O Horrible, Horrible, Most Horrible: What Went Wrong at the Nahal Oz IDF Base

By Hugh Fitzgerald | Mar 4, 2025

What went wrong at the Nahal Oz IDF base on October 7, 2023?

Everything.

More on this unparalleled disaster — soldiers without weapons, soldiers without weapons training, tanks in the wrong places, commanders taking key equipment off-base, Hamas having acquired total information about the IDF base at Nahal Oz from social media posts by the soldiers themselves, and so much else gone wrong — can be found in the minute-by-minute account of the attack on Nahal Oz IDF base here: “Damning IDF probe: Social media leaks enabled Hamas raid on Nahal Oz,” by Yonah Jeremy Bob, Jerusalem Post, March 3, 2025:

IDF soldiers left so many markers on social media that Hamas invaders on October 7 had a complete breakdown of nearly every unit, sub-unit, and building within the Nahal Oz IDF base when they overwhelmed it, killed 53 soldiers, and took 10 hostage on October 7, 2023.

16 of those killed were female field observers, many killed when Hamas burned the building they were in, and several of the hostages were among the recently released female hostages as part of the January 19 ceasefire. Two officers and five soldiers did escape the burning situation room by breaking a bathroom window and sneaking out.

So complete were the social media descriptions, often simply from photos that soldiers snapped next to different buildings on their first or last day in a position, that the IDF official probe of the battle has concluded that Hamas did not need a single spy to pull off its highly specific infiltration plan.

To that extent, interrogations of Hamas prisoners and the seizure of other physical Hamas items which the IDF found while invading Gaza led to Hamas being able to build a model of portions of the base to practice its invasion, just like Israeli special forces sometimes do pre-operation.

This allowed Hamas to greatly improve its tactical planning for invading Nahal Oz, far beyond even the already significant analysis it had performed in the 2021-2022 Walls of Jericho plans, being able to time exactly how long it would take certain IDF reinforcements to arrive, and which soldiers would be stationed where in the early and secondary stages of the invasion….

This report comes as such a shock to those of us who are so used to singing the praises of the IDF, assuming it to always be able to defeat the enemy whatever the odds, the way that the IDF beat back the five Arab armies that invaded simultaneously on May 15, 1948, and destroyed the Egyptian Air Force on June 5, 1967, which allowed the IDF to simultaneously defeat the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian forces in what became known as the Six-Day War, and recovered from a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria in 1973 to turn the tide of the Yom Kippur War, even at the end of the war being poised to destroy Egypt’s Third Army, that had been surrounded by Sharon’s forces on the western side of the Suez Canal. The catastrophe at the Nahal Oz base should result in some demotions. Who decided, for example, not to give weapons to every soldier at the base, or thought it acceptable to station soldiers right on the border with Gaza who had no combat training? Who failed to transmit warnings from the female soldiers at their lookout stations about breaches in the fences?

And now that the IDF realizes just how much information Hamas garnered from the soldiers’ social media posts — including possessing photographs of every corner of the Nahal Oz base that the soldiers themselves had posted — it will surely ban the use of all personal phones on every IDF base. That’s a start. The old adage still holds. Loose lips sink ships.