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🇮🇱 Israel /Crime & Justice

Israel's October 7 investigation delay is unacceptable, editorial says

From Jerusalem Post · () English

Translated from English, summarized and contextualized by DistantNews.

At a glance

Opinion Sources not specified Context piece
  • Israel faces renewed criticism over its delayed investigation into the failures preceding the October 7 Hamas attack.
  • Newly revealed Hamas documents suggest the group planned an even larger invasion than what was executed, highlighting the scale of Israel's intelligence and preparedness failures.
  • The editorial argues that Israel owes its citizens a comprehensive national accounting of the massacre, criticizing the postponement of accountability.

Israel's failure to fully investigate the events leading up to the October 7 Hamas attack is unacceptable, according to a Jerusalem Post editorial. The editorial highlights newly revealed documents indicating Hamas had planned an invasion force of up to 10,000 fighters, significantly larger than the approximately 5,600 who attacked on that day.

Every new document about Hamas’s preparations for the October 7 massacre makes the same question harder to escape: How did Israel fail to see what was being built in front of it?

— JPOST EDITORIALThe editorial introduces the central question of Israel's failure to anticipate the October 7 attack.

The editorial emphasizes that October 7 marked the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, with over 1,200 people murdered and 251 taken hostage. The fact that Hamas's actual execution was below its planned scale underscores a profound failure in Israel's understanding of its enemy and its own preparedness.

If what happened on October 7 was not the upper limit of Hamas’s planning, but rather the scale it managed to execute, then Israel owes itself something much deeper than what it is currently getting.

— JPOST EDITORIALThe editorial emphasizes the need for a deeper reckoning given Hamas's potential for larger-scale attacks.

For nearly three years, Israelis have lived with the consequences of the massacre without a complete national accounting. While internal military inquiries, State Comptroller's Reports, and political proposals have occurred, the editorial criticizes the repeated promises of a future reckoning as a tactic to postpone and blur responsibility. This delay, it argues, is unacceptable and prevents a full understanding of the multifaceted failures that occurred.

For nearly three years, Israelis have been asked to live with the consequences of the October 7 massacre without being given a full national accounting of how it happened.

— JPOST EDITORIALThe editorial highlights the prolonged lack of a comprehensive national accounting for the massacre.

The failures, the editorial asserts, were not isolated to a single unit or decision but encompassed intelligence assumptions, political policy, military deployment, deterrence doctrine, border defense, and the relationship between political and security echelons. The High Court of Justice has acknowledged the depth of the problem, yet an appropriate mechanism for a comprehensive investigation remains absent more than two and a half years after the massacre.

But later has become both a policy and a shield, a way of ensuring that responsibility is postponed until it is blurred. That is unacceptable.

— JPOST EDITORIALThe editorial criticizes the strategy of delaying accountability.
DistantNews Editorial

Originally published by Jerusalem Post in English. Translated, summarized, and contextualized by our editorial team with added local perspective. Read our editorial standards.

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