On October 6, 2023 - less than 24 hours before the Hamas attack that triggered the Gaza war - Israel gathered intelligence indicating the Palestinian group was planning something for the following morning, Israeli Kan public broadcaster has revealed.
The information came through an intelligence-gathering operation, conducted via drones over the Gaza Strip, focused on the Hamas guards operating in the tunnel where Israel believed hostage Avera Mengistu was being held, the report said, according to an article published in The Times of Israel on Saturday.
Mengistu, a member of Israel’s Ethiopian minority and reportedly suffering from mental illness, entered Gaza by crossing a barbed wire fence in 2014, and was then arrested and held by Hamas. He was freed as part of a ceasefire deal in February this year.
The Times of Israel quoted Kan as saying that some piece of information obtained during that drone operation, though unclear, set off a red flag, and it was passed along to the Israeli army’s Southern Command.
The broadcaster, citing “sources,” claimed that the Command dismissed the intelligence as, in all likelihood, indicative of a Hamas training exercise, rather than an imminent attack.
The October 6 operation does not appear in the Israeli army’s records, nor has it been mentioned by probes into the events leading up to and during the subsequent terror onslaught, Kan said, adding that the reason for its omission is not clear.
Kan first reported on the intelligence operation earlier this month, but initially cited a source privy to the matter who said it had brought neither an intelligence breakthrough on Mengistu nor any indication of the imminent Hamas attack, The Times of Israel said.
It added that the Kan report comes about two weeks after Israeli Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir appointed a panel of experts to investigate the military’s failed handling of intelligence reports received since 2018, which outlined Hamas’s intent to launch a wide-scale attack against Israel, a topic not included in the army’s initial probes into the October 7, 2023, onslaught.
