The Soldier Who Saw October 7 Coming — and Was Told to Go Back to Sleep

Originally published in Hebrew By Nadav Eyal - on Ynet.co.il.

Almost two years have passed since October 7, but new details are still emerging from that night in the Gaza Division’s intelligence war room. One stands out: a young soldier, not an officer, who looked at the signals coming in, understood the danger, and raised the alarm. His warning was dismissed. Hours later, Israel awoke to catastrophe.

A Lonely Voice in the War Room

The soldier, whom we will call R., was stationed in the Gaza Division intelligence hub through the holiday night. Alongside him sat a young female soldier in her mandatory service, barely 20. As the data flowed in, R. grew convinced that Hamas was about to launch a large-scale assault.

Unlike most around him, R. was not lulled by the prevailing belief that Hamas had no interest in escalation. He tried to sound the alarm. “Something is happening,” he told his superiors. His concern was brushed aside.

“Go Back to Sleep”

When R. and the female soldier reached out to their commanders, the response they received was chilling in hindsight: they were told to “go back to sleep.” Division intelligence chief Col. A. was not persuaded. Neither were senior officers. Even Brig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld, the Gaza Division commander, who was at the base that night, did not bother to walk the short distance to the intelligence center.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the IDF, the Chief of Staff and the Southern Command were already awake, tracking mounting intelligence warnings. Yet inside the very division that would be the first to face the onslaught, the commander remained absent.

The Disaster at Dawn

At 6:29 a.m., the Hamas assault began. Hundreds of terrorists poured across the border. Entire Israeli communities were set upon. More than a thousand civilians were massacred.

In later inquiries, IDF intelligence did examine R.’s warnings. No definitive conclusion was reached. But several senior officers told me they were convinced of his credibility and earnestness.

One soldier, perhaps the only one in the Gaza Division that night, had tried to think differently.

Systemic Blindness

The failure, of course, was not R.’s. Military Intelligence Unit 8200 did not scramble its forces or deploy special capabilities. Its head of the Palestinian desk reportedly failed to answer her phone until the rockets began to fall. Even more damning: in the later debrief, officers discovered that if they had simply plotted the disparate alerts coming from Gaza on a single map, the picture would have been unmistakable.

The Gaza Division had, in fact, a formal “alert model”, a checklist of threat indicators meant to trigger high-level alarms. The model did not envision a full-scale Hamas invasion. Yet even within its narrower parameters, had the criteria been applied honestly that night, a general alarm would have been issued across the IDF. It was not.

A Soldier Who Knew Better

The tragedy of that night is that a young conscript understood what experienced commanders did not. He saw the danger clearly. He tried to speak up. And he was silenced with a shrug: go back to sleep.

History has now recorded the price of that dismissal.