The Green Flag conducted by the IDF on October 7th was almost certainly decided back in 2021:
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an investigation on 9 May, providing further details of the alleged intelligence failures that allowed Hamas to launch Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October successfully.
The investigation concluded that leaders in the army refused to consider or prepare for the possibility of a Hamas ground invasion of Israel and instead focused on the threat from Hamas missile attacks.
As a result, the army ceased collecting intelligence on low and mid-level Hamas commanders and their activities, the investigation claimed.
The decision to focus intelligence gathering on only a few top Hamas commanders was made in 2021 following a battle with Hamas called “Operation Guardian of the Walls.”
“From that moment,” says an intelligence officer who at that time held a significant position in the Southern Command, the army “had no interest in gathering intelligence on Hamas forces and senior and prominent commanders in the organization, or on their training.”
Though Hamas’ armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, was openly carrying out exercises to break through the Gaza border fence to attack Israeli settlements and military bases, Israel’s military leadership assumed any breach of the wall was impossible and therefore focused its resources on identifying Hamas rocket launch sites.
Haaretz states that during the Hamas attack on 7 October, the “border fence was revealed to be semi-imaginary” and that fighters from Hamas’ elite Nukhba brigade breached it at 44 different points.
Less than two years earlier, Brigadier General Eran Ofir, head of the border administration, had declared that due to the border fence and accompanying surveillance and automatic machine gun turrets, “it is impossible to pass into the territory of the State of Israel.”
According to the Haaretz report, the Israeli army held two exercises in previous years to prepare for the possibility of Hamas breaching the border before the fence’s completion.
The first was in 2016 and involved responding to a Hamas raid that would use cars, motorcycles, and paragliders to breach the fence into Israel and then move toward the southern settlements (kibbutzim), around which army soldiers were deployed.
However, a security source who participated in the exercise stated that it was soon stopped without any clear plan to prevent such an attack.
“After a few hours, Edelstein decided to stop when the ‘enemy’ had already reached the Ad Halom junction in the north [near Ashdod] and others had reached Kiryat Gat in the south – without the Southern Command and the Gaza Division knowing how to respond,” the source said.
Despite the failure of the exercise, the army leadership opposed holding a second training in 2019 and insisted on focusing on Hamas’ missile capabilities.
Any officers warning of a possible Hamas ground invasion were either ignored or ridiculed.
The dictum of “people – no, launchers – yes” was advanced by the entire line of the senior command, Haaretz writes.
The Israeli newspaper reports as well that the army withheld resources from the Military Intelligence Directorate, the Southern Command, and the Gaza Division to prepare to defend against a ground invasion.
It’s now obvious that the plan was to permit an attack of sufficient weight to provide a justification for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. The IDF response was slow, not due to any surprise, but because the army leadership knew exactly what was happening and the plan called for them to provide the attackers with enough time to run amok before returning back into their own territory with their hostages.
Those who claim this sort of thing is impossible are in total denial of basic human history. Most, though not all, governing elites are just as willing to spend civilian blood as they are to pay a price in soldiers’ lives in order to accomplish their objectives. The only lives they aren’t willing to risk are their own. Look at Ukraine, for example. If the Kiev regime had any concern whatsoever for the Ukrainian people’s lives, it never would have attacked the Donbass, or tried to wage war against Russia.