During his parting address, Colonel Haim Cohen, who presided over the Gaza Division’s Northern Brigade on October 7th and during the ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, revealed an incident that occurred, he says, approximately a month and a half before the Hamas surprise attack.
In his address, he blamed the General Staff command center for not having basic information. „Forever I will ask where the Air Force was on October 7th. Forever I will ask why IDF Intelligence didn’t alert us about the surprise war.“
Cohen claimed that he asked to launch a surprise attack on the terror organization and was refused: „There were at the time launches, explosives, and violent riots on the border fence and the entire chain of command came to tour the sector, including the Defense Minister. To everyone, I recommended an opening blow, and the message I got from everyone was – Hamas is deterred.“
Cohen recounted how unknown individuals in the military spoke out against him to try to put the blame for the October 7th Massacre on him. He mentioned the events of that day and said accusingly: „At 3:30 a.m. I left to go to the brigade, despite the fact that the intelligence was unclear,“ he recounted. „I naïvely thought that like myself, at least some of the IDF chain of command were reporting in. Unfortunately, I was proven wrong during the first hour of the battle. At 6:29, the gates of hell opened up. As I rush to the command center, in the middle of a heavy missile barrage, I see a breach at dozens of locations by hundreds of terrorists, paragliders, and rubber rafts, and all at the same time. I announced that we’re in a suprise war. Amazed by the enemy’s ability to lead a terrorist military attack without our Intelligence knowing beforehand, I learned about the ‚Walls of Jericho‘ plan (Hamas’s plan for the attack, which was known to Israeli Intelligence) from Ilana Dayan’s exposé about a month later.“
He added: „I understood that I must try to stop thousands of terrorists and oversee dozens of incidents at the same time. On that day, no one in the General Staff Command Center even bothered to turn on the communication networks. While the media received a reliable picture from civilians, no one bothered to coordinate it in real-time at the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit.“
