Police: If IDF had shared intel soon enough, Nova partiers might have been saved

Some police officials have accused the IDF and the Shin Bet of withholding security threat information overnight between October 6 and 7, which, if it had been shared with the police, could have saved the lives of 364 civilians who were killed at the Nova party and 44 hostages who were taken.

First reported by Channel 12 at the end of the weekend, acting police commander for the Negev area Eyal Azulai is quoted as saying that the police had always been unsure about the safety of the Nova party attendees and that if they had known about the enhanced security threat, they might have ended the party before the invasion took place.

The warnings that Azulai was referring to led to at least two consultations among and between the Shin Bet and the IDF in the middle of the night between October 6 and 7.

No Israeli official had any idea of the scale of Hamas's invasion

It appears that an aspect of these warnings involved IDF intelligence seeing somewhere between dozens to hundreds of Israeli SIM cellphone cards switching on within Gaza, drawing suspicion of a potential attempted penetration into Israel.

The various warnings eventually led to a decisive telephone conference between IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi, Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, and other senior IDF officials, in which the Shin Bet decided to send a small additional crew of reinforcements to the border and all of the security officials agreed to discuss the situation more the next day.

However, either because the security chiefs did not view the threat as terribly significant, or because they did not want to widen the circle of intelligence sharing to the police, whom they might have trusted less with such sensitive information, they did not even tell the police that anything problematic was afoot.

Asked to respond to the allegations, the IDF gave a generic non-denial denial, saying only that it is still probing the Nova party incident and will present its findings to the public when it concludes the probe.

However, given that the IDF had originally said it would publish the probe in June and then sometime over the course of July and August, IDF and police officials have been now regularly leaking findings from all of the different military probes in order to try to frame the public’s view of them before the official reports are issued.

In the past, certain IDF officials have tried to blame the police for allowing the Nova party to go forward in such an area and for reacting slowly to save the attendees, given that technically it had more direct responsibility for their safety than for the many Gaza border towns that Hamas invaded and which were supposed to be protected by the IDF.

This latest leak places the onus on the IDF and the Shin Bet (which has been even more opaque than the IDF, not providing a single public update to date about its October 7 failures) for failing to warn the police of the increased danger they knew about overnight between October 6 and 7.

Even though no one in the IDF or the Shin Bet had any idea of the scale of the impending invasion, even a warning of a small penetration, which they were worried about, might have been enough to get the police to close the Nova party and evacuate the attendees.

Next, the Channel 12 report tries to compliment the police for evacuating a significant percentage of the Nova party attendees once Hamas’s invasion started, as well as for setting up a defense position on Route 232, which slowed Hamas’s advance against some of the attendees.

However, the report also said that then-Israel Police chief Kobi Shabtai did not even call Halevi for more help until 11:45 a.m., by which time it was already too late to save many of the Nova party attendees.

At that point, neither Halevi nor Shabtai made any bold moves to send a larger amount of reinforcement forces rapidly to the Nova party, despite the fact that far more civilians were there than in many other locations invaded by Hamas.

As has become clear by a variety of IDF briefings, top IDF officials were either still in shock or lacked a clear picture of places where Hamas had invaded and did not assign field commanders to certain areas until around 1:00 or 2:00 p.m., and full reinforcement forces did not arrive in some places until even later.

By then, the entire police position on Route 232 had been overrun, and any Nova party civilians who had stayed nearby were mostly killed or kidnapped.

There is ongoing disagreement between the IDF and the police on which side had more doubts about holding the Nova party and which side was more negligent in allowing it to go forward in a dangerous area so close to Gaza in the first place.

A number of IDF officials have said they had not even been updated by other IDF officials that the party was taking place.

Yet, IDF Southern Command Chief of Staff Brig.-Gen. Manor Yanai had told Azulai that there was no security issue with the Nova party, and despite that statement, did not later update Azulai or any other police officials that the situation had changed, according to Channel 12.

The lack of updating of the police by the IDF Southern Command would stand even more since its commander and Yanai’s boss, Maj.-Gen. Yaron Finkleman, abandoned his vacation in northern Israel and rushed south to his base at Beersheba in the middle of the night to have a closer hand on the situation.