Hamas knew how to disable Israeli border defenses
When Hamas militants arrived in the tiny kibbutz of Kissufim, less than a mile from the border with the Gaza Strip, they attacked a carefully picked first target: the white and red metal communication towers on its outskirts.
They made a beeline for the small fenced compound that housed the critical equipment, shooting at it and using a ladder to scale a barbed wire fence to get inside, videos obtained by The Washington Post show.
“They knew exactly what they were doing,” said Shai Asher, 50, a member of the armed kibbutz security squad that battled Hamas gunmen that day, struggling to communicate with each other and unable to call for backup.
“The phone network doesn’t work, WhatsApp doesn’t work, everything is broken down, our radio doesn’t work, all the channels of command are missing,” he recalled. “They had a flawless battle plan that they executed flawlessly.”
For hours, volunteers such as Asher were left to fend for themselves, outnumbered and outgunned. The soldiers that were supposed to protect them were blind to the unfolding disaster, or had been killed or kidnapped.
In a simultaneous wave of attacks on at least seven military posts across the border, Hamas sought to systematically disable key detection, communications and warning systems, using snipers and commercial drones armed with explosives.
The strategy allowed its gunmen to advance deep into Israeli territory with little resistance and scrambled the subsequent military response.
The Washington Post spoke to more than a dozen current and former Israeli intelligence and security officials and studied footage from Hamas body cameras to build a picture of how militants were able to overwhelm Israeli military installations and rampage through more than 20 residential communities.
“There weren’t enough soldiers; there weren’t enough capabilities,” said Eyal Hulata, the head of the country’s National Security Council from 2021 to 2023. “The first line of defense became the last line of defense, and this should never happen. Israel knows that.”
The attack, in which more than 1,400 people were killed and 229 others taken hostage, exposed the vulnerabilities of Israel’s border security system, long believed to be one of the most advanced and indomitable in the world. At least 309 Israeli soldiers are among the dead.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had boasted for years of multimillion-dollar investments in an expansive “smart wall,” running the length of the enclave above ground and extending deep into the ground.
Claiming in recent years that Hamas had been successfully contained in Gaza, Netanyahu oversaw the gradual withdrawal of troops from the south. Forces left behind at the military and intelligence bases were trained to rely on sophisticated cameras and sensors to monitor for border infiltrations, and to alert forces on the ground in case of unusual events.
But in the early hours of Oct. 7, at least 1,500 Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants broke through some 30 points along the border barrier. They overran some bases so rapidly that soldiers were killed in their bunks, and the militants took out communication networks so efficiently that the area became a blind spot for the military.
“They coordinated it, in sync, to get the maximum impact,” Hulata said.