Hamas last week launched one of the deadliest attacks on Israel during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur that would leave more than 1,300 Israelis dead and thousands more injured. What is dubbed as a surprise attack, was reportedly practiced in a plain site a month ago without drawing the ire of the country’s highly regarded security and intelligence services.
On September 12, a two-minute propaganda video was posted to social media by Hamas showing fighters dressed in black using explosives to blast through a replica of the border gate, sweep in on pickup trucks and then move building by building through a full-scale reconstruction of an Israeli town. This was similar to what they would do for real in the deadly attack last Saturday.
Mock-ups and Live-Fire Exercise
During the live-fire exercise dubbed Operation “Strong Pillar”, Hamas militants in body armor and combat fatigues were seen carrying out operations that included the destruction of mock-ups of the wall’s concrete towers and a communications antenna. While Israel was clearly caught flatfooted by Hamas’ ability to breach its Gaza defences, the group appears to have hidden its extensive preparations for the deadly assault in plain sight.
“There clearly were warnings and indications that should have been picked up,” said Bradley Bowman, a former US Army officer who is now senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington research institute. “Or maybe they were picked up, but they didn’t spark necessary preparations to prevent these horrific terrorist acts from happening.”
The Associated Press reviewed and verified key details from dozens of videos Hamas released over the last year, primarily through the social media app Telegram. Using satellite imagery, the AP matched the location of the mocked-up town to a patch of desert outside Al-Mawasi, a Palestinian town on the southern coast of the Gaza Strip.
West Bank Misdirection
The former US Army officer said there are indications that Hamas intentionally led Israeli officials to believe it was preparing to carry out raids in the West Bank, rather than Gaza. It was also potentially significant that the exercise has been held annually since 2020 in December, but was moved up by nearly four months this year to coincide with the anniversary of Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.
In a separate video posted to Telegram from last year’s Strong Pillar exercise on Dec. 28, Hamas fighters are shown storming what appears to be a mockup Israeli military base, complete with a full-size model of a tank with an Israeli flag flying from its turret. The gunmen move through the cinderblock buildings, seizing other men playing the roles of Israeli soldiers as hostages.
Michael Milshtein, a retired Israeli colonel who previously led the military intelligence department overseeing the Palestinian territories, said he was aware of the Hamas videos, but he was still caught off guard by the ambition and scale of Saturday’s attack. “We knew about the drones, we knew about booby traps, we knew about cyberattacks and the marine forces … The surprise was the coordination between all those systems,” Milshtein said.
External Help?
Military experts told the AP the attack showed a level of sophistication not previously exhibited by Hamas, likely suggesting they had external help. “I just was impressed with Hamas’s ability to use basics and fundamentals to be able to penetrate the wall,” said retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Stephen Danner, a combat engineer trained to build and breach defenses. “They seemed to be able to find those weak spots and penetrate quickly and then exploit that breach.”
Ali Barakeh, a Beirut-based senior Hamas official, acknowledged that over the years the group had received supplies, financial support, military expertise and training from its allies abroad. However, he insisted the recent operation to breach Israel’s border defenses was homegrown, with the exact date and time for the attack known only to a handful of commanders within Hamas. Details of the operation were kept so tight that some Hamas fighters who took part in the assault Saturday believed they were heading to just another drill, Barakeh said.
(With agency inputs)