(Day 801) Swords of Iron – “October 7: Shining Light on our Failures To Improve the Future”

Chaim starts by saying he’s recording the video in Jerusalem, Israel’s undivided capital.

Next, he says that we need to talk about what happened on October 7th, 2023, including the failure of the Israeli security and intelligence agencies to detect and confront this attack in time to save lives.

Chaim says he’s been in several wars and operations in Gaza and also fought in Lebanon, starting with the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and every few years there’s been another one.

Chaim says he fought in these wars as a reservist, despite being done with his mandatory service a long time ago and now running two charities, the Aliyah Return Center and the Faithful Galileans.

In particular, Hezbollah in Lebanon posed a major strategic threat to Israel because it had large numbers of trained and experienced fighters, sophisticated weapons, guided missiles and rockets, and leadership that knew what they were doing.

For this reason, most of the attention of the intelligence and security services were directed at the threat from Hezbollah, and little was left over to keep an eye on Hamas, who were assessed to be contained and deterred. This was despite multiple warnings from the residents of the kibbutzeem in the border region, and even some of the IDF troops deployed there, that Hamas was up to something. Chaim says that he’d been in Gaza before, crawling into their tunnels and checking out what they had, and he was among those who assessed that the threat from Hamas in Gaza was manageable.

But on October 7th, we all found out how wrong those assessments were.

Thousands of Hamas terrorists and ordinary Gazans poured through the holes made in the fences and attacked these vulnerable communities, which had minimal defenses.

Even the larger city of Sderote had very few armed and trained defenders. Hamas knew a lot about the city too, including where the mayor lived, where the police station was, etc.

Speaking of intelligence, Chaim also tells the story about Rafael Hayun, an Israeli civilian who had been monitoring Hamas communications and trying to pass information about what they were up to on to the IDF field commanders in the area. But the head of Unit 8200, the IDF’s signals intelligence unit, shut him down, along with military intelligence. He was not given any  explanation as to why, and many people still wonder what was going on with this situation.

There were other failures. Equipment meant to monitor the fence was not functioning as it should. The observation balloons were all grounded, the hi-tech fence completely failed in the purpose it was designed for, 

There was also a failure of imagination, the IDF and the Mossad, Shin Bet, and all the other agencies whose job it was to protect Israeli communities did not believe that Hamas had the will or the capacity to carry out an attack like the one they eventually did carry out.

Because of this, forces that had been deployed to protect these areas were withdrawn and redeployed elsewhere, and anyone who objected or tried to suggest a different approach was silenced.

However, on the evening of October 6th, there began to be some indications that something unusual was happening, and as the night wore on, more and more indications and warning signs were observed.

There were some attempts to get a clearer picture of what was going on, but for the most part, the warnings were not taken seriously by the IDF and other intelligence and security agencies.

Decisions were also made ot not wake up Prime Minister Netanyahu because the security heads were afraid he might make a bad decision. However, they themselves made the bad decisions.

Finally, at 6:29 AM, after the attack had already commenced, Netanyahu was woken up and briefed on the situation, but there were already thousands of rockets being fired into the country as well as thousands of highly trained and heavily armed commandos coming in to rape, kill, torture and destroy.

They also took lots of pictures and videos so they could broadcast it all over the world because they thought that would motivate other people to do the same things they were doing and destroy Israel and the Jews permanently.

Chaim says that there were a series of mistakes that led up to the failure on October 7th, and he includes the political atmosphere in the country surrounding the governing coalition’s drive for judicial reform, the poor handling of that by the Attorney General and the judiciary itself, the street protests, and the lack of clarity provided to the Army, the Police and the other elements of the executive branch of government. All of this set up a situation where Hamas and Israel’s other enemies sensed an opportunity to strike at a time when Israel was distracted and weak.

This carried over into October 7th, when the IDF’s own judicial wing sent lawyers to different military commands to countermand orders given to them by the Prime Minister, which greatly added to the confusion and created many problems.

Finally, it got sorted out, but for several days, there were still terrorists inside Israel who were being chased down and eliminated by the security forces and it took almost another month for a counter-offensive to be organized and executed.

Chaim says that there will eventually be a fill investigation and everything will come to light, but for now, he wanted to share what he has been able to determine from the reports that have already been released, including firsthand information given to him by personal friends, to convey a sense of the frustration he and many of his fellow IDF soldiers have at the terrible incompentence and poor judgement shown by the political, legal and even militaty echelon that led up to this series of failures.

However, he ends on a high note, pointing to the way the people of Israel rose to the occasion after their leaders and institutions failed. He says that we must continue to trust in God and look to Him for guidance and inspiration to carry on.

In this context, he concludes by quoting Psalms 60:12; “Through God we will do valiantly, for it is He who shall tread down our enemies.