It has emerged that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were in possession of a 40-page blueprint for a major assault on Israel more than a year before Hamas initiated its deadly attack on 7 October 2023, The New York Times (NYT) reported on 30 November 2023.
The Hamas battle plan, codenamed ‘Jericho Wall’ by the IDF, included a rocket bombardment of Israel and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to disable the IDF’s surveillance capabilities along its border fence with the Gaza Strip prior to a widespread invasion of southern Israel and IDF bases there.
Also discounted a month before the attack was evidence of Hamas training specific to the attack, including Hamas social media postings showing its fighters using explosives to breach the border fence before sweeping through it on pick-up trucks to attack a full-scale replica of an Israeli town, the NYT reported.
Another 2016 IDF memo obtained by the NYT showed that Hamas intended to take hostages back to Gaza.
On 7 October around 3,000 Hamas militants invaded southern Israel in an operation that closely followed the ‘Jericho Wall’ blueprint, killing around 1,200 Israelis and abducting around 240 hostages back to Gaza.
According to the NYT reporting, in July 2023 a female analyst within an IDF signals intelligence unit warned that what she was witnessing was a narrowing of the gap between the ‘Jericho Wall plan and what Hamas was actually capable of conducting. However, senior Israeli intelligence officials pushed back against this assertion, still regarding ‘Jericho Wall’ as an aspirational plan that was unlikely to materialise in the near term.
One tactic that Hamas did not apparently adopt during its attack was the widespread use of ‘suicide drones’, despite Hamas propaganda videos showing dozens of what have been described as Iranian-inspired but Hamas-produced tactical fixed-wing UAVs being used in training. While these may have been stockpiled for future use, it is also possible that they were not deemed particularly effective and that their use might have indicated to the IDF that an unprecedented offensive was unfolding.
However, one UAV type that was, indeed, used to significant effect – and foreshadowed in ‘Jericho Wall’ – were the multi-rotor UAVs that Hamas used to destroy IDF surveillance towers along the Gaza border fence where Hamas broke through. According to Hamas propaganda videos and IDF photos of captured Hamas equipment, at least some of these systems, which were used to drop RPG rounds on the towers, appear to be Matrice 600 rotary-wing UAVs manufactured by Chinese company DJI. These systems, which are typically used for aerial photography, are widely available on the commercial market. They can carry a payload of up to 6 kg and can be purchased for around EUR 6,000.
