a serious warning like that, phone calls should have been made instead of relying on a [written] report. For more minor things than that they called us and we deployed forces.”
However, a security official rejected the claims, anonymously telling Kan: “It is exactly for such situations that this warning system was set up so that there is no need to rely on someone making a call or not, that it should be immediate” and not require a permanent team to send the alerts.
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari referred to the reports during a press briefing on Sunday night.
“We have not yet finished the investigations into warnings on the night of October 7,” he said. “At the moment, we are focusing on fighting and dealing with investigations.”
Hagari said the results of the probes would be presented with “full transparency to the public, with a focus on the night before October 7.”
The government and top military leaders have contended that they had not been warned about an imminent invasion at the time, despite several reports that have surfaced in the past year of red flags raised about Hamas’s plans to launch a major offensive.
Earlier this year, the IDF admitted that intelligence officials identified that terror operatives in the Gaza Strip had activated Israeli SIM cards in their phones. The military at the time put the number of SIMs at “dozens,” though Channel 14, which broke the story, claimed it was 1,000. In a joint statement at the time, the IDF and Shin Bet said that number was “false and far from reality.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office initially denied that Netanyahu had been aware that invading Hamas terrorists switched to Israeli SIM cards until the Channel 14 report. The PMO later clarified that Netanyahu hadn’t been aware of that numerical claim until the TV report, but was told, “at the start of the war, … that the terrorists used dozens of Israeli SIMs.”
It is believed that Israeli SIM cards enabled the terrorists better communication in southern Israel during the onslaught.
Netanyahu has resisted forming a state commission of inquiry into the failings leading up to October 7 or the handling of the war. He has said investigations must wait until after the fighting ends and has repeatedly avoided committing to forming a state commission, which is the inquiry body that enjoys the broadest powers under Israeli Law. A state inquiry commission is the most independent form of panel capable of probing government conduct, placing it above the ongoing state comptroller probe.
It was previously reported that on the night between October 6 and 7, hours before the early morning assault, an email was sent from an IDF base on the Gaza border describing “certain signs coming from Gaza” about an imminent attack. At the same time, the Shin Bet security agency also saw signs that something was up.
The IDF had long touted its security fence, with cameras, watchtowers and high-tech sensors, as providing security to residents of Gaza border towns. But on October 7, Hamas terrorists knocked chunks of the barrier aside with explosives and bulldozers at multiple locations, then drove right through the gaping holes in jeeps and on motorcycles, while others sailed over in paragliders, as drones dropped explosives on observation towers and took out cameras.
Amid a simultaneous rocket barrage across southern and central Israel, an estimated 3,000 terrorists stormed into southern Israel and slaughtered soldiers and civilians alike, with some local resistance but with the military establishment slow to react. Terrorists also abducted 251 people who were taken as hostages to Gaza.
'Terrorists? Freedom Fighters
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