The report said “serious mistakes and errors” were made in the military response as Hamas overran the community. The military was underprepared and did not always prioritize civilian lives, it said. The report details how IDF forces remained standing nearby during the afternoon while residents were killed.
“While troops waited outside the kibbutz throughout the afternoon, the massacre continued inside,” the statement said. “The IDF failed in its mission to protect the population in the most crucial way.”
Military officials presented their findings to surviving members of the community at the Dead Sea resort, where Hamas fighters from Gaza killed 101 people – one in every ten people in Beeri. Breaking through Israel’s high-tech border fence And it surprised the troops.
Dozens more people are being held hostage, 11 of whom remain unreleased.
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All along the border, local guards and residents, ill-equipped with weapons, were fighting virtually alone.
“We failed to defend the kibbutz,” IDF spokesman Maj. Gen. Daniel Hagari acknowledged while speaking with residents. According to Israeli reportsHe noted that the IDF investigation stopped short of establishing a broader independent investigative commission, which he said “should be established.”
Nine months after the attack, public pressure is growing for accountability for a historic breakdown in security that allowed Hamas-led militants to infiltrate communities along Israel’s border. Gaza Stripso far, A minority of security leaders With his resignation, the prospect of accountability within the political class seems even more remote.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly refused to establish an independent commission while Israel is at war, and an internal IDF investigation is unlikely to do much to assuage public demands.
Tamar Helman, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, said the investigation “is not being taken very seriously. People are expecting some kind of official investigative commission to be set up that is made up of people who had no involvement whatsoever.”
Although the IDF has managed to partially restore its reputation in the eyes of many Israelis, Gaza WarBelli said anger still lingers inside her.
“It should be noted that Kibbutz Beeri did not need the results of an investigation to have felt the failure of the IDF every minute since 6:29 a.m. on that black Sabbath,” the kibbutz said in a statement. “The failure of the army has been imprinted on our bodies and our minds for nine months now.”
The report detailed the chaos on the day of the attack, when some 340 fighters, including around 100 from Hamas’ special forces, Nukba, entered the kibbutz.
According to the report, a small IDF unit that arrived at the kibbutz in the morning “came under attack” and retreated from the kibbutz, taking up positions at the gate and engaging in fighting there as Hamas carried out kidnappings.
Meanwhile, members of the kibbutz’s security team continued to resist the attack.
“During the first seven hours of the fighting, the kibbutz residents defended themselves and, by their actions and resourcefulness, prevented the enemy from expanding their attacks to other areas,” the report said.
The kibbutz statement said the investigation had certainly contributed to understanding the severity and complexity of the fighting in some areas of Beeri, but added that the investigation did not provide satisfactory answers to “important questions.”
Questions include why troops gathered at the kibbutz’s entrance for hours but never went inside, the root causes of the intelligence failures that allowed Hamas to advance, and whether the soldiers who arrived understood that their primary objective was to protect civilians.
Rami Gold, 70, a security officer in Beeri who tried to thwart the militants that day, said the military’s investigation had yielded little new information.
“The way I see it, they were saying, ‘We’ve abandoned you,'” he said.
Trust has been broken, said Gold, one of the few residents who has returned to live in Bíli.
“The military’s job is to get people to trust us,” he said. “Not right now. I trust us.”
One of the IDF’s most controversial decisions on October 7 was to target the home of Pessi Cohen, where Hamas fighters were hiding with 14 hostages.
Despite the presence of Israeli soldiers inside the house, Brigadier General Barak Hiram, who had been appointed to lead the fighting in Biri that afternoon, decided to target the house.
The IDF concluded that the tank fire was a joint decision taken by commanders after assessing the situation, and was carried out “professionally”, with the intention of “putting pressure on the terrorists and rescuing the civilians trapped inside the vehicle”.
The report did not say whether Israel’s infamous Hannibal Directive, which instructs the military to do everything in its power to prevent the kidnapping of Israelis, even if it put their lives at risk, was in effect at the time.
This was reported by the Haaretz newspaper. It was reported this week that the Hannibal Order went into effect on October 7, with troops receiving the order at 11:22 a.m. that “not a single vehicle may return to Gaza.” This was one of several orders issued that day that applied the directive, according to the paper.
The IDF declined to say whether such an order had been issued. “Questions of this nature will be investigated at a later date,” the IDF said on Thursday.
The attack raised many widespread questions and deep concerns among Israelis about the country’s intelligence and defense capabilities. According to The Washington Post, intelligence that an attack was imminent became apparent in August, but the warnings were ignored. report last year.
“You can’t look at the Beeri incident in isolation,” said Yossi Kuperwasser, former head of research for the Israel Defense Forces intelligence agency. “You can’t separate it from everything else that happened on that horrific day.”
A majority of Israelis – around 58 percent of Jews and 81 percent of Arab citizens – believe it is time for those responsible for the October 7 fiasco to step down, the pollster said. Israel Democracy Institute poll It was carried out in April.
But public sentiment is increasingly polarized: Israel’s left and center are more likely to blame Netanyahu’s government, while the right is more likely to blame the security services, Helman of the Israel Democracy Institute said.
The scope of the investigation remains unclear, as does the agency that will oversee it, she said.
“There is no consensus on what to do and the disagreements are growing as time goes on,” she said.
Other things to know
The Israeli delegation returned from Doha, Qatar on Thursday. Hamas will take part in the ceasefire talks and then fly to Cairo in the evening for further talks, the prime minister’s office said, but in a statement said Hamas was not taking part in the talks.
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem condemned the Israeli army’s order for all Palestinians to leave Gaza City as “utter madness.” that Added “The international community must demand that Israel immediately end the war,” it said, adding that the conflict has caused destruction and heavy casualties. The call for the full withdrawal of the IDF was made on Wednesday.
Gaza’s Civil Defense said it had recovered 60 bodies from rubble in Shejaiya, Gaza City. The spokesman said neighbours, including women and children, were killed after the Israeli forces withdrew. Mahmoud Bassal said the area was “unfit for life” after days of operations.
At least 38,345 people have been killed and 88,295 injured in Gaza since the war began. of Gaza Ministry of Health Israel estimates that about 1,200 people, including more than 300 soldiers, were killed in the October 7 Hamas attack. 325 soldiers They have been killed since the start of the military operation in Gaza.
Lior Soroka and Hazem Balousha contributed to this report.
