Jericho Wall, the warnings that went unheeded, and the theses now in contention
The argument that has seized Israel this week — a Haaretz investigation into an Emirati warning conveyed to Benjamin Netanyahu; a dispatch by Ronen Bergman in Yedioth Ahronoth on a clandestine channel to Hamas; a libel action announced by the prime minister — is not a quarrel over a footnote. It is the return of an older question: was 7 October 2023 a surprise that could not reasonably have been foreseen, or the consequence of a refusal to hear?
What has been established must be distinguished, with some severity, from what remains alleged.
I. The governing document: “Jericho Wall”
The indispensable account remains the investigation published on 30 November 2023 in The New York Times by Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman: nytimes.com.
That article established — and subsequent inquiries by the Israel Defence Forces have since confirmed — the following.
In 2022, Israeli military intelligence obtained a Hamas document of some forty pages, the latest recension of a plan under preparation since the early years of the previous decade. The Israelis assigned it the code-name Jericho Wall.
The document opens with a verse from the Qur’an: “Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will certainly prevail.”
It sets out, in sequence: a rocket barrage intended to drive Israeli soldiers into their shelters; drones directed against the cameras and automated machine-guns along the border fence; a simultaneous breach at dozens of points — the text speaks of some sixty; an assault by paraglider, motorcycle and on foot; the overrunning of the Gaza Division and of selected bases, among them Re’im; and attacks upon the kibbutzim.
Hamas had assembled, in addition, a remarkably precise picture of the Israeli order of battle: the disposition of forces, their strength, the nodes of communication.
On 7 October the organisation executed the plan “with shocking precision.” Every element recorded in the document reappears in the attack as it was carried out.
What the document was not. It contained no date. Jericho Wall is a method of war, not a calendar.
What was made of it. The Gaza Division treated it as a “compass”: Hamas knew its destination but had not yet arrived. Senior officers — among them Major-General Aharon Haliva, then head of Military Intelligence; Major-General Eliezer Toledano, then commander of the Southern Command; and Major-General Yaron Finkelman — judged the plan unrealistic. A colonel in the Gaza Division, in July 2023, dismissed the scenario as “wholly imaginary.”
Whether Mr Netanyahu himself ever read Jericho Wall has not been established. The Times recorded that the document circulated widely among the senior ranks of the army and the intelligence services; its transmission to the political summit remains unproven.
II. The officer who listened: an analyst of Unit 8200
On 6 July 2023 a veteran analyst of Unit 8200 wrote to her colleagues. Hamas had just conducted a day-long exercise under the eyes of its senior commanders: a rehearsal in the shooting-down of Israeli aircraft, the seizure of a kibbutz, the overrunning of a training base and the killing of its cadets. In the course of the drill the fighters recited the same Qur’anic verse that stands at the head of Jericho Wall.
She wrote, in encrypted correspondence later examined by the Times:
“I utterly refute the contention that this scenario is imaginary. It is a plan conceived to open a war, not merely a raid upon a village. We have already lived a comparable experience, fifty years ago, on the southern front, concerning a scenario that then seemed imaginary. History may repeat itself if we are not careful.”
The allusion to the war of Yom Kippur, 1973, could scarcely have been plainer. A colonel of the Gaza Division held his ground: the scenario was imaginary. His view prevailed.
The women observers posted at Nahal Oz had, for months, reported anomalous activity along the fence. The army’s later meta-inquiry — the Turgeman committee, 2025 — concluded that their reporting, had it been professionally assessed, might have laid bare Hamas’s unusual preparations. It was not so assessed.
III. The other warnings of record
The Shin Bet, September 2023. An intermediary of Fatah meets Yahya Sinwar in Gaza. Sinwar speaks of a “vast surprise,” repeats the Arabic word zilzal — earthquake — and asks that the message be conveyed to the Israelis. It reaches the Shin Bet around 15 September. Ronen Bar briefs the prime minister. A security consultation follows. The prevailing interpretation is of tension in the West Bank, not of an invasion from Gaza.
Egypt. Warnings of a general character — that the ground in Gaza would be made to tremble — without date and without method.
The night of 6–7 October. Military Intelligence reports unusual activity in Hamas’s aerial apparatus. The possibility of a raid is raised. In order not to compromise sources, and because certain signs were read as reassuring, Southern Command and the General Staff confine themselves to modest measures and appoint a further review for half past eight in the morning. The assault begins at about half past six.
Bergman has shown that from two o’clock in the morning the prime minister’s intelligence officer received the material by two separate channels and rose to examine it. The claim that “they resolved not to wake him” is, on this particular point, contradicted by the chronology.
The Aman letter of 23 July 2023 (Bergman, Ynet, 10 September 2026). Brigadier-General Amit Sa’ar addresses to Mr Netanyahu the gravest warning of that season. The letter cites a clandestine channel with Hamas, known as “Srogim,” through which Sinwar’s messages passed by way of the brother of a Hamas official.
The letter quotes:
“There are many fuses. The extremists in your government are leading you to light them and to set the entire region ablaze, and you alone will bear the consequences.”
Mr Netanyahu maintains that the warnings he received before the massacre concerned only Hezbollah and Iran. Bergman writes that this is untrue: the letter names a Hamas channel in terms. The article: ynet.co.il.
IV. The Haaretz investigation of 8 September 2026
This is not Bergman’s work. The authors are Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, writing for the book Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment.
The central allegation. In late September 2023, some ten days before the massacre, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed telephones Mr Netanyahu from Abu Dhabi. The conversation lasts forty-five minutes. The Emirati president warns that Sinwar is preparing an operation of consequence. Mr Netanyahu receives the news with composure, speaks rather of the West Bank, and does not convey the warning to Lieutenant-General Herzi Halevi or to Mr Bar. Both men have stated that they were never informed of any such call.
What lends the account weight, without proving the call itself:
- A senior officer of Middle Eastern intelligence confirms to Ynet that the United Arab Emirates transmitted to Israel, shortly before 7 October, a warning drawn from a source described as “highly reliable,” concerning a “significant and imminent” Hamas action. He does not confirm that the warning took the form of a personal conversation between the two heads of government.
- Abu Dhabi declines the categorical denial requested by the Prime Minister’s Office. Its statement records that channels exist and that relevant intelligence “has been, and continues to be, communicated.”
- Naftali Bennett declares the report “true,” without producing a document.
- Mr Eldar asserts that he holds papers and traces. None has been made public.
Mr Netanyahu’s denial. There was no call between the beginning of September and 7 October. The logs of the Prime Minister’s Office, of the National Security Council and of the military secretariat have been examined. Calls from Sheikh Mohammed pass through an encrypted instrument brought to the office; entries are recorded; there is no trace. An action in defamation has been announced.
The present state of the facts. That an Emirati warning reached Israel is highly probable. That it assumed the form of a forty-five-minute personal call to the prime minister, followed by a deliberate suppression of the information, has not been established by any official paper in the public domain.
V. What the official inquiries have found
As of September 2026 there is still no independent state commission of inquiry. There have been internal examinations by the army and by the Shin Bet, and a meta-inquiry by the Turgeman committee.
The committee, in 2025, identified six causes: a conceptual failure regarding Hamas’s intentions; a failure of intelligence in assessment and warning; neglect of the defensive design associated with Jericho Wall; a deterioration of organisational culture; a persistent discrepancy between the threat as defined and the force as posted; and deficient decisions on the night of the attack.
“The surprise of 7 October did not arise from a vacuum. In the night of 7 October, direct intelligence had accumulated which, had it been professionally analysed, could and should have produced an alert and a substantial operational response.”
The Shin Bet, in a declassified summary of March 2025, accepts its own failure. It adds that government policy permitted Hamas to accumulate arms and treasure — Qatari funds diverted to the military apparatus. Mr Bar has said that the attack might have been prevented.
A military report records 767 soldiers on the frontier against more than five thousand assailants; the collapse of command; villages left to themselves for hours.
VI. Four theses now in the field
They are not wholly exclusive of one another.
Thesis A — The failure was first of the army and of intelligence. The “conception” — that Hamas was deterred, that it governed, that it did not desire war — blinded Military Intelligence, the Shin Bet and the General Staff. The signals existed; the mental frame rendered them void. This is Bergman’s thesis, that of the army’s and the Shin Bet’s own inquiries, and the structural analogue of 1973. It is the best documented.
Thesis B — The failure was first political. The doctrine of “money for quiet,” the decision to treat Hamas as a useful administrator against the Palestinian Authority, the refusal of a pre-emptive blow against Sinwar, the thinning of the southern garrison, the domestic crisis of 2023: all of this was determined at the summit. An independent civilian commission in 2024 judged that the disaster “was not a fatality.”
Thesis C — The prime minister was not informed in the night itself. This is Mr Netanyahu’s present line: had he been woken, he would have placed the entire army on alert. The thesis encounters two difficulties. The prime minister’s intelligence officer received the material from two o’clock in the morning; and the commanders who would have called him themselves believed that any action would be limited. A waking would not, of itself, have dissolved the conception.
Thesis D — The Emirati warning alters the character of the fault. If Sheikh Mohammed personally warned the prime minister, and if the latter transmitted nothing, collective blindness becomes the individual withholding of critical information. This is the thesis of Haaretz and of Mr Bennett. It is politically explosive some six weeks before a general election. It is not yet proven in the documentary sense.
VII. Could 7 October have been averted?
Could any attack by Hamas, on some day or other, have been prevented? No one may responsibly say so. The organisation had prepared the operation for years and had misled even some among its allies as to the hour.
Could this massacre have been prevented — thousands crossing the fence essentially unopposed for hours; the collapse of the Gaza Division; twelve hundred dead; two hundred and fifty taken hostage? In large measure, yes. The military inquiries say as much. The signals were sufficient, in July as in the night of 6–7 October, to raise the state of alert and to diminish, perhaps dramatically, the scale of what followed.
What was wanting was not information. It was the intellectual licence to believe it.
To know how to listen did not mean to collect warnings. Israel already knew how to do that. It meant allowing an analyst of Unit 8200, an observer at Nahal Oz, or a letter from Military Intelligence to destroy the story the system told itself: that Hamas was a manageable inconvenience; that the fence could stand in for soldiers; that Sinwar was a pragmatist; that quiet could be purchased.
Everything that said otherwise was filed as noise.
Principal sources
- Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman, “Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan Over a Year Ago,” The New York Times, 30 November 2023.
- Ronen Bergman, Ynet / Yedioth Ahronoth, 10 September 2026.
- Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, Haaretz, 8 September 2026; Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment.
- Turgeman committee, IDF meta-inquiry, November 2025.
- Declassified summary of the Shin Bet inquiry, March 2025.
- Internal Military Intelligence examination, reported by The Times of Israel, February 2025, on the treatment of Jericho Wall.
The established facts may be stated in a sentence. The plan was known; people said so; the system elected not to believe them. What remains — who knew what, at what hour, and who chose silence — is still a field of political combat, in the continuing absence of a state commission of inquiry.
