Maariv military correspondent Gabi Ashkenazi on Monday cited IDF sources who admit that senior officials at the General Staff are working to prevent the conclusion of the October 7 investigations, in an attempt to prevent the disclosure of the truth regarding the functioning of units and formations and commanders’ decisions, including those by Chief of Staff Major General Herzi Halevi.
The IDF is at a serious low point in the public’s trust. In the Gaza envelope communities, the level of trust in the IDF is extremely low. The residents repeatedly claim that “the IDF betrayed them and was not present on October 7 to protect them.” The public’s feelings about trust in the IDF and its commanders are multilayered. And politicians have turned the IDF into the national whipping boy.
IDF spokesman Brigadier General Daniel Hagari has stated several times that the IDF will act transparently and present the October 7 investigations impartially, in the hope of restoring public trust in the army. He presented a timetable for the presentation of the investigations, which as of today were supposed to include the Chief of Staff, the General Staff, the Intelligence Division, the Shin Bet, the Southern Command, the Home Front Command, the Operations Division, the Gaza Division, and other units and formations.
Instead, so far only one investigation, of the Battle of Be’eri, has been presented. There are reports inside and outside the IDF that indicate that the decision to publish the Be’eri investigation was only intended to qualify the appointment of Brigadier General Barak Hiram as commander of the Gaza Division.
IDF officers admit that there is a War of the Generals (a reference to the crisis in the IDF following the failures of the October 1973 war – DI) going on around the events of October 7, 2023, with tensions between the senior officer and the middle command regarding the sharing of blame. Some reports indicate that Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi sided with Military Intelligence’s position and refrained from carrying out operations to organize an attack so as not to reveal intelligence capabilities and sources, even though there was enough intelligence information about Hamas’s intention to carry out an offensive operation.
Will we ever know? Highly unlikely.
This version receives external reinforcement from a telephone conversation between the commander of the Gaza division Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld and the commander of the Ashdod naval base, in which Rosenfeld asked to send troops to the sea and said something was happening in Gaza. IDF sources say that Rosenfeld hinted in this conversation that he did not have permission to move troops.
Sources in the IDF and the Southern Command said that if the Chief of Staff had made a different decision that night, hundreds and thousands of lives would have been saved. According to them, it would have been enough to add attack helicopters and additional battalions to change the picture.
But the IAF chief, General Tomer Bar, was not included in the notorious October 6 phone conversation and was not aware of the intelligence regarding Hamas movements. This is why the first IAF chopper took to the air only around 2 PM, seven full hours after the start of the attack.
There’s also talk about the fact that many IAF pilots had been refusing to show up for their weekly refresher sessions, which was part of their protest against the government’s judicial reform.
Many in the IDF suggest that if the army is not transparent about all the failures that led up to October 7, then no lessons are going to be learned and the same disasters will be repeated.
