Southern Command entered the war against Hamas on October 7 without any relevant operational plans, forcing officers to devise new ones in the weeks that followed the attack, a senior reserve officer lamented last week during a closed conference attended by IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir and other senior officers.
The comments come just days before the expected release of the Turgeman Committee report, which examined the army’s internal investigations into the failures that led to Hamas’ deadly assault.
The reserve brigadier general, who has served in the Southern Command’s firepower division since the war began, said the command “opened the war unprepared” and had to “create plans from scratch” during the first three weeks of fighting before Israel’s ground invasion began.
The officer — a career combat soldier who defended his Gaza-border community as a civilian on October 7 before reporting for duty — criticized years of neglect and complacency in the command. He said repeated reviews and recommendations to improve readiness had been ignored by successive commanders, leaving the division without an actionable playbook for a full-scale war with Hamas.
He singled out the tenure of Maj. Gen. Eliezer Toledano, who led the Southern Command from March 2021 to July 2023, calling it a period marked by “severe neglect and a lack of operational planning.” Speaking before hundreds of officers, the brigadier general noted that Toledano had hung a banner at headquarters reading “Victory loves preparation” — but in practice, “the opposite happened.”
At the same event, officers acknowledged that existing contingency plans — including Operation Damocles, a proposal to strike Hamas’ underground network in the event of a surprise war — proved irrelevant once fighting began.
“I ask for a full, transparent and honest war investigation so we can truly learn,” the brigadier general told Zamir, adding that both Zamir, who took over as IDF chief from Herzi Halevi in March 2025, and current Southern Command chief Maj. Gen. Yaniv Asor had brought “the best changes the command has seen in a year.”
The upcoming Turgeman Committee report, led by Maj. Gen. (ret.) Sami Turgeman, is expected to highlight serious flaws in the IDF’s internal reviews, including those conducted by Military Intelligence and the Operations Directorate. The panel also examined broader policy failures tied to Israel’s decade-long strategy of containing Hamas rather than dismantling it.
The IDF declined to comment on the officer’s remarks, saying in a statement that the army “holds learning conferences that enable open, critical and professional dialogue” and does not comment on “discussions held in closed operational forums.”