by Oct 24, 2024
Approximately three hours prior to the Hamas’ attack in southern Israel on October 7, Shin Bet warned other elements of the police and security establishment that a potential assault emanating from the besieged Gaza Strip could be imminent.
The Kan public broadcaster and Channel 12 news reported the internal security service sent a “top secret” notification to the National Security Council, Mossad, and police that Israeli SIM cards Shin Bet had previously circulated within the group’s ranks as part of an operation had been activated “in a number of Hamas battalions.” There was no solid quantification of how many SIM cards were activated in the warning, but as the Times of Israel notes each battalion presumably contains hundreds of fighters.
The Shin Bet operation involving the cards was launched to provide an early warning for future Hamas attacks against Israel. The automatically generated alert was sent to situation rooms staffed 24 hours a day, contradicting past police claims about never receiving any warning, per Israeli media.
The Nova music festival held just outside the Gaza concentration camp went on as scheduled despite the alert, where concertgoers were subsequently slaughtered by Hamas as well as the IDF, which reportedly implemented a mass Hannibal Directive.
The Hannibal Directive is a policy of the Israeli military to kill their own soldiers when taken hostage, so as to prevent them from being used as bargaining chips by various resistance groups. However, on October 7, this order was extended to include Israeli civilians potentially kidnapped by Hamas. The group managed to abduct roughly 250 hostages and bring them back to the Strip.
Israeli police and Shin Bet are at odds over who is to blame, some sources told Kan that the internal security service should have raised a stronger alarm while other officials argue police did not pay the warning sufficient attention. Shin Bet’s warning said the activity demonstrated “unusual accumulation and, given additional suspicious signs, could be an indication of Hamas attack activities.”
The Times notes, “despite the warning, the security establishment maintained an outlook that Hamas was not capable or interested in carrying out a massive attack on the country.” Adding, “no action was taken” based on the Shin Bet alert. As the Jerusalem Post reported last year, this cavalier attitude was shared by commanders within Israel’s apartheid army who were admonished by their lookouts that suspicious activity was ongoing near the border before the attack.
“For a serious warning like that, phone calls should have been made instead of relying on a [written] report. For more minor things than that they called us and we deployed forces,” an anonymous senior police official on duty the night the Shin Bet warning arrived told Kan. Another security official balked at that argument, insisting “It is exactly for such situations that this warning system was set up so that there is no need to rely on someone making a call or not, that it should be immediate.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office had originally denied that the Israeli leader was aware of the SIM cards’ activation prior to a Channel 14 report. Although Netanyahu’s office has now changed its story, claiming he did not know multiple battalions had engaged these cards, only that he was aware “at the start of the war, … that the terrorists used dozens of Israeli SIMs.” The prime minister, as well as his Likud party, spent decades funding Hamas directly and indirectly, as part of a larger strategy to avoid ever negotiating a two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority.
Netanyahu may have an international arrest warrant issued against him for war crimes committed in the Gaza genocide. In the meantime, he has opposed the formation of a state inquiry commission – which is apparently the “most independent form of panel capable of probing government conduct” – until the war ends. The ongoing state comptroller probe holds significantly less authority and Netanyahu is constantly expanding the scope of his war from the ethnic cleansing and mass starvation campaign in Gaza, to war against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Iran.
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