"As Hamas attacked, the women at Nahal Oz, a base about a kilometre from the Gaza border, began to say goodbye to one another on their shared WhatsApp group."
"Israel's military has published its first official account of the mistakes that led to its failures during Hamas's 7 October 2023 attack, which triggered the Gaza war.
"The report concludes that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) "failed in its mission to protect Israeli civilians".
"The 19-page report contains much that is already known about what led to catastrophic loss of about 1,200 lives when approximately 5,000 gunmen from Hamas and other Palestinian groups stormed into Israel, also taking 251 hostages in the process.
"There are no dramatic revelations, but it is still sobering to see the military's conclusions about how it misjudged Hamas's intentions and underestimated its capabilities laid out in black and white.
How Hamas built a force to attack Israel on 7 October
"The report says the military regarded Gaza as a secondary security threat, with priority given to Iran and Hezbollah. Its policy towards Gaza, it says, was "paradoxical: Hamas was illegitimate, yet there was no effort to develop an alternative".
"The military had chosen a "conflict management" approach to dealing with Gaza, it says. And had assumed that Hamas was "neither interested [in] nor preparing for a large-scale war" - a perception reinforced by Hamas's own deception tactics.
"Evidence from 2018 onwards suggesting that Hamas - which is proscribed as a terrorist group by Israel, the US, UK and other countries - was indeed developing an ambitious plan was interpreted as "unrealistic or unfeasible", reflecting "Hamas's long-term aspirations rather than an actionable threat".
"The report says that in the months leading up to the war, the Military Intelligence Directorate began to develop a new assessment, suggesting that Hamas's plan was not merely a vision but "a concrete framework for operational planning".
"However, this emerging assessment was not brought to the attention of senior officials in military intelligence." . . .
. . . "These women were not the only ones raising the alarm, and as more testimony is gathered, anger at the Israeli state - and questions over its response - are mounting.
"The BBC has spoken also to the grieving families who have now lost their daughters, and to experts who see the IDF's response to these women as part of a broader intelligence failure. The IDF said it was "currently focused on eliminating the threat from the terrorist organisation Hamas" and declined to answer the BBC's questions.
" 'The problem is that they [the military] didn't connect the dots," a former commander at one of the border units tells the BBC.
"If they had, she says, they would have realised that Hamas was preparing something unprecedented." . . .
Accounts of survivors of the intense battle that took place at the Nahal Oz base on October 7th provide a chilling glimpse into the realities faced by those on the front lines
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