Israel’s October 7 inquiry hinges on this election

0:00ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. 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. 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. Join me for ABC News Daily. Find us on ABC Listen. This podcast was produced on the lands of the Awabakal, Gadigal and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people. Benjamin Netanyahu is fond of making a comparison between the October 7th attacks by Hamas in Israel in 2023. The darkest day in Israel's history. Altogether, they slaughtered 1,200 Israelis that day. And the 9-11 attacks in New York in 2001.

0:59I 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 9-11s. 16 9-11s. 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. Today I sign an act of Congress... And it starts with this announcement by US President George W. Bush. ...and creating a national commission to investigate the events of September the 11th, 2001, and the years that led up to that event. Following the attack, Bush wasn't enthusiastic about the idea of an independent commission of inquiry into 9-11,

1:51but he finally agreed to create one just over a year later. This commission will help me and future presidents to understand the methods of America's enemies and the nature of the threats we face. The commissioners 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. 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. In the course of the inquiry, a number of top government officials made some very serious admissions. We all understood bin Laden's attempt to strike the homeland.

2:39The 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 people despite doing everything I could. We did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies. 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.

3:30The 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. 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 anti-Semitic attack on Jewish people in Bondi took 25 days to set up.

4:16And even that was seen by some people as taking too long. With all this pressure, it's hard to see how Anthony Albanese could continue to deny a National Royal Commission. 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. But in Israel, it's been more than 1,100 days since the October 7 attack, and still no independent commission of inquiry has been set up to figure out what happened. Even in an 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 ones seen after 9-11. So why is it taking so long?

5:06Well, 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. 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. We came this evening to demand that the Israeli government

5:58will form a national investigative committee. Investigating October 7 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. 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.

6:58What questions need answering to make sure this can't happen again? I'm Matt Bevan and this is If You're Listening. For the majority of this episode, we're going to be counting down towards October 7th, 2023, a truly horrific day in global history. The Hamas terrorists committed the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. They went house to house, shooting Israeli civilians point blank. They live streamed as they murdered. But don't worry, we're not going to play the audio of people being murdered or terrorised 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, OK?

7:54Start the clock. 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. The Raim 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. There were clashes tonight between Palestinian protesters

8:46and Israeli forces near the Gaza-Israel border. 30,000 Palestinians were involved in the protests near the border wall Israel had built around Gaza. Organisers 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. The people went to the demonstration because they have nothing to lose or 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.

9:28But the protest quickly started to escalate. It was hoped this would be a peaceful protest. Instead it turned violent. The Gaza division of the IDF said that the protesters hurled stones and Molotov cocktails at them near the border. Soldiers responded with gunfire and tear gas, delivered by grenades and from drones. More than 130 Palestinians were killed during international criticism of Israel. General Gadi Eisenkot said that the protest was really a pretext for an invasion of Israel by the terrorist organisation Hamas, so the harsh response from the IDF was justified. It's no demonstration. It is very aggressive energy, the idea of Hamas regime to infiltrate the border between Israel and Gaza Strip,

10:17to infiltrate to the kibbutzim along the border and to change the situation. Which is why when Gadi Eisenkot and Benjamin Netanyahu visited Rahim 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. 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 8 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.

11:20The 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 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 organized 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. Take Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

12:06He said that the aim of the riots is to quote, tear down Israel's border and tear out their hearts. Now did you clock the name he said there? Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas. 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. 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

12:56and surrounding Arab countries. 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. So in order to get the demonstrations to stop, Netanyahu agreed to allow more money and assistance to reach Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu's strategy has been merely to placate Hamas and keep things quiet in Gaza. Netanyahu says that the advice he was getting from the intelligence agencies was that SINWA was not really interested in conflict. Netanyahu says that the advice he was getting from the intelligence agencies was that Sinwa was not really interested in conflict. Netanyahu has released a number of select quotes from classified intelligence documents that back this argument up.

13:34He says that while he wanted to assassinate Sinwa 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. 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 Sinwa wanted the Israelis to think. The New York Times has reported that documents found in Gaza since October 7th said that Sinwa and the other leaders wanted to, quote, keep the enemy convinced that Hamas in Gaza wants calm.

14:30And it worked spectacularly. From 2021 onwards, Israelis felt that their borders were so secure, they even stopped googling Hamas. OK, 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 Organization. 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. One of the world's most efficient intelligence agencies, Unit 8200 of the Israeli Defence Force. 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.

15:31Whether 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. 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,

16:19send fighters into Israel rapidly using paragliders and motorcycles, 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.

17:07Basically, the plan might be something, but until we see any actual preparations taking place, it also might just be nothing. Over the next few months, Hamas forces held a number of training drills. They seemed to be practising raids on makeshift Israeli military bases and kibbutzim. They were practising going through houses, executing people who were trying to surrender and taking hostages. 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. 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

18:10that 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 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. 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, Remember when I said that the 9-11 Commission found that the American intelligence agencies had experienced a failure of imagination,

19:06it seemed that Master Sergeant V had identified another one. So what happened next? Well, let's jump forward to the 19th of September, 2023, 18 days before the attack. 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

19:58and sent to the top brass in the Gaza Division. Channel 11 reported that despite this, 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. 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

20:56head of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwa himself. Sinwa 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 Zayda, showed the documentary before the earthquake a handwritten note with Sinwa'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. Both the Israelis and Sinwa called Abu Zayda back to make sure that the message had got through correctly. He confirmed to both that it had. So that's one potential warning.

21:47Then, on the 26th of September, 11 days before the attack... The Atlantic is reporting that Egypt's intelligence chief, Abbas Kamal, also visited Tel Aviv shortly before October 7 with a dire warning about Geyser. And then on the 27th of September, 10 days before the attack... 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' then leader, Yahya Sinwa, was planning a major attack on Israel. 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, the head of the National Security Council was on the radio

22:32saying that Hamas had been very, very restrained and that they understood the consequences of further defiance. But then at midnight on October the 7th, six hours before the attack, came the final warning. And for that we need to go back to Unit 8200. 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. A large number of Israeli SIM cards all started turning on simultaneously inside Gaza.

23:29This 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. 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. 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

24:17early morning of October 7th, 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 I-24 News that it was because they had bought Hamas' deception. It seems very, very clear that 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. 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

25:07Israeli intelligence said it would. 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 7th wasn't caused by any individual failure inside any individual agency or unit. Benjamin Netanyahu compares October 7th 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 they needed to prevent the attack. It had all been

26:00picked 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 7th 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 from happening

26:42again. 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 7th 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 7th have been for Israelis. Three of his family members, including his son, have been killed in action for the IDF in the conflict since then. Coalition negotiations are set to begin soon.

27:33They will not just decide who will sit in the Prime Minister's chair, but what will happen with this inquiry. If you're listening, it's written by me, Matt Bevan. Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon. It's produced by Adair Shepard 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 Willesey, 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.

28:21We'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. I'll catch you next week.