The Mysteries of October 7

Seymour Hersh:

One serious complication that has not been publicly discussed since the October 7 attack is that the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, were not the sole attackers or collectors of hostages on a day in which there was no Israeli Army presence in the kibbutzim and villages under attack for at least eight hours.

“We know,” the American official told me, “that the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade participated.”

…

I heard a similar account of how the long-planned October 7 attack got out of control from a long-standing expert on Middle Eastern politics who has no access to American intelligence assessments. “The goal of the Palestinian operation,” he told me, “was exactly what happened—a shocking and inspired military operation that humiliated the Israelis and shook them to their foundation. Hamas military commanders had a map of bases [inside Israel] and wanted to take computer servers with all of the potentially compromising information they contained and would probably have sent them to Iran for analysis.”

Another Hamas goal, I was told, was to take Israeli Army prisoners and force Israel to trade for the release of thousands of Gazan and West Bank prisoners, break the siege of Gaza, and continue to compete with the Palestine Liberation Organization that was initially designated by the 1993 Oslo Accords to control the West Bank and Gaza. “A further bonus of a successful attack,” the expert said, “would have been to stifle the ongoing normalization talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel.”

The Qassam wing of Hamas initiated the attack by launching rockets to distract the Israeli military and then disarmed the electronic system that provided round-the-clock surveillance of the fence around Gaza. The Hamas fighters who poured through the destroyed fence were soon followed by local residents of Gaza City who, in their ongoing anger at Israel, were eager to join in on the assault, as were members of other resistance groups in the Gaza Strip. The expert said he was told that attacking the all-night dance party—260 young Israelis were slaughtered that morning—was not part of the initial plan, but no one is denying that, planned or not, the murders at the dance party and in the Israeli settlements ultimately are the responsibility of Hamas.

…

The expert said that the critical issue for the Israeli military today, in the view of the Hamas leadership, is that a planned Hamas commando raid aimed at seizing IDF soldiers “turned into a prison break.” News of the unchallenged penetration of the initial Hamas attackers quickly spread throughout Gaza, and spontaneous groups of Gazans and hastily formed martyr hit teams poured through the downed fence. The result, said the expert, turned “the operation into a catastrophic success.”

More than 200 hostages were carted off—one can see their abduction in various videos that have emerged—on the backs of a motorcycle or a bicycle or jammed into autos, and now are believed to be scattered in underground tunnels or in private homes throughout Gaza. Their fate may never be known.

There are scores of videos providing evidence of what clearly was a fly-by-night attack that succeeded because of a stunning Israeli Defense Force failure that thus far has not led to the punishment of a single Israeli army officer. That possibility—that the initially limited Hamas goal turned into the horror that took place essentially because of the IDF failure—has yet to be acknowledged by Israel’s military and political leadership. They believe, as the expert said, that Hamas and other factions broke out of Gaza into Israel with specific orders to kill and abduct as many civilians and soldiers as possible.