Herzi Halevi was not supposed to be awake that night at all.
Before Oct. 7, a very strange piece of intelligence reached the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate: Hezbollah was going to assassinate Moshe (Bogie) Ya'alon, a former IDF chief of staff. The information was lacking context and was flimsy, but Military Intelligence took no chances. They called the Shin Bet security agency, which in turn quickly sent security guards to Ya'alon's home and ordered him not to go outside.
As we reveal here for the first time, the vague information also made its way to the office of the IDF chief of staff, but Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi's team was not alarmed. The intelligence, as noted, was so hazy that they saw no reason to wake the commander. A short time later, in the early morning hours, an explosive device detonated in Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv, right on Ya'alon's cycling route. When Halevi woke up and heard what had happened during the night, he was angry. "You should have woken me up," he told his staff.
A few weeks later, when the phones in the chief of staff's office began buzzing at night, the officers on duty did not want Halevi to be angry with them again. So they called him.
At 3:20 a.m. on Oct. 7, the phone rang at Halevi's private home. On the line was his bureau chief, Lt. Col. Matan Feldman, who updated him for the first time about the activation of SIM cards belonging to Hamas' Nukhba force. "In recent hours, suspicious signs have been received from Hamas in Gaza," Feldman said, sounding not particularly troubled. "Comprehensive checks were carried out. All the intelligence officials are unanimous that Hamas is in routine mode and that nothing unusual is expected in the near term." Halevi, ostensibly, could have gone back to sleep, but he asked to be given 10 minutes to wash his face. "In the meantime, get the head of Southern Command on the line," he said.
Halevi, until not long before then the head of Southern Command himself, knew the Gaza sector and Hamas' cunning very well. While waiting for the call, he sat down in his study and began scribbling a few lines on a piece of paper. At the top of the page, Halevi wrote to himself: "Don't think this is nothing." He then tried to imagine what Hamas was plotting.
The area that troubled the chief of staff more than anything else that night was Zikim Beach, or so at least he scribbled on the page. In the period before Oct. 7, it emerged that the IDF system for detecting divers in the water was not working properly, and Halevi was very concerned that Hamas would exploit this and send a force of terrorists by sea.
Halevi's second concern, which also appeared on the piece of paper, had to do with a Hamas attack tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip that penetrated into Israeli territory. After it was discovered by the IDF, cameras and booby-trapped explosive charges were placed inside it, with the aim of blowing it up by surprise if a Nukhba platoon tried to pass through it. Several times, Hamas scouts were even seen walking inside the tunnel, reaching almost to its end and then turning back. Halevi was worried that Hamas had discovered the booby traps in the tunnel, neutralized them and was planning to use it to carry out an infiltration attack.
There was one scenario Halevi did not write on that piece of paper, and did not manage to imagine in his mind: a mass raid by all the Nukhba forces on the Gaza Division. A few months later, when Halevi returned home for the first time since the outbreak of the war, the page would be waiting for him on the desk in his study.
