Colonel Haim Cohen, who presided over the Gaza Command’s Northern Brigade on October 7th, leveled heavy criticism against the senior staff for their actions during the massacre.
During his parting address, Colonel Haim Cohen, who presided over the Gaza Division’s Northern Brigade on October 7th and during the ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, revealed an incident that occurred, according to him, approximately a month and a half before the Hamas surprise attack.
In his address, he blamed the General Staff command center for not having basic information. “Forever I will ask where the Air Force was on October 7th. Forever I shall ask why intelligiance didn’t alert about the surprize war.”
Cohen claimed that he asked to launch a surprise attack on the terror organization and was refused: “There were at the time launches, explosives, and violent riots on the border fence and the entire chain of command came to tour the sector, including the Defense Minister. To everyone, I recommended an opening blow, and the message I got from everyone was – Hamas is deterred.”
Cohen recounted how unknown individuals in the military spoke out against him to put the blame for the October 7th Massacre on him. He mentioned the events of that day and accused: “At 3:30 a.m. I left to the brigade, despite the intelligence was obscure,” he recounted. “I naïvely thought that like myself, at least some of the IDF chain of command were reporting. Unfortunately, I was proven wrong during the first hour of the battle. At 6:29, the gates of hell opened up. As I rush to the command center, in the middle of a heavy missile barrage, I see a breach at dozens of locations by hundreds of terrorists, paragliders, and rubber rafts, and all at the same time. I announced that we’re in a suprise war. Amazed by the enemy’s ability to lead a terrorist military on an attack without intelligence. I learned about the ‘Walls of Jericho’ plan (Hamas’s plan for the attack, which was known to Israeli intelligence) from Ilana Dayan’s exposé about a month later.”
He added: “I understood that I must try to stop thousands of terrorists and oversee dozens of incidents at a time. On that day, no one in the General Staff Command Center even bothered to turn on the communication networks. While the media received a reliable picture from civilians, no one bothered to coordinate it in real-time at the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit.”
