Israel has used the October 7 “Al-Aqsa Flood” incursion to mount a genocidal assault on Gaza. The official narrative from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, repeated faithfully by his imperialist backers, is that Hamas carried out an unexpected and unprecedentedly barbaric assault and must now be wiped out at whatever cost.
This turns truth on its head. As the World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly warned, ever since his government took office at the end of 2022, Netanyahu mounted provocation after provocation against the Palestinians aimed at inciting retaliation, as then occurred on October 7. Al-Aqsa Flood provided the casus belli for a pre-planned campaign of mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians beginning with Gaza and then moving on to the West bank and including Israel’s 2 million Arab citizens.
Palestinians look for survivors following Israeli airstrike in Nusseirat refugee camp, Gaza Strip, October 31, 2023. [AP Photo/Doaa AlBaz]
Israel’s genocidal campaign has already claimed more than 14,000 lives—mostly children, women and the elderly. It has destroyed hospitals, schools and apartment blocks, while Israel’s refusal to allow food, fuel, electricity and even water to enter Gaza means that many more defenceless Palestinians will die a terrible death from starvation, thirst and disease.
But Israel’s entire narrative surrounding the events of October 7 has begun to collapse, with mounting evidence that Netanyahu’s government and Israel’s army and security services knew a military incursion was about to happen and that once it did take place, large numbers of Israeli casualties resulted from a massive military operation carried out by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
These revelations have been largely ignored by the world’s media, which has dutifully and endlessly repeated Israel’s claims that Hamas fighters committed horrific atrocities—including brutal kidnappings, babies being decapitated and burned and women raped—that claimed 1,400 lives. The gunmen, they said, had deliberately targeted the Supernova music festival killing hundreds of young people, and also slaughtered the residents of Kibbutzim.
Many of the Israeli families of those killed, injured and taken hostage on October 7—reflecting a widely held view that Netanyahu is responsible for the disaster and did nothing to prevent it—have called for an independent and international investigation, which the government has refused. They have demanded answers to two basic questions:
What did Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus know in advance about what Hamas had planned? And what happened over the weekend of October 7-8?
What did Israel know about the planned attack?
The official line on October 7, endlessly repeated, was that Israel’s infamous Mossad spy network had no inkling that such a large-scale attack, requiring months of planning, training and coordination among several Palestinian groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and non-affiliated Palestinians, was in the offing.
The secret American military-intelligence base in Israel’s Negev desert just 20 miles from Gaza, “Site 512,” was likewise blindsided.
Neither did the authorities explain how its massive electronic border fence could have been breached with only rudimentary tools and without any sirens going off or army bases being alerted—meaning that the Middle East’s most sophisticated army supposedly took hours to arrive at the scene in a country no bigger than the US state of New Jersey.
Media commentary has largely ascribed Israel’s security failure to its focus on the West Bank. The Netanyahu government has promoted settler violence against the Palestinians and ultra-orthodox provocations at the Al-Aqsa Mosque that supposedly consumed the attention of the IDF and Mossad.
Historically, far from viewing Hamas as a threat, Netanyahu has bolstered it as a counterweight to the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA). Israel has worked to cement divisions between the two rival Palestinian factions and prevent the establishment of a mini-Palestinian state made up of the West Bank and Gaza.
As an anonymous Israeli intelligence officer told The Washington Post last month, “That’s what happens when you forget that all defense lines can eventually be breached and have been historically. That’s what happens when you underestimate your enemy.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting at the prime minister's office in Jerusalem, Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2023.
Netanyahu repeatedly denied having received any military-intelligence about a possible attack. On October 29, he tweeted that “under no circumstances and at no stage was Prime Minister Netanyahu warned about Hamas’ intending to go to war.”
Two days ago, his lies were exposed with the publication by Ha’aretz of letters written in March and again in July by the head of the research division at Military Intelligence, personally warning Netanyahu that the sociopolitical crisis rocking the country was encouraging Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas to risk action against the country, even simultaneously.
In March, Brigadier General Amit Sa’ar wrote, “We are seeing deliberation on whether to sit on the fence and let Israel continue to weaken itself, or to take initiative and worsen its situation”, and attached the intelligence reports on which his warnings were based.