Israeli Leaders Blamed by Independent Inquiry for Oct. 7 Failures

After the Israeli government delayed a formal investigation into the Hamas attacks, an alliance of survivors and victims’ families set up their own inquiry. Their scathing findings were released on Tuesday.

For more than a year, the Israeli government has avoided holding itself to account for its failure to prevent the deadliest event in Israel’s history: the Hamas-led raid on Oct. 7, 2023.

An independent commission, founded by survivors of the raid and relatives of Israelis who were killed and kidnapped, tried to fill that void on Tuesday, releasing a scathing report that blamed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and top military commanders for years of faulty decisions that made Israel more vulnerable to invasion.

Based on three months of interviews and public hearings, the commission’s report criticized the government’s decision to funnel money to Hamas, which allowed the group to entrench itself in the Gaza Strip in the decade before the attack. The commission, formally known as the Civil Commission of Inquiry of the Oct. 7 Disaster, condemned Mr. Netanyahu for sidelining high-level decision-making forums that might have stirred greater internal debate about the wisdom of such a policy.

The commission also criticized top generals for reducing the number of troops stationed along Israel’s border with Gaza, allowing loose discipline among the soldiers who remained, and prioritizing signal intelligence over human and visual monitoring of the Palestinian enclave.

“Netanyahu is responsible for undermining all decision making hubs,” the report said. Top military officials, it said, were to blame “for accepting the doctrine of ‘money for quiet,’ and utterly ignoring all other perceptions.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s office and the Israeli military declined to comment on the committee’s findings. The military is conducting its own investigations into specific incidents that took place on Oct. 7, while Mr. Netanyahu has said the time for accountability should come after the war in Gaza that was set off by the Hamas attack.

Founded in July by victims’ relatives as well as the survivors of several massacres, the commission was led by five former senior officials, including a retired judge, police commissioner and a city mayor. The panel heard testimony from 120 witnesses, among them former officials.

The inquiry is a striking example of how civil society in Israel has increasingly assumed roles over the past year that are typically performed by the government, including social support for displaced people and psychological support for victims.

Its existence highlights the frustration felt by many Israelis at the government’s refusal to hold itself to account. And it embodies how leaderless Israelis felt in the aftermath of the deadliest day in their history, as the government’s ineffectual response to the disaster undermined a widely held belief that the Jewish state — founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust — would always be able to protect them.

For many, those feelings have been compounded by the spectacle of a sitting prime minister wielding power while simultaneously defending himself in a criminal corruption case. On Tuesday, an Israeli court granted Mr. Netanyahu’s request for a delay in his testimony, pushing it back until Dec. 10. He has described the accusations as unfounded.

“A civilian commission of inquiry can provide a space for venting for many populations in Israel who want to have an opportunity to tell their stories, but it is not an alternative to providing real lessons learned,” said Eran Shamir-Borer, a researcher and former military lawyer at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based research group.

As an independent initiative, the inquiry has no legal weight and is not expected to cause formal repercussions for the government, such as prosecutions. Those powers are reserved for a state commission of inquiry, which can summon witnesses, review classified materials, and recommend government action.

Such inquiries were set up in the aftermath of other national disasters, including the surprise Arab attack at the start of the Arab-Israeli war in 1973 that prompted a similar moment of collective trauma and reckoning. But Mr. Netanyahu’s government has so far avoided establishing such a commission, amid criticism that it is attempting to avoid scrutiny.

The civilian-led committee did not investigate the conduct of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which has been the focus of several international legal proceedings, including a charge of genocide at the International Court of Justice and accusations of war crimes at the International Criminal Court. Similar accusations could potentially be addressed in a state commission of inquiry if one were ever established, Mr. Shamir-Borer said.

At a press briefing on Tuesday, the leaders of the independent commission lamented the fact that their body had needed to be founded in the first place. They called for the government to set up its own inquiry, urging elected leaders to facilitate a process of learning and correction among senior state officials and allow Israeli society to come to terms with the attack and the war that has followed.

“We are the first committee that would be happy to be dissolved,” Varda Alshech, a former judge who heads the panel, said at the briefing in Tel Aviv.

Hen Zander, a journalist whose sister was among the hundreds killed in the attack on the Nova Music Festival, said that the report “exposed many details that shook our world” and that “I’m afraid to find out what a state commission of inquiry, where all those involved would be summoned to testify, would uncover.”

But, Ms. Zander said, the victims’ families would continue pressing for just that.

“Otherwise, we will never reach the truth, and we won’t be able to prevent the next Oct. 7,” she said. “Our siblings and children would have died for nothing.”

Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting.

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