This is the IDF Intelligence Chief Who Could Have Stopped Oct. 7
Col. Ariel Lebovsky, exposed to the “Jericho Wall” attack plan, assessed Hamas activity as a drill and failed to act on the warning.
Israel lifted the gag order today on the identity of the Southern Command’s senior intelligence officer during the October 7 Hamas assault. Col. Ariel Lebovsky, who served as the Command Intelligence Officer (KAMAT), had been exposed to Hamas’s detailed operational plan known as “Jericho Wall” but did not advance or escalate its handling.
Jericho Wall was a classified 40-page Hamas battle plan, codenamed by Israeli intelligence, that outlined in precise detail the multi-pronged assault launched on October 7, 2023. Named after the biblical walls of Jericho (symbolizing a dramatic breach), the document was obtained by Israeli officials in mid-2022, over a year before the attack, but dismissed as "aspirational" and beyond Hamas's capabilities, marking a catastrophic intelligence failure.
Key Elements of the Plan
The blueprint described a coordinated, overwhelming invasion mirroring the actual events:
Earlier versions of similar plans dated back to 2016 and 2018, with a 2021 iteration explicitly warning of Hamas's intent to shift confrontations "into Israeli territory."
By July 2023, an IDF signals intelligence analyst flagged a Hamas training exercise that closely mirrored the plan, but superiors downplayed it as "imaginative."
According to the newly cleared information, Lebovsky participated in the situation assessments in the days leading up to the attack. Despite growing indications of unusual Hamas activity, he judged the developments to be part of a large-scale training exercise by the organization, a critical misreading that contributed to the failure to anticipate the assault.
Doron Kadosh slammed the military censor for withholding his name. He said:
It took the military censor almost a week to approve the publication of Colonel Lebowski's name. The request was submitted to them last week, and was considered there for 6 days!
At first, the censors claimed that the name was prohibited from publication because Lebowski was still an officer in the Intelligence Directorate, and insisted that this was the case - but after I insisted to them that they were relying on incorrect information, and demanded that they investigate the matter again - it took them several days to confirm that he had indeed been discharged from the IDF (a puzzling matter in itself), and several more days to consider and approve the publication of the name.
I don't remember a security piece of information that took the censor so long to consider and discuss whether it could be published" as published on Channel 10.
The disclosure comes as part of the ongoing investigative process into the intelligence and operational shortcomings that preceded the deadliest attack in Israel’s history.