An Israeli soldier stated that he and his fellow soldiers stationed at a military outpost near Gaza received orders not to carry out their usual early morning patrol on the border fence on 7 October 2023, Israeli media reported on 17 July.

During the time the border patrol would have normally been carried out, members of Hamas's armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, crossed the fence to attack Israeli army bases and settlements (kibbutzim).

Shalom Sheetrit, a soldier in the Golani Brigade, revealed the directive while giving testimony at a meeting of the lobby for reserve personnel in the Israeli Knesset.

He stated that on the night before the 7 October attack, he and two other soldiers, Yotam Sror and Itamar Ben Yehuda, sat by the battalion radio at the Pega military outpost near Kibbutz Be'eri.

“We were playing on the phone [at 5:20 am] and suddenly a strange message comes from my battalion commander,” the soldier explained, “and what he says on the call is something like this: ‘I don't know why, but an order was issued that there are no patrols at the fence until nine in the morning.’”

Sheetrit said soldiers from the outpost carried out patrols on the border fence every morning “because you are in an operational battalion and that is part of the matter.”

Hamas fighters attacked the Pega outpost and killed 14 Israeli soldiers there during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

When asked if this was why many soldiers at the outpost were still sleeping when the Hamas attack began, Sheetrit stated, “I don't know how to answer it that way. In our mortar department, there was an alert at dawn, and we woke up. It's possible that in the patrol departments, they were told not to wake up. I don't know. I don't want to just say that.”

Sheetrit stated that the military units based in the Pega outpost were responsible for protecting Kibbutz Be'eri, which was also attacked by Hamas.

“Unfortunately, we were not up to the task. There were dozens against hundreds of terrorists, 25 against 150, and so we couldn't arrive, unfortunately. I'm far from being a military man who can give answers to questions, the situation hurts me just as it hurts everyone,” the soldier explained.

A major battle took place at Be'eri in which over 100 Israelis were killed.

After the attack began, the Israeli air force deployed Apache Helicopters, tanks, and drones to bomb the kibbutz and the Gaza border nearby to prevent Hamas from taking captives with them back to Gaza.

As a result, Israeli forces burned to death hundreds of Israeli civilians and Hamas fighters in airstrikes in Be'eri and other kibbutzim near the border, as well as at theNova Music Festival, per a secretive policy known as the Hannibal Directive. The deaths were all quickly blamed on Hamas.

“I tried to ask military personnel why and what happened there. The blood of my friends and the blood of many people in the country was spilled in a huge tragedy, and I tried to understand why it happened and how,” Sheetrit added.

The strange order to cancel routine patrols along the Gaza border adds to evidence that Israeli political and military leaders knew in advance about Hamas's plan to attack on 7 October – and allowed it to happen to justify the conquest and ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the building of Jewish settlements on top of the ruins of the strip's soon-to-be-destroyed cities.

Israeli military and intelligence officials ignored many signals on the night before the attack, and in the previous weeks and months, indicating that Hamas was planning a large attack to take captives to exchange for Palestinian prisoners.

Female Israeli soldiers tasked to observe activity on the Gaza border issued multiple warnings to their superiors that an attack was imminent, but they were ignored.

“In hindsight, we could have done a lot of things, we could have listened to the observers, we could have brought up the air force, and these things didn't happen,” Sheetrit concluded.

“That's the failure. It's not a failure of the fighters on the ground, but of the higher levels in the army, of people who went down to Eilat even though we informed them a week in advance that there was intelligence information.”