One thing that looks odd about Hamas attack on October 7 was, despite its success, it didn’t have any contingency planning, further steps weren’t thought out.
Now two sources tell Middle East Eye that Hamas didn’t plan to take no more than 20-30 hostages, and it didn’t expect that Israel’s Gaza division would collapse. They argue that Hamas didn’t plan for this:
• The original attack plan, according to several sources, was to strike military targets and then make a quick withdrawal.
• Hamas wanted to inflict maximum embarrassment on Netanyahu and get something to bargain with for a mass prisoner release.
• While Hamas was ready for the war, it did not expect the attack to provoke anything more than limited retaliatory strikes on Gaza. “The strike was supposed to be tactical, not strategic,” one source said.
• Hamas sent in 1,500 fighters, expecting that most would be killed. “Somewhere around 1,400 fighters came back,” said one source.
• The source said that Hamas force unexpectedly kept on advancing, attacking locations that were not on an original list of targets, and they ended up with a far larger number of hostages than they had planned for
• Hamas knew the addresses of senior IDF commanders. It knew the layout of military bases and the location of checkpoints.
• Furthermore, it knew the time of the shift change at the Gaza Division’s barracks at the end of the Yom Kippur holiday. It launched the attack one hour after the shift change. Many of the troops were caught in their beds.
• “The plan was to assault the Gaza Division and not the kibbutz, because the Qassam intention was to capture soldiers and officers to finish the file of prisoners,” said one source familiar with the planning of the operation. “The number of civilian hostages was as a result of the sequence of battle when a lot of people crossed the border.”
• Hamas and affiliated fighters were free to cross between designated targets and for a couple of hours nobody was in control.
• “Once that happened, other forces, smugglers with weapons, lay people, criminals all flooded through the fence and we had a massacre. That was why 15 Thai workers were kidnapped. It became complete chaos,” the source continued. — Middle East Eye