Intelligence failures Anger persists over IDF's inaction on warnings

In the late afternoon on 7 October, an Israeli software engineer in his mid-30s found himself driving down a deserted road parallel to the perimeter fence that separated Gaza from Israel.

- Jason Burke

He had been fighting for hours with an AK-47 taken from a dead Hamas militant. Now he and three friends were heading to the town of Ohad to search for relatives who had gone missing.

"Only when we set off south did we understand how big this was. It was like an apocalypse," the engineer, who did not want to be named, said last week. "There were hundreds of bodies of civilians inside their cars or on the road, hundreds of dead terrorists with their pickup trucks or motorbikes.

There were dead police, army vehicles on fire. We were alone." He was among scores, possibly hundreds, of Israelis who headed independently to the combat zone around Gaza on the morning of the raid launched by Hamas on 7 October last year. Many were lauded as heroes by their compatriots, but that they were needed at all underlined the deep failures of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that, a year on, remain part of the traumatic legacy of the attack for millions of Israelis.

The continuing recriminations are part of a bitter broader argument over who to blame for the biggest security failure in Israel since the foundation of the country in 1948. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, has avoided accepting responsibility, though several senior military and intelligence officials have resigned or admitted their errors.

About 1,200 people were killed in the raid launched by Hamas. Most of the dead were civilians, often murdered in their homes or at a music festival. Victims included children and elderly people. A UN inquiry found reasonable grounds to believe that attackers committed sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, at several locations.

Hamas militants, and other extremists from Gaza who followed them, also seized about 250 hostages, of whom approximately 100 remain in the territory.

Since the attack, Israel media have picked over what went wrong.