Hamas practised in plain sight, posting video of mock attack weeks before border breach

AP

Jerusalem, October 13

Less than a month before Hamas fighters blew through Israel's high-tech “Iron Wall” and launched an attack that would leave more than 1,200 Israelis dead, they practised in a very public dress rehearsal.

A slickly produced two-minute propaganda video posted on social media by Hamas on September 12 shows fighters using explosives to blast through a replica of the border gate, sweep in on pickup trucks and then move building by building through a full-scale reconstruction of an Israeli town, firing automatic weapons at human-silhouetted paper targets.

The Islamic militant group's live-fire exercise dubbed operation 'Strong Pillar' also shows militants wearing body armour and combat fatigues swiftly carrying out operations that included the destruction of mock-ups of the wall's concrete towers and a communications antenna, just as they would do for real in the deadly attack last Saturday.

While Israel's highly regarded security and intelligence services were clearly caught flatfooted by Hamas' ability to breach its Gaza defences, the group appears to have hidden its extensive preparations for the deadly assault in plain sight.

“There clearly were warnings and indications that should have been picked up,” said Bradley Bowman, a former US Army officer who is now senior director of the Centre on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, a Washington research institute. “Or maybe they were picked up, but they didn't spark necessary preparations to prevent these horrific terrorist acts from happening.”   

The Associated Press reviewed and verified key details from dozens of videos Hamas released over the last year, primarily through the social media app Telegram.

Using satellite imagery, the AP matched the location of the mocked-up town to a patch of desert outside Al-Mawasi, a Palestinian town on the southern coast of the Gaza Strip. A large sign in Hebrew and Arabic at the gate says “Horesh Yaron”, the name of a controversial Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

Bowman said there are indications that Hamas intentionally led Israeli officials to believe it was preparing to carry out raids in the West Bank, rather than in Gaza. It was also potentially significant that the exercise has been held annually since 2020 in December, but was moved up by nearly four months this year to coincide with the anniversary of Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.

In a separate video posted to Telegram from last year's Strong Pillar exercise on December 28, Hamas fighters are shown storming what appears to be a mockup Israeli military base, complete with a full-size model of a tank with an Israeli flag flying from its turret. The gunmen move through the cinderblock buildings, seizing other men playing the roles of Israeli soldiers as hostages.

Michael Milshtein, a retired Israeli colonel who previously led the military intelligence department overseeing the Palestinian territories, said he was aware of the Hamas videos, but he was still caught off guard by the ambition and scale of Saturday's attack.

“We knew about the drones, we knew about booby traps, we knew about cyberattacks and the marine forces…The surprise was the coordination between all those systems,” Milshtein said.

The seeds of Israel's failure to anticipate and stop Saturday's attack go back at least a decade. Faced with recurring attacks from Hamas militants tunnelling under Israel's border fence, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a very concrete solution — build a bigger wall.

With financial help from US taxpayers, Israel completed construction of a USD 1.1 billion project to fortify its existing defences along its 40-mile land border with Gaza in 2021. The new, upgraded barrier includes a “smart fence” up to 6-metres (19.7 feet) high, festooned with cameras that can see in the dark, razor wire and seismic sensors capable of detecting the digging of tunnels more than 200 feet below. Manned guard posts were replaced with concrete towers topped with remote-controlled machine guns.

“In our neighbourhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts,” Netanyahu said in 2016, referring to Palestinians and neighbouring Arab states. “At the end of the day as I see it, there will be a fence like this one surrounding Israel in its entirety.”   

Shortly after dawn on Saturday, Hamas fighters pushed through Netanyahu's wall in a matter of minutes. And they did it on the relative cheap, using explosive charges to blow holes in the barrier and then sending in bulldozers to widen the breaches as fighters streamed through on motorcycles and in pick-up trucks. Cameras and communications gear were bombarded by off-the-shelf commercial drones adapted to drop hand grenades and mortar shells — a tactic borrowed directly from the battlefields of Ukraine.

Snipers took out Israel's sophisticated roboguns by targeting their exposed ammunition boxes, causing them to explode. Militants armed with assault rifles sailed over the Israeli defences slung under paragliders, providing Hamas airborne troops despite lacking airplanes. Increasingly sophisticated homemade rockets, capable of striking Israel's capital of Tel Aviv, substituted for a lack of heavy artillery.

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