Hamas militants carried out a dress rehearsal for their deadly attack on Israel, it is believed.
The practice round took place less than a month before the fighters blew through Israel’s high-tech “Iron Wall” to kill more than 1,200 people and reportedly take at least 97 hostages.
This was revealed after an Associated Press analysis which included looking at a two-minute propaganda video that Hamas posted on its social media accounts on September 12.
The clip shows fighters using explosives to blast through a replica of the border gate, sweep in on pickup trucks and then move building by building through a full-scale reconstruction of an Israeli town, firing automatic weapons at human-silhouetted paper targets.
Fighters, who were even dressed up in their body armour, destroyed mock-ups of the wall’s concrete towers and a communications antenna.
This is exactly how they would go on to launch their assault last Saturday, which clearly took the Israeli authorities by surprise.
The exercise, called Strong Pillar, has reportedly been held every December since 2020, but was moved up by nearly four months this year - to coincide with the anniversary of Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.
Military expert Bradley Bowman said: “There clearly were warnings and indications that should have been picked up.
“Or maybe they were picked up, but they didn’t spark necessary preparations to prevent these horrific terrorist acts from happening.”
Mr Bowman, a former US Army officer who is now the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, believes Israel may have been misled by Hamas.
He said there are indications the group attempted to make officials believe it was planning to attack in the West Bank rather than from Gaza.
For example, the gate to the mocked-up town where the exercise was carried out displayed a large sign in Hebrew and Arabic which read “Horesh Yaron” - the name of a controversial Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.
Michael Milshtein, a retired Israeli colonel who previously led the military intelligence department overseeing the Palestinian territories, said he was aware of the Hamas videos, but was still caught off guard by the ambition and scale of Saturday’s attack.
“We knew about the drones, we knew about booby traps, we knew about cyberattacks and the marine forces … The surprise was the coordination between all those systems,” Mr Milshtein said.
Israel spent $1.1 billion (£953 million) on fortifying its existing defences along its 40-mile land border with Gaza in 2021 – a project partially funded by US taxpayers.
The upgraded barrier includes a “smart fence” up to six metres high, festooned with cameras that can see in the dark, razor wire and seismic sensors capable of detecting the digging of tunnels more than 200 feet below.
Manned guard posts were replaced with concrete towers topped with remote-controlled machine guns.
Despite all this, Hamas fighters managed to push through this wall in a matter of minutes on Saturday morning.
They used explosive charges to blow holes in the barrier and then sent in bulldozers to widen the breaches as fighters streamed through on motorcycles and in pick-up trucks.
Cameras and communications gear were bombarded by off-the-shelf commercial drones adapted to drop hand grenades and mortar shells — a tactic borrowed directly from the battlefields of Ukraine.
Snipers took out Israel’s sophisticated roboguns by targeting their exposed ammunition boxes, causing them to explode.
Once the wall was breached, Hamas fighters streamed through by the hundreds and committed horrific violence against Jewish civilians.
Israel has responded with a relentless siege on the Gaza Strip, blocking it from access to food, water, electricity and fuel while bombing it almost constantly.
On Friday morning, the United Nations said it has been told by the Israeli military that 1.1 million people, around half of the Gaza Strip’s population, are advised to flee south in the next 24 hours.
Israel is expected to launch a ground offensive for the first time in nearly a decade.
