It started as another routine shift in the “pit,” the screen-filled underground chamber nestled deep beneath the Israel Defense Forces command center in the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv.
The career officer from the Israeli Air Force Intelligence Group sitting before one of those screens was likely quite bored. Suddenly, an alert flashed across her monitor: Something unusual was happening in the aerial array of the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip.
The large clock mounted on the wall showed it was the early hours of the morning. The date was Oct. 7, 2023.
For several years, the Air Intelligence Group had been closely monitoring the terrorist group’s aerial capabilities. While the organization didn’t have an air force, it possessed several dozen unmanned aerial vehicles, some of which were smuggled into Gaza after being manufactured in Iran.
These drones were primarily used for surveillance, but Hamas also possessed armed drones capable of attacking ground targets.
The officer followed protocol, passing along information about the unusual activity in Hamas’s aerial array. The intelligence reached the commander of the IAF’s central control room, also located in the pit, and the IDF’s Intelligence Directorate.
However, due to limitations in interpreting the signals detected by the Air Intelligence Group, the unusual activity in Gaza wasn’t recognized as a prelude to war. “They knew something unusual was happening but didn’t know what,” said a source familiar with the details.

Why were no questions asked?
The information about the irregularities in Gaza was transferred from the IAF to Military Intelligence, but the flow of information that night was largely one-directional: the IDF Intelligence Directorate did not in turn update the IAF about the suspicious signals it had also detected during those fateful hours—the activation of Israeli SIM cards by Hamas’s Nukhba strike force.
The SIM card activation wasn’t the only information withheld from the IAF. From the air-force investigation of Oct. 7, substantial portions of which were published by Israel Hayom, it emerges that throughout that fateful night, no one in the military updated the IAF about the events unfolding in Gaza.
While Military Intelligence, the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) and IDF Southern Command tried to decipher the meaning of the SIM card activations—and even as IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi held an extraordinary situation assessment at 4 a.m. with the OC Southern Command and the head of the Operations Directorate, in the air force’s underground command center—things remained routine.
Even the IAF commander wasn’t brought into the loop during the night of Oct. 7. Nevertheless, after the chief of staff’s early-morning situation assessment, the IAF command center did receive directives from the IDF Operations Directorate.
According to these directives, which arrived around 4:45 a.m., the air force was instructed to reinforce the Gaza sector with one additional drone and to transfer two Apache attack helicopters from their alert status at the Ramat David base in the north to the southern sector.
The drone was directed to be deployed immediately, but the helicopters were requested to arrive in the south only at 8 a.m.
Perhaps because of this, the air force didn’t press for answers or try to understand the reason for the heightened alert in Gaza. This even though it was aware, as mentioned, of the unusual activity in Hamas’s aerial array that night.
“Raising alert levels on orders from the Operations Directorate is something that happens routinely, and you don’t always bother to ask why the alert was shortened or why an additional drone is needed,” explained a source who has spent considerable time in the IAF command center. “On Oct. 7 too, they didn’t ask why.”
The unusual aerial activity, the SIM cards, the chief of staff’s assessment, the shortened helicopter alert, the drone deployment—the sad truth is that no one in the IAF, the IDF, or the intelligence community connected all the dots.
In less than two hours, the gates of hell would open.
While the air-force investigation into Oct. 7 does praise the actions of that female intelligence officer, it barely dwells on the night of Oct. 7, on intelligence that was or wasn’t received during those hours, or on the IAF’s tendency not to press for answers when receiving orders from the Operations Directorate.
The vast majority of the investigation deals with events in the air force command center only from 6:30 a.m. on Oct. 7 until midnight that day. The first day of fighting in a war that has now lasted a year and a half.
As befitting the air force, the Oct. 7 investigation, which has yet to be finalized by outgoing Chief of Staff Halevi and is still considered a draft, is loaded with data, graphs and videos. It tells a complex story of a war machine that was completely surprised, but after just a few hours of recovery, operated to the best of its ability with all tools at its disposal.
Indeed, data revealed here for the first time shows that during the fighting on Oct. 7, the IAF fired 11,000 shells, dropped more than 500 one-ton bombs and launched 180 missiles. According to the data, during the battles, the air force eliminated 1,000 terrorists.
“That terrible morning, we failed to defend Israel’s citizens,” said an IAF source. “But it should be said that from 6:29 a.m., we did everything we could. We pounced, took off with everything possible, engaged the enemy, linked up with forces on the ground, flew in thousands of soldiers and evacuated hundreds of wounded. From 7:15 that morning, we have not stopped attacking.”
The investigation further reveals that besides the aerial attack formations, the air force’s special combat units—Shaldag (“Kingfisher”) and Unit 669—took a significant part in ground operations and that IAF transport helicopters landed about 1,700 infantry fighters in the Gaza sector during the fighting and evacuated more than 150 casualties.
During one mission, a Sikorsky CH-53 “Yasur” helicopter was destroyed by a rocket-propelled grenade after making an emergency landing. The air-defense array also dealt, with relative success, with the heaviest rocket barrage ever fired at Israel.
The authors of the investigation made sure to emphasize right from the start the fact that the IAF—the most well-funded and powerful branch of the IDF, the fear of the entire Middle East—failed completely in its mission to defend Israel’s citizens and borders. Nevertheless, it appears that from the moment the it engaged the enemy at 6:30 a.m., it operated well with initiative and resourcefulness.
According to the investigation, IAF Commander Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar arrived at the pit at 7:03 a.m. and declared a state of war at 7:10 a.m.
In the first two hours, the control center was still convinced they were dealing with only a limited number of infiltrations. Only at 9:30 a.m., as the battle picture became clearer, did Bar instruct pilots in the field to attack along the entire border area without requesting permission.
At 10:30 a.m., the control center understood that the main problem they were dealing with was waves of fighters continuing to infiltrate the Gaza border fence. In a real-time recording, you can hear the following order on the radio: “Whoever doesn’t have a mission, go to the perimeter and ensure there’s no entry into our territory.” The data shows that from this moment, the number of attacks carried out by air-force pilots rose dramatically.
One of the conclusions emerging from the IAF investigation is that for too long, pilots in the field continued to stick to orders and the customary IAF approval chain, failing to internalize that they needed to transition to a much more permissive open-fire policy. When presenting the investigation to various air-force forums, the term “excessive obedience” was even used to describe the pilots’ conduct in these first hours.

Limited array
Back to the morning hours. While helicopter gunships were heading south and fighter jets patrolled the skies, UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) were the first to attack in the Gaza combat zone.
The first missile was fired from a UAV at 7:15 a.m., as part of an attack on terrorists rampaging in Kibbutz Netiv HaAsara. In total, the UAV array fired 240 missiles that day, causing 350 casualties, according to the investigation data.
The main firepower that joined the UAVs in the first hours of fighting was that of the helicopter gunships. By 8:40 a.m., three gunships were hovering over the Gaza border fence, having fired 331 rounds and five missiles by that time. Most of the fire was directed at vehicles passing through breaches in the fence. By 9:11 a.m., 889 rounds and 13 missiles had been fired from helicopters, and by 10:20 a.m., the figures were 2,153 and 32.
At a relatively early stage, helicopter pilots realized they couldn’t stay three kilometers away from the border fence, as required by protocols designed to protect helicopters from anti-aircraft fire.
“I don’t care about the three-line,” the control room can be heard telling one of the chopper pilots in one of that day’s videos. “The gunships started attacking at eight in the morning and didn’t stop operating until nighttime,” said an air-force source.
However, it now appears that the IAF’s gunship array on Oct. 7 was quite limited. In recent years, the IDF decided to transition increasingly to UAV operations at the expense of helicopters. Several helicopter squadrons were closed as a result, and another was facing closure.
Indeed, one of the investigation’s conclusions is that this trend must be reversed, as helicopters proved much more effective than UAVs during Oct. 7, partly because they are equipped with cannons and their pilots can build a better battle picture.
The air-defense array also performed well, according to the investigation. Hamas’s opening salvo included 1,014 munitions, fired within just 20 minutes. Relative to this enormous number, the array’s interception rates were high. Throughout the day, Hamas fired 3,700 projectiles; some Iron Dome batteries ran out of interceptors.

‘Prepare for Event X’
Of all the IAF’s branches, the saddest story is that of the fighter jets. The force’s most prestigious branch was the least effective that day. Israel’s enormous advantage over its enemies turned into a huge disadvantage on Oct. 7.
The air force had prepared contingency orders for the scenario of a Hamas raid into Israel. The working assumption was that such a raid would be carried out via “approach tunnels” with exits near the border fence.
These contingency orders for attacking the tunnels were activated already at 7:50 a.m., and throughout the day, fighter jets attacked many of the known exit points. But because Hamas’s raid was conducted above ground, the tunnels were empty.
At 10:30 a.m., the “Sword of Damocles” contingency order was also activated, under which the fighter jet array attacked Hamas command posts and weapons depots deep in Gaza. Even if these attacks were effective, it’s understood that they weren’t relevant to stopping the ground raid. Either way, during the day fighter jets dropped 530 tons of bombs on Gaza.
The IAF investigation’s conclusions state that “the root cause of failure” on Oct. 7 was an “effectiveness gap” that stemmed from “war by surprise, without prior preparation, versus the reference scenario, and slow understanding of the battle picture relative to enemy moves.”
In other words, the investigation concluded that the air force wasn’t ready for Hamas’s surprise attack but that from the moment it engaged, it operated adequately. Not everyone exposed to the investigation agrees with this determination or with the investigation’s conclusions in general.
“When all hell broke loose, the force didn’t know how to function, but that was barely criticized in the investigation,” said an air-force reserve officer who participated in the war.
Last week, Halevi announced he was stepping down while emphasizing the issue of IDF war investigations, some of which are about to be presented to the defense minister, and later also to the public. “The IDF must provide answers and produce truthful investigations: high-quality, thorough and with full transparency,” he said.
Although the IDF investigation teams were appointed already in March 2024, with a promise to complete their work within four to five months, so far only one investigation—of the battle in Kibbutz Be’eri—has been presented to the public.
Israel Hayom has also learned that only this week was the investigation of the battle at Kibbutz Kfar Aza presented to the General Staff forum. The IDF claims that conducting the investigations was delayed after the intense campaign in the north began.

Meanwhile, separate investigations are being conducted in the IDF dealing with various issues, such as information security, evacuation of casualties’ bodies, evacuation of communities, etc. This is a process that consumes significant time from military commanders, including the chief of staff, while fighting continues.
For example, in the last week, Halevi participated in 20 hours of discussions solely related to investigations. “The investigations in the IDF have gone bankrupt,” says a senior officer who participated in the war. “I have enormous respect for Halevi for his resilience, for how he led the army in war. But I have major criticism of the fact that his investigations are one big bluff; there aren’t any really sharp investigations.”
It’s possible that even Halevi himself would agree with the last sentence in this angry officer’s words. Already at the start of the war, the chief of staff decided that the IDF wouldn’t be able to investigate itself effectively, and turned to outside help: In December 2023, Halevi formed an external expert team meant to investigate the October disaster, composed of four senior former officers, former Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz and former generals Sami Turgeman, Yoav Har-Even and Aharon Zeevi Farkash.
In early January, the establishment of the external investigation team and the identities of its members leaked to the media. The news was published right during a cabinet meeting and caused a great commotion. A source present at the meeting recalls how government ministers, led by Miri Regev and Dudi Amsalem, attacked the chief of staff for daring to appoint Mofaz to the team, who had previously spoken out against the government.
For about a month, Halevi still tried to convince the political echelon of the necessity of the external investigation team but encountered a government that appeared to balk at the very idea that its own failures might come under a magnifying glass. From the moment the “Mofaz Team” was taken off the table, the army decided to continue internal investigations.
“It’s clear such investigations have disadvantages,” says an IDF source. “But they didn’t approve an expert group for us, they didn’t establish a state commission of inquiry or any other investigation committee, and then they claim the IDF is investigating itself by itself. What else could we do?”
Although the air-force investigation also receives sharp criticism, officers who spoke with us claim that ground forces investigations struggle even more to reach useful conclusions. “The ground forces never managed to create a learning system like exists in the Air Force,” says one of them. “Officers understood that if they want to advance in the ground forces, they need to fall in line and say in the investigation what needs to be said, not the truth.”
This claim aligns well with what a reservist involved in investigating one of the Oct. 7 community battles tells us this week. “People lie freely in my investigation,” he says. “From battalion commander level down. There were cases where we saw one thing in videos and heard a completely different story from the fighters in the field. You sit across from such a person and know they’re lying to you.”
The IDF Spokesperson’s Office responded to Israel Hayom: “Under the Chief of Staff’s directive, the IDF began in March 2024 the process of investigating the Oct. 7 events, during combat, intending to lead to improvement and learning and out of commitment to the families of the fallen, the hostages and the entire public.
“The investigation work is extremely complex and includes more than 40 investigation focuses. The investigation pace is progressing according to the pace of combat while giving priority to the war effort. After the process, the findings will be presented transparently to the public.
“The details presented in the article do not constitute official IDF investigations which, as stated, are in final stages and will be presented transparently to the public upon their conclusion.”
Originally published by Israel Hayom.