The Minerva’s owl (Roman mythology) is taking flight almost sixty days after the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. The philosopher of Stuttgart (Hegel, 1770-1831) attributed to the owl, goddess of wisdom – a woman – the power to tell us from a certain distance, when the day has already been lived, what happened. “Minerva’s owl,” he wrote in 1820, “takes flight from her at twilight.” Maybe the equivalent is better in the Greek mythology, Athena, because while in Rome Minerva was only the goddess of wisdom, in Greece she was the goddess of wisdom, military strategy and war.
Journalists Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman reported in the American newspaper ‘The New York Times‘ last Friday, December 1, that Israel “knew of Hamas’s plans more than a year ago,” in reference to the military invasion resulting in 1,200 deaths on Saturday, October 7. “The ‘Times’ reviewed a plan that included a detailed description of the attacks, which Israeli officials dismissed because they did not think the armed group had the capacity to carry it out,” says the newspaper.
According to inquiries made by journalists about the aforementioned plan – a Hamas internal report of about forty pages, written in Arabic, and whose date would go back just over a year – those responsible for several Israeli intelligence services They valued the document as a project without any possibility of realization. And they discarded it.
“You will surprise them at the gate”
The report began with a Quran phrase: “You will surprise them at the gate. If you do, you will prevail.” This phrase was used by Hamas in videos and statements released after October 7.
The meticulous description of the operation in that document and the striking resemblance like two drops of water to the October 7 operation does not seem to be pure coincidence.
“The document provided for a barrage of rockets at the beginning of the attack, drones to destroy security cameras and machine guns along the border, as well as armed men to enter Israel en masse on paragliders, motorcycles and on foot, all of which occurred on October 7,” it is noted.
Precise details
“The plan also included details about the location and size of the israeli military forcescommunications centers and other sensitive information, which raised questions about How Hamas Gathered Its Information intelligence and whether there were leaks within the Israeli security establishment,” the journalists point out.
The report was classified by the Israeli services with the code name Jericho Wall. “Named after the ancient fortifications in the present West Bank, It was more explicit. He detailed missile attacks to distract the Israeli military and make them hurriedly take cover in bunkersas well as the use of drones to disable the complex security measures throughout the border fence that separates Israel from Gaza,” the information explains.
It draws attention, above all, to the target identity between the report and the facts. “One of the most important objectives outlined in the document was to take the Israeli Army base in Reim, headquarters of the Gaza division responsible for protecting the region. Other bases that are under the division’s command were also on the list. Hamas carried out that objective on October 7, devastating Reim and overrunning parts of the base,” he notes.
Movement alert in Gaza
But there was another relevant clue three months before the attack, according to the North American newspaper. A call analyst Unit 8200specialized in sending signals, a female soldier with knowledge of the Jericho Wall report warned about movements in Gaza.
“On July 6, 2023, the experienced analyst of Unit 8200 wrote to a group of intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas elements had recently carried out training exercises, under the observation of senior Hamas commanders. The training included a mock shootdown of Israeli planes and the taking of a ‘kibbutz’ and a military training base in which it was given death to all cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Koran that appeared at the top of the attack plan on the Wall of Jericho, the analyst wrote in the email exchanges seen by the ‘New York Times’.”
According to the analyst, “the colonel in the Gaza division praised the analysis, but said that the exercise was part of a ‘totally imaginative’ scenario and it was not an indication that Hamas had the capacity to carry it out.”
High degree of knowledge
Although the ‘New York Times’ focuses on these relevant indications about the Army’s degree of knowledge of a Hamas attack, in Tel-Aviv it has emerged that a group of female soldiers (‘tatzpitanit’, in Hebrew) of the Army, observers of the monitors who guard at surveillance posts near the wall that separates Gaza from Israel – working nine hours a day – warned of suspicious movements in the months prior to October 7. Some of them have been kidnapped in the operation.
No less astonishing than the training that the signals intelligence analyst warned about in July 2023, the observers consider that “Hamas was quite negligent: They did not try to hide their plans and kept suspicious movements openly. But, they point out, high-ranking Army officers refused to listen to their warnings. “The observers are young women and the commanders are young women. If those who had been in front of the screens instead of women had been men, things would be seen differently,” a soldier tells the newspaper ‘Haaretz’.
How Unit 8200 works
The operation of the aforementioned Unit 8200 has been another of the enigmas. Because the high command ordered that he not be on duty on weekends. Ergo: The specialized signals team stayed home on October 7. Two newspapers that are nothing like opposition ‘The Times of Israel’ and the digital ‘Israel Hayo’ emphasize the importance of this unit being out of combat, “the unit that could save Israel from 7/O“.
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For now, the Government of national unity has postponed any investigation into what happened. It does not seem that the theory of Hamas’ extraordinary military capacity can be completely valid. Ignorance – deliberate? – could have played a trick or those who, like Netanyahu and his friends, with water up to their necks politically speaking, concentrated their military forces to support religious and extremist settlers of the West Bank and withdrawing from the Wall of Jericho.
The warning messages from the Israeli goddesses, embodying the wisdom of Minerva-Athena, entered through one ear of the generals and came out through the other. It is one thing to belittle Hamas’s capabilities after obtaining the Jericho Wall report and another to completely dismantle security. Come on, almost open the gate.