Squads of Hamas operatives were training in plain view of Israel Defense Forces observations posts and surveillance cameras along the border four days before the terror group’s shock October 7 attack on southern Israel, according to a television news report on Wednesday evening.
Nissan Lisha, father of Cpl. Dvir Lisha, 21, a Golani soldier who was killed fighting terrorists in the south on October 7, told Channel 12 that his son had told him about the Hamas drills on October 3, in the family WhatsApp group.
“Anyone looking for something to do over Sukkot is welcome to come down to the Gaza border — Hamas is putting on a stunning display of its military capabilities,” the solider wrote in a message to his family. He also shared a screenshot of security footage from the Gaza border showing some 20 Hamas gunmen standing in formation around a jeep, assault rifles cocked to a 45-degree angle, firing on command.
The bereaved father said that his son had seen the drills from the Zikim IDF training base, less than three miles (five kilometers) from the Gaza border, one of the bases infiltrated by Hamas terrorists on October 7. He pointed out that what his son observed wasn’t “intelligence,” but rather regular surveillance footage from cameras along the “smart fence,” also known as the Iron Wall. The 40-mile (65-kilometer) fortified barrier, which cost NIS 3.5 billion ($1.1 billion) and took over three years to complete, was meant to end the threat of cross-border attack tunnels from the Palestinian enclave.
“The writing was on the wall,” he said in the Channel 12 interview.
The messages in the Lisha family group were sent just four days before some 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists burst across the border by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people and seizing over 240 hostages of all ages under the cover of a deluge of thousands of rockets fired at Israeli towns and cities. The vast majority of those killed as gunmen seized border communities were civilians — including babies, children and the elderly. Entire families were executed in their homes, and over 360 people were slaughtered at an outdoor festival, many amid horrific acts of brutality by the terrorists.
According to the warning signs that soldiers observing the Gaza border were seeing, Lisha said, his son had assessed that “if there was an infiltration, there would be over 1,000 casualties.”
“He didn’t predict [the October 7 massacres], but it was clear to him that it would happen, because they were really close to the border and they were training,” Lisha told Channel 12. “It was obvious.”
The mother of another observation soldier who was killed fighting terrorists on October 7 said that her son, Staff Sgt. Neta Bar Am, 21, from the Border Defense Corps’s 414th unit, had said the Gaza border fence was impenetrable.
“He would say, ‘We see every fly on the wall,'” Nirit Bar-am told Channel 12, though she added that he too knew something was brewing. “At some point he sent me a message, ‘In the end there will be war here.'”
The testimonies join a slew of footage and reports that have previously revealed that the IDF had detailed intelligence of Hamas attack plans during the weeks, months and years before the October 7 massacres — which officials largely ignored, believing it to be empty boasting — and that senior military officers had ignored or dismissed alarms sounded by lower-ranking soldiers, that the military had diverted its attention away from Gaza, and that last-minute indications of an impending attack were not urgently acted upon.
A total of 501 IDF soldiers have been killed since the war began, the majority during Hamas’s terror onslaught on southern Israel on October 7.