Israel’s October 7 inquiry hinges on this election

In 2018, Israeli intelligence obtained a Hamas planning document outlining almost exactly how the October 7 attack would unfold. A more detailed version followed in 2022, and Egypt and the UAE both delivered direct warnings in the weeks before the attack. None of it stopped what Israelis call the worst single day in the country’s history. More than 1100 days later, Israel still hasn’t opened an independent inquiry into the attack, and Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected calls for one. His rival Gadi Eisenkot has promised to launch one immediately if he wins. So will Israel get a proper reckoning with October 7? It all comes down to a single election. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IfYoureListeningABC

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Hi, it's Sam Hawley from ABC News Daily, the podcast that brings you one big story affecting your world each weekday in just 15 minutes.

• 0:20Speaker 02

  In Iran's case, not only living standards are going down, prices are rising very fast. These are like twin pains that Iranians are suffering.

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• 0:35Matt Bevan?

  This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uwabakal, Gadigal and Warunduruy Woywarung people. Benjamin Netanyahu is fond of making a comparison between the October 7th attacks by Hamas in Israel in 2023.

• 0:49Speaker 04

  The darkest day in Israel's history. Altogether, they slaughtered 1,200 Israelis that day.

• 0:56Matt Bevan?

  And the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001.

• 0:59Speaker 04

  I want to give you an idea of what this means for a country of 10 million. Proportionately, this is equal to 40,000 innocent Americans slaughtered in less than 24 hours. That's 16 times 9/11, 16 9/11s.

• 1:17Matt Bevan?

  Now, I'm generally not into comparing atrocities with each other. But I want to bring attention to one very important way that October 7th is not like 9/11.

• 1:28Speaker 05

  Today I signed an act of Congress authorized-

• 1:30Matt Bevan?

  And it starts with this announcement by US President George W. Bush.

• 1:34Speaker 05

  And creating a national commission to investigate the events of September the 11th,

• 1:42Speaker 05

  2001 and the years that led up to that event.

• 1:45Matt Bevan?

  Following the attack, Bush wasn't enthusiastic about the idea of an independent commission of inquiry into 9/11. But he finally agreed to create one just over a year later.

• 1:55Speaker 05

  This commission will help me and future presidents to understand the methods of America's enemies and the nature of the threats we face.

• 2:04Matt Bevan?

  The commission has interviewed more than 1,200 people and were given access to millions of classified documents before issuing their final 585-page report about a year and a half later.

• 2:17Speaker 05

  They've done a really good job of learning about our country, learning about what went wrong prior to September the 11th and making very solid, sound recommendations about how to move forward.

• 2:30Matt Bevan?

  In the course of the inquiry, a number of top government officials made some very serious admissions.

• 2:35Speaker 06

  We all understood Bin Laden's attempt to strike the homeland.

• 2:39Speaker 07

  The right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. And I'll take part of the blame on this. I kind of failed my people despite doing everything I could.

• 2:48Speaker 06

  We did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade, our government had blinded itself to its enemies.

• 2:55Matt Bevan?

  This was a particularly important admission. The government had blinded itself. The final report found that, quote, "a failure of imagination as well as a breakdown in communications between the CIA and FBI had contributed significantly to the disaster." In response to the report, US intelligence agencies made some massive changes. Now, was it perfect? Absolutely not. But these changes made it virtually impossible for the same intelligence failures that led to 9/11 to happen again. The entire inquiry was completed before the third anniversary of the attacks, which feels pretty efficient. But in terms of commissions like this, that's actually pretty slow.

• 3:41Matt Bevan?

  I know this because I've been looking into how long it typically takes for governments around the world to launch an independent inquiry in the wake of an atrocity. And it's usually pretty quick. So the 9/11 inquiry started 442 days after the attacks. The inquiry into the Kennedy assassination took seven days. In the Norway shooting in 2011, it was 21 days. In the Christchurch massacres in 2019, it took 24 days. The Australian Royal Commission into the antisemitic attack on Jewish people in Bondi took 25 days to set up, and even that was seen by some people as taking too long.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  With all this pressure, it's hard to see how Anthony Albanese could continue to deny a national royal commission.

• 4:26Matt Bevan?

  And that's because when it comes to launching these inquiries, speed matters because memories fade. Documents and information get lost. The faster you get started, the better.

• 4:39Matt Bevan?

  But in Israel, it's been more than 1,100 days since the October 7th attack and still no independent commission of inquiry has been set up to figure out what happened. Even in Israeli context, this is unusual. Israeli commissions of inquiry into intelligence failures are usually ordered and completed quickly and lead to systemic changes, like the one seen after 9/11. So why is it taking so long? Well-

• 5:07Speaker 06

  That is something that Mr Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected, insisting it's an example of the deep state trying to undermine him and his government.

• 5:15Matt Bevan?

  Benjamin Netanyahu wants his government to set up an inquiry where they get to pick the investigators instead of a properly independent probe. But so far, we've had neither. So it's been primarily up to journalists to dig up information on how October 7th happened, which isn't ideal. Journalists don't have access to classified documents unless they are leaked. They don't have the power to force people to answer questions. They can gather breadcrumbs but can't always find the objective truth. This has not gone unnoticed in Israel.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  We came this evening to demand that the Israeli government will form a national investigation, investigative committee.

• 6:02Matt Bevan?

  Investigating October 7th became a key issue in the election campaign this year, with opposition candidates promising to set up a state commission of inquiry immediately if elected. The election was held on October 27th and it's still not clear who won. A lengthy negotiation process is set to begin over whether Netanyahu or the opposition parties can build a large enough coalition to form government. It's likely that an independent inquiry will be a key bargaining chip in those negotiations.

• 6:44Matt Bevan?

  So today I want to preview what a potential inquiry might investigate by taking a look at what we know about the warnings the Israeli government and intelligence agencies received in the lead up to October 7th. What questions need answering to make sure this can't happen again? I'm Matt Piven and this is If You're Listening.

• 7:11Matt Bevan?

  For the majority of this episode, we're going to be counting down

• 7:16Matt Bevan?

  towards October 7th, 2023, a truly horrific day in global history.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  The Hamas terrorists committed the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. They went house to house, shooting Israeli civilians point blank. They livestreamed as they murdered.

• 7:36Matt Bevan?

  But don't worry, we're not going to play the audio of people being murdered or terrorized by the Hamas fighters that day. For the purposes of this episode, which is about intelligence failures, the story ends when the wall is breached. That's where we're going to stop the countdown, okay? Start the clock.

• 7:59Matt Bevan?

  We're going to start this story on the 17th of July, 2018, five years and 82 days before the attack. Ironically enough, with the two guys currently fighting over who gets to be the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and Gadi Eisenkot. But back in 2018, Netanyahu as prime minister and Eisenkot as the chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces were being helicoptered into the middle of the Negev desert to visit a military base.

• 8:29Matt Bevan?

  The Ra'im camp is the headquarters of the Gaza Division of the IDF, the unit devoted to protecting southern Israeli towns and kibbutzim from Hamas raids out of Gaza. And the Gaza Division had recently been very busy.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  There were clashes tonight between Palestinian protesters and Israeli forces near the Gaza-Israel border.

• 8:49Matt Bevan?

  30,000 Palestinians were involved in the protests near the border wall Israel had built around Gaza. Organizers have called it the Great March of Return, demanding that Palestinian refugees have the right to return to Israel. Now, most of the people at the protest were just Palestinian civilians, men, women and children who felt like they were being trapped in the Gaza enclave by the IDF and its border fences.

• 9:15Matt Bevan?

  The people went to the demonstration because they have nothing to lose or any-

• 9:18Speaker 07

  Anything else to do. We are so poor, we don't have money to buy food. We go there because life is so boring. Life is so disgusting here in Gaza. We live under siege.

• 9:28Matt Bevan?

  But the protest quickly started to escalate.

• 9:30Speaker 05

  It was hoped this would be a peaceful protest. Instead, it turned violent.

• 9:36Matt Bevan?

  The Gaza Division of the IDF said that the protesters hurled stones and Molotov cocktails at them near the border.

• 9:43Speaker 05

  Soldiers responded with gunfire and tear gas, delivered by grenades and from drones.

• 9:49Matt Bevan?

  More than 130 Palestinians were killed, drawing international criticism of Israel. General Gadi Eisenkot said that the protest was really a pretext for invasion of Israel by the terrorist organisation Hamas, so the harsh response from the IDF was justified.

• 10:05Speaker 07

  It's no demonstration. It is very aggressive energy. The idea of Hamas regime to infiltrate the border between Israel and Gaza Strip, to infiltrate the kibbutzim along the border and to change the situation.

• 10:31Matt Bevan?

  Which is why when Gadi Eisenkot and Benjamin Netanyahu visited Ra'im camp in 2018, there was a very live debate inside the Gaza Division about how likely an infiltration of the border really was. And there was cause for concern, because according to the Israeli news outlet Ynet, the division had recently obtained a document written by Hamas officials outlining the basics of a plan for a massive assault.

• 10:58Matt Bevan?

  The document said that about 3,000 fighters would be sent across the border at about 70 different points to attack the Ra'im camp and destroy the Gaza Division, then attack eight kibbutzim and take hostages. And depending on how all that went, they would then continue on to attack secondary targets in the surrounding areas of southern Israel. The Gaza Division's intelligence unit had translated the document from Arabic into Hebrew and began circulating it inside the Israeli intelligence community. But the wider community wasn't as concerned as some members of the Gaza Division, and they made the determination that challenges of secrecy, competence and intelligence alongside strategic considerations

• 11:43Matt Bevan?

  will prevent Hamas from fully implementing the proposed plan for now. They're essentially saying that at the time, in July 2018, Hamas wasn't organised enough to pull off their plan without Israel finding out first and stopping them. Despite this, Netanyahu seemed to take the threats outlined in this document seriously.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  Take Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. He said that the aim of the riots is to, quote, "tear down Israel's border and tear out their hearts."

• 12:13Matt Bevan?

  Now, did you clock the name he said there? Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas.

• 12:18Speaker 06

  Regarded as a hardliner, Yahya Sinwar rejects any reconciliation with Israel. The 55-year-old was jailed for murder in Israel but freed after 22 years behind bars as part of a prisoner swap deal in 2011.

• 12:33Matt Bevan?

  Sinwar became the leader of Hamas in Gaza in 2017, and Israel recognised that he seemed to be more of a strategic thinker than his predecessors. But despite this, the government's assessment was that these protests were not an attempt at an invasion of Israel, but rather were about creating enough noise so that Gaza could get concessions from Israel and surrounding Arab countries.

• 12:57Speaker 06

  They include things like, you know, allowing money into the Gaza Strip from the donor country Qatar, which gives cash to Hamas to allow it to run essential services.

• 13:07Matt Bevan?

  So, in order to get the demonstrations to stop, Netanyahu agreed to allow more money and assistance to reach Gaza.

• 13:14Speaker 06

  Benjamin Netanyahu's strategy has been merely to placate Hamas and keep things quiet in Gaza.

• 13:20Matt Bevan?

  Netanyahu says that the advice he was getting from the intelligence agencies was that Sinwar was not really interested in conflict. Netanyahu has released a number of select quotes from classified intelligence documents that back this argument up. He says that while he wanted to assassinate Sinwar and other Hamas leaders, the security establishment wanted to maintain peace. Now, that is Netanyahu's claim, backed up by the declassified documents he's personally chosen to release. It's yet to be tested by an inquiry.

• 13:57Matt Bevan?

  The question of who took Hamas's plans for attack seriously is something that an independent commission would definitely want to establish. Because the idea that Hamas was not capable of or not interested in conflict is exactly what Yahya Sinwar wanted the Israelis to think. The New York Times has reported that documents found in Gaza since October 7th said that Sinwar and the other leaders wanted to, quote, "keep the enemy convinced that Hamas in Gaza wants calm." And it worked spectacularly. From 2021 onwards, Israelis felt that their borders were so secure, they even stopped Googling Hamas.

• 14:43Matt Bevan?

  Okay, hold that thought, because we're going to push the countdown forward a bit to April 2022, 18 months before the attack. We're inside the offices of Israel's Signals Intelligence Organisation. An extremely important document just landed on the desk of a woman known from reporting as Master Sergeant V. She was part of the Israeli Defence Force's largest single military unit, known as Unit 8200.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  One of the world's most efficient intelligence agencies, Unit 8200 of the Israeli Defence Force.

• 15:19Matt Bevan?

  A big part of what they do at Unit 8200 is comb through the communications of Palestinians, looking for information they can use to force those Palestinians to become Israeli collaborators.

• 15:31Speaker 06

  Whether said individual is of certain sexual orientation, cheating on his wife, or in need of treatment in Israel or the West Bank, he is a target for blackmail.

• 15:41Matt Bevan?

  But in April 2022, according to Ynet reporting, Master Sergeant V was part of a team tasked with translating a document they'd obtained from Hamas. At the top of the document was written a passage from the Quran, which read, "Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will certainly prevail." The document was essentially the same vibe as the one that Israeli intelligence had obtained in 2018, but it had significantly more detail. It included plans to use explosive drones to knock out security cameras, communications towers, and automated machine guns along the border, send fighters into Israel rapidly using paragliders and motorcycles,

• 16:24Matt Bevan?

  and use engineering teams with heavy machinery to punch through the border wall to allow fighters to follow on foot. After translating the plan, Master Sergeant V called it "the Jericho Wall." That's a reference to a story from the Book of Joshua where, "by marching around the city of Jericho for seven days, the Israelites caused the walls to collapse." The translated plan was again circulated through the IDF, including to the Gaza Division at their base down by the border wall. But according to a military assessment obtained by the New York Times, it was, quote, "not yet possible to determine whether the plan has been fully accepted and how it will be manifested."

• 17:05Matt Bevan?

  Basically, the plan might be something, but until we see any actual preparations taking place, it also might just be nothing.

• 17:17Matt Bevan?

  Over the next few months, Hamas forces held a number of training drills.

• 17:24Matt Bevan?

  They seemed to be practising raids on makeshift Israeli military bases and kibbutzim.

• 17:33Matt Bevan?

  They were practising going through houses, executing people who were trying to surrender and taking hostages.

• 17:42Matt Bevan?

  But it wasn't until July of 2023, three months and one day before the attack, that Master Sergeant V heard the thing that would make her blood go cold. So let's jump forward to that.

• 17:58Matt Bevan?

  So Unit 8200 is primarily about listening to things, listening to intercepted phone calls and radio communications. And it was while listening to radio communications from one of Hamas's training exercises that Master Sergeant V heard the fighters shouting the Quranic verse, "Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will certainly prevail." The same phrase written at the top of that document that she'd translated into Hebrew about the plan that she had called "the Jericho Wall." These practice raids by Hamas seemed to confirm that the plan wasn't just something that someone wrote down on a piece of paper.

• 18:40Matt Bevan?

  The drills in Gaza were rehearsals for the Jericho Wall plan happening in real life. She wrote in an internal email, "I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary", adding that, quote, "It is a plan designed to start a war. It's not just a raid on a village." Remember when I said that the 9/11 Commission found that the American intelligence agencies had experienced a failure of imagination? It seems that Master Sergeant V had identified another one. So what happened next?

• 19:14Matt Bevan?

  Well, let's jump forward to the 19th of September 2023, 18 days before the attack.

• 19:21Matt Bevan?

  By this point, according to reporting from Channel 11 News in Israel, Unit 8200 had gathered enough information to be able to describe in detail, basically Hamas's entire plan. This included a lot of information about how Hamas planned to coordinate their hostage-taking during and after the attack. Each platoon would have three sites to drop off hostages, where the hostages' clothes would be searched for mobile phones. Hamas expected to take between 200 and 250 hostages during the attack. Documents prepared by Unit 8200 were circulated through the intelligence services and sent to the top brass in the Gaza Division. Channel 11 reported that despite this,

• 20:05Matt Bevan?

  the Gaza Division had only made plans for dozens of terrorists infiltrating at three locations at worst, not thousands of fighters breaching at dozens of locations. But the key piece of information the Gaza Division and Unit 8200 were missing was when the attack would come. That's because they were at the bottom level of the intelligence agency pyramid, watching and listening to the training drills across the border fence and wondering when the hammer would fall. It was the levels above them who had some idea that the attack was actually going to come quite soon.

• 20:46Matt Bevan?

  So what did they know? Well, just over three weeks before the attack, Israeli intelligence officials received a call from one of their contacts, who had a message to convey from the head of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar himself. Sinwar had apparently been frustrated by a lack of progress in secret negotiations with Israel aimed at getting Palestinian prisoners released from Israeli jails. The intermediary, a Palestinian politician named Sufyan Abu Zaida, showed the documentary Before the Earthquake a handwritten note with Sinwar's message, which was that Hamas would cause an earthquake in the prisoner exchange issue before the end of September, and that Israel should "prepare themselves to empty the prisons".

• 21:32Matt Bevan?

  Both the Israelis and Sinwar called Abu Zaida back to make sure that the message had got through correctly. He confirmed to both that it had.

• 21:43Matt Bevan?

  So that's one potential warning. Then, on the 26th of September, 11 days before the attack...

• 21:51Speaker 00

  The Atlantic is reporting that Egypt's intelligence chief Abbas Kamal also visited Tel Aviv shortly before October 7 with a dire warning about Gaza.

• 22:00Matt Bevan?

  And then on the 27th of September, 10 days before the attack...

• 22:03Speaker 06

  The intel came from Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, known as MBZ, the president of the United Arab Emirates. According to Haaretz, during a 45-minute phone conversation, he warned Mr Netanyahu that Hamas's then-leader Yahya Sinwar was planning a major attack on Israel.

• 22:20Matt Bevan?

  At least publicly, it didn't seem like the warnings were gaining any traction. Because on the 1st of October, six days before the attack...

• 22:30Matt Bevan?

  The head of the National Security Council was on the radio, saying that Hamas had been "very, very restrained", and that they understood the consequences of further defiance.

• 22:43Matt Bevan?

  But then at midnight on October 7, six hours before the attack, came the final warning. And for that, we need to go back to Unit 8200.

• 22:53Matt Bevan?

  Things were pretty quiet at Unit 8200's Gaza desk. Observing Hamas had apparently become so boring to them that they had reportedly stopped listening to their handheld radio communications, deciding that it was a waste of effort. But despite this, there were systems in place that were meant to detect any unusual communications activity. And those systems started sending off alarms at midnight on the 7th of October.

• 23:22Matt Bevan?

  A large number of Israeli SIM cards all started turning on simultaneously inside Gaza. This is the kind of thing that Hamas would do if it was preparing for a mass invasion of Israel. They would need Israeli SIM cards in their phones to allow them to continue to communicate as they invaded.

• 23:40Speaker 06

  The activation, mass activation at a given time of Israeli SIM cards by Gazans was viewed as a potential security warning by the Israeli defence establishment. However, what's also very clear is that it was ignored on this particular case.

• 23:58Matt Bevan?

  Part of the reason it was basically ignored is that Hamas had activated a large number of SIM cards all at once a number of times before, but nothing had happened afterwards. It now appears that the previous SIM activations were practice runs for the real thing. In the early morning of October 7, just hours before the attack, reports about those SIM cards were written up and pushed up the chain of command. But at some point, someone decided that this wasn't all that important, and they stopped waking people up. IDF veteran-turned-security expert Benjamin Anthony told i24 News that it was because they had bought Hamas's deception.

• 24:41Speaker 06

  It seems very, very clear. The conclusion of the defence establishment, and above, incidentally, was "there is no threat from Gaza, they are deterred, Hamas is deterred, and we need not worry about these activities because they would not dare to invade".

• 24:58Matt Bevan?

  At 6:29 that morning, the invasion began. And it played out pretty much exactly the way the 2018 and 2022 documents picked up by Israeli intelligence said it would.

• 25:12Matt Bevan?

  Part of the reason we know so much about this stuff is because lots of small inquiries have been conducted inside Israel's intelligence and military agencies. And Netanyahu himself has declassified various documents that he says prove the whole thing isn't his fault. But the thing is, October 7 wasn't caused by any individual failure inside any individual agency or unit. Benjamin Netanyahu compares October 7 with 9/11 to show the scale of the attack on his country. But the biggest similarity between the two events from a security standpoint is this: In both attacks, government agencies had in their possession almost all of the information

• 25:57Matt Bevan?

  they needed to prevent the attack. It had all been picked up by one part of the system or another. 9/11 happened in part because the FBI and the CIA weren't talking to each other. The right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. It was an issue of sideways communication. October 7 is not just about sideways communications problems, but vertical communications problems as well. How far up the chain of command was the key information going? And should it have been going further? That's something that only a broad, sweeping, independent state commission of inquiry can determine. For a lot of people, the desire to set up inquiries like this is about finding someone to blame. But more important than that, it's about preventing something like this

• 26:41Matt Bevan?

  from happening again. Gadi Eisenkot, the man who is right now trying to take Benjamin Netanyahu's job, has promised that if he is elected prime minister, he will launch an independent inquiry into October 7 as soon as possible. And clearly, it's a promise that's been popular with voters, who've turned out in record numbers across the country. Now, Eisenkot was the former IDF chief of staff, so he will also need to answer some tough questions about the failings that led to the attacks. But despite this, he is pushing on because he knows firsthand how serious the ramifications of October 7 have been for Israelis. Three of his family members, including his son, have been killed in action for the IDF

• 27:26Matt Bevan?

  in the conflict since then.

• 27:30Matt Bevan?

  Coalition negotiations are set to begin soon. They will not just decide who will sit in the prime minister's chair, but what will happen with this inquiry.

• 27:47Matt Bevan?

  If You're Listening is written by me, Matt Bevan. Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon. It's produced by Adair Shepherd and Jess O'Callaghan. Next week, well, it's a big week. The US midterms are happening, and it's kind of a referendum on Donald Trump's performance as president so far. On Tuesday, we'll be chatting to Mark Willissey, who has been on the ground for the ABC in the US covering the campaign and talking to voters. Then, on Wednesday, I'll be going live on our new YouTube channel at 3pm Eastern daylight time to answer all your questions about the midterms and follow the results as they come in. We've just done a rehearsal for it, and it went pretty well. So, search for If You're Listening on YouTube and make sure that you subscribe and have notifications turned on so you can follow along.

• 28:32Matt Bevan?

  I'll catch you next week.