CNN revealed late Tuesday night new details about how Hamas prepared for its murderous surprise attack on October 7 while hiding it from Israel. According to the report, the planning lasted two whole years and was done by a small cell of operatives in the terrorist organization, who communicated with each other through telephone landlines installed in the extensive network of Hamas tunnels in the Gaza Strip that is nicknamed the "Metro of Gaza."
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The Hamas operatives, according to the report, made sure to avoid using computers and other means of communication, such as mobile phones, which Israeli intelligence can more easily track. The CNN report is based on two sources who are familiar with intelligence information that Israel passed on to the US, and it reports that the activities of the cell that was responsible for the preparations for the terrorist attack were kept a secret even from the majority of the terrorists who took part in the invasion of Israel. Although those terrorists underwent a variety of training by Hamas, they were exposed to the specific plan only a few days before its implementation.
The Palestinian terrorists' use of "outdated" communication technology to evade Israeli intelligence is not surprising, and CNN quotes an Israeli source who says that even in Operation Home and Garden operation in the Jenin refugee camp in July, a communication system based on telephone lines was exposed. According to the source, the forces that then raided the refugee camp uncovered a network of closed-circuit surveillance cameras, which were designed to provide early warning of the movements of the security forces, in addition to secure phone lines.
The CNN report is one of several from numerous outlets in the past two weeks that have reported on the intelligence and operational failure that enabled the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel's history, in which 1,400 people were murdered - including babies, children, women and the elderly, and more than 200 were kidnapped to Gaza. Alongside the "conception" under which both the political and military levels were convinced that Hamas was "deterred" and interested in continuing to receive the economic benefits that were agreed upon with it after Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021, the public training carried out by Hamas and Islamic Jihad were not seen as significant as far as Israel was concerned.
Hamas and Jihad did not at all hide these training sessions, in which they practiced more than once taking over Israeli communities, and they even set up bases to simulate them; but Israeli officials did not take this seriously. "They always train their people this way, it didn't seem different," one of the officials told CNN in describing how these trainings were perceived in Israel.
The Hamas terrorists also had, according to a report published last week in the New York Times, surprising information about how the IDF operates . Among other things, they knew where specific military units were stationed, and how long it would take for reinforcements to arrive to assist the forces in the field upon the start of the attack. A senior military official in Israel told The Times that in several of the military bases that were attacked, the terrorists knew exactly where the communication servers were located and destroyed them in a way that made it very difficult for the IDF to identify the extent of the infiltration, call for help and formulate a faster response.