Of all the monuments to the horrors of the October 7 massacres, the remains of the military outpost closest to the Gaza Strip and the nearby kibbutz at Nahal Oz must be the most melancholy. They received the first onslaught of the Hamas terrorists at around 4.30am.
In less than an hour 66 soldiers were killed, six were captured and six are still missing while at the kibbutz nearby 15 were killed and eight taken into Gaza as hostage.
When the murderers struck Nahal Oz kibbutz, Amir Tibon rushed his two small girls into their protected safe room. You're on automatic pilot, he recalls. You are hearing gunfire inside your house. You're locked inside with two very young girls... trying to keep them calm and reserved. Rescue came from a small team led by his father, retired general Noam Tibon, who was shocked at the absence of the regular military.
Of the soldiers killed and captured at the Nahal Oz base, 27 were from Unit 414 of the Combat Intelligence Corps. All were female, most of them unarmed. Some between 17 and 18 in age had been at the base for only two days.
Their job was to monitor phone and signal traffic, and movements of the Palestinian militias just across the wire and trench barrier. Of late they had noted unusual movement by militiamen close to the barriers, and reported this but this does not appear to have been passed to the higher military and intelligence command.
The murderous and psychopathic attacks by Hamas on October 7 last year mark the biggest single intelligence failure in Israel's 76-year history. The coalition of Israeli intelligence units knew of the aggressive posturing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, but just didn't see anything like the attack coming. What went wrong?
The elite among elites
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