Captured Hezbollah plans reveal that October 7 could have turned into an existential threat to Israel

Photos: Flash90, Menachem Kalish

Intelligence obtained during the IDF’s operation in Lebanon confirm the terror group’s ambitions to conquer the north, and reveal that the horror of October 7 could have turned into an existential threat to the country.

IT

was 4 a.m, and the IDF troops advancing rapidly toward their destination through the dense Lebanese forest knew that the sun would rise in only an hour, depriving them of the cover of darkness.

Suddenly, they heard a shout from their walkie-talkies: “Stop! Stay where you are. The road ahead of you is mined!”

Several kilometers away, another IDF force had just completed a raid on a Hezbollah compound and was busily combing the site. One group focused on sorting the weaponry found at the site, while others, Arabic-speakers, sat down to review the reams of documents left behind by the terrorists they’d eliminated.

What they found was shocking. Detailed maps, scarily impressive operational plans, precise locations, and code names. But one folded note that looked newer drew a soldier’s attention. When he opened it, he discovered a sketch of a compound that seemed vaguely familiar to him. In a split second, he remembered where he’d seen it. It was just hours ago, during the briefing on the mission back in the operations room. The compound in the sketch was about to be raided by a different IDF force.

The map marked the precise locations of powerful explosive charges, leaving no room for doubt. The force had to be stopped before it walked into the trap. The report was immediately passed on to the commander of the other force, and he stopped them at the last moment. Minutes later, and the story would have ended very differently.

The near disaster during the IDF’s operation in south Lebanon was averted with a dose of Heavenly intervention and priceless intelligence obtained in real time.

“The thousands of intelligence documents seized during the maneuver in southern Lebanon are perhaps the most important discovery we made,” says Maj. A. of the Intelligence and Technological Exploitation Unit.

That intel confirms a wider story, one that has circulated since the beginning of the war. As horrific as the October 7 attacks were, an even worse fate was avoided. The full Iranian plan involved attacking Israel from multiple fronts, with the aim of overwhelming the small country’s defenses.

If Hamas had coordinated with Hezbollah as they were meant to, the results could have been far worse — not just the massacre of Simchas Torah, but an existential threat on a scale that’s hard to comprehend.

The captured intelligence documents he speaks of detail almost everything. Not everything has been cleared for publication. In fact, most of the IDF’s findings from the maneuver will probably never be revealed to the public. But even the little that has been released testifies to the miracle of the threat averted.

Reading the Enemy

The ITEU unit tasked with deciphering captured intelligence documents was established as part of the lessons of the Yom Kippur War, under the Hatzav unit, which was tasked with collecting OSINT (open-source intelligence). Its function was to process captured enemy documents and weapons systems.

In 1992, as part of the “conceptzia” — or misguided operational thinking — that pervaded the upper echelons of the IDF, leading directly to Hamas’s ability to carry out the massacre of October 7, the Hatzav unit was restructured and merged into the IDF’s Unit 8200, which is charged with collecting SIGINT (“signal intelligence,” intercepted communications).

As soon as the current war broke out, the Hatzav unit was reestablished, along with the Intelligence and Technological Exploitation Unit (ITEU). The unit spent the first months of the war processing the enormous amounts of weaponry captured in the Gaza Strip, including Iranian, Russian, and Chinese equipment, alongside tens of thousands of invaluable intelligence documents.

When they began operating on the ground in Lebanon, the unit were on the lookout for documents that would answer one of the biggest questions surrounding the events of October 7: What was the degree of coordination between Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north?

“If Hezbollah had also breached the fences [in the north] on October 7, we would have been in a completely different place,” a reservist Intelligence Directorate officer says. “The containment battles would have started only around Golani Junction [about 30 kilometers inside Israeli territory] and terrorists would have infiltrated at least as far as the Hadera area.”

For context, the working assumption is that Hezbollah would have conquered Israel up to a line drawn between Haifa and Teveria.

The documents and intelligence gathered by the IDF over the past year reveal that Hezbollah had worked for years on a frighteningly detailed plan to conquer the Galilee. While the IDF was not completely unaware of this, seeing the plan from Hezbollah’s point of view gives a completely different picture.

For example, one captured document outlines the plan to conquer Metula and take control of Route 90, the longest road in Israel, running from Metula to Eilat, using five crack teams. An infiltration team comprising two fighters and four engineers; a security team of four terrorists; a raiding team comprising two fighters and 11 engineers; a reserve team; and a medical and logistics team.

The document details the weapons that would be needed, as well as logistical and operational instructions, and was located by IDF troops from Battalion 8101 of the 91st Division, in a shaft that came out of an engineering warehouse next to the headquarters of the Radwan Force’s Fourth Battalion, in Mais al-Jabal.

Another document describes plans for the conquest of the Galilee by 3,000 to 5,000 Radwan Force fighters. The invading force was to strike in three waves to maximize the effectiveness of the attack, a tactic reminiscent of Hamas operations on October 7.

Another document, apparently more recent, reveals that the organization had drawn up two scenarios for an invasion. The first was a lightning operation by 2,000 Radwan terrorists, who would swoop in on short notice, capturing strategic locations on the border and entrenching themselves there, while the other was a longer operation involving 5,300 terrorists.

In both scenarios, the plan was to infiltrate deep into Israeli territory — similar to the deadly Hamas attack in the south on October 7. The first plan was an emergency contingency, to be put in action in the event of a sudden Hamas invasion. In this scenario, Radwan forces planned to breach the fence, occupy several yishuvim near the border, isolate them completely, and entrench themselves there for a prolonged period. If this plan had been implemented, thousands of Israeli civilians in the north would have fallen into Hezbollah’s hands.

The second plan was more comprehensive, calling for an operation lasting several days and involving up to 10,000 terrorists, who would sweep through the Galilee and reach as far as Haifa.

The coordination between Hezbollah and Iran, and between Iran and the rest of its proxies, is also discussed in several of the documents. Together they planned and trained for a lethal, coordinated attack that would destroy Israel “in one day,” as one of the documents puts it.

Oft Evil Shall Evil Mar

All of this only makes it harder to understand why Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar decided to act alone on October 7 and not wait for Hezbollah, Arab residents of Judea and Samaria, and Iran.

A senior source who was exposed to some of the intel explains the IDF’s thinking on the matter which lies somewhere in the realm of armchair psychology.

“In Sinwar’s head, he was a leader. Or rather, the leader. It’s important to understand the dynamics here. Unlike Hezbollah, which is officially an Iranian proxy group, funded and operated by Iran, Hamas is an independent organization. Iran’s support for Hamas has grown in recent years, but the organization still isn’t directly subordinate to it.”

Sinwar had planned to launch the attack half a year earlier, on Leil HaSeder of 2023. The Nukhba units had been prepared, the engineering teams had readied their equipment for breaching the fence, but Israel increased the alert level on the fence due to suspicious activity, and Sinwar canceled the attack at the last minute, thinking the plan had been detected.

Half a year later, he decided to try again. This time with extreme compartmentalization of information. Even Hamas’s battalion commanders didn’t know the exact date, and even companies within the same battalion didn’t know what the other companies were doing.

“In his head, it was clear to Sinwar that the moment he breached the fence, everyone else would join in,” says the senior source. “He knew that Hezbollah was ready on the northern border, he knew that the Arabs in Judea and Samaria had received their instructions. He knew that it was technically feasible, so he decided to start out on his own.

“He was so sure of Hamas’s capabilities, and of his own ability to bring in the others, and he wanted to go down as the man who engineered Israel’s downfall. The ‘Nachshon’ who spearheaded the attack and led to the destruction of the Zionist entity.”

And the truth is that Sinwar’s assumptions weren’t inherently flawed. The documents captured by the IDF during the ground operation in Lebanon paint a blood-curdling picture of Hezbollah’s prewar capabilities.

“On the operational level, there was nothing stopping Hezbollah from joining in immediately and carrying out a lethal attack within an hour and a half to three hours after Hamas breached the fence in the south.”

Additional documents seized reveal the extent of the tunnel infrastructure prepared by Hezbollah for the invasion. According to the documents, Hezbollah dug a complex system of tunnels 25 to 45 meters below ground, some of them up to four meters wide and 2.5 meters high, enough to transport significant forces and heavy weaponry. The tunnels were designed with advanced ventilation systems, electrical infrastructure, and arm depots at strategic points.

In one of the central tunnels, uncovered by IDF forces in the western sector, detailed plans for the construction of an advanced underground operations room were discovered. The operations room was to serve as a control center throughout the invasion, complete with encrypted communication systems and computing devices. The documents show that this tunnel was supposed to serve as a key infiltration point, with multiple exits in the direction of the northern settlements.

Footage found on a laptop seized at one of the outposts reveals that the organization had prepared well-camouflaged exit points in advance in the woodlands, 300 to 500 meters from the fence. At each such exit point, ammunition and weapons depots were prepared, including anti-tank missiles, heavy machine guns, and RPG launchers. These depots were designed to be used by the breakout forces in the first stage of the attack.

Another document revealed that the tunnels were also meant to serve as a logistics network, with refueling stations for off-road vehicles, field clinics, and food depots that could support a fighting force of several thousand for weeks. This testifies to the plans to occupy Israeli communities for a prolonged period, cutting them off from the rest of the country.

Black Shabbos

And now that you know all that, imagine a scenario that was purely hypothetical at the time, but was all too realistic on the morning of Simchas Torah 2023.

At 6:29 a.m., Hamas launches an invasion of southern Israel. The IDF begins moving soldiers south, and two hours later, Hezbollah joins the war in the north. As Hamas terrorists burst into the kibbutzim and slaughter, kidnap, and burn, Radwan forces do the same in the north. And while the IDF scrambles to deploy its forces to key flashpoints, the Arabs in Judea and Samaria launch their own attack, breaking into settlements and crossing the Green Line to infiltrate towns in central Israel.

And this is without taking into account the Houthi drones, the Iraqi militias, the Iranian ballistic missiles, and the tens of thousands of militia fighters then sitting on the northern border.

On that black Shabbos, at 7 a.m., the IDF Northern Command activated plans for a rapid deployment on the border to head off an invasion. But all it could call on was reserve forces ready to be deployed on short notice, and the forces available were small, not much larger than the one in the south. It was a far cry from the forces necessary to repel a full-scale invasion.

Why did Hezbollah hold back? As believing Jews, we know that Someone Upstairs orchestrated it that way. On a more worldly note, it turns out that Hamas’s attack had come as such a surprise that even Hezbollah needed time to adapt to the situation. And by the time it did, it was too late. Within 24 hours, tens of thousands of reserve soldiers had been deployed to the border, and Hezbollah’s invasion plan, which relied on a minimal IDF presence, became infeasible.

Nasrallah himself said several times before his assassination that he’d been surprised by Hamas’s attack on October 7. He wasn’t surprised by the plan itself, which he was aware of, but by the timing. The original plan had called for total coordination between the different terrorist groups. Sinwar’s megalomania, it turns out, saved the State of Israel.

Backup for the Backup

But those early plans are only part of the story told by the documents captured in Lebanon. It’s important to know what could have happened in retrospect, but much more crucial is knowing what will happen next. And the documents told that story, too.

The harrowing anecdote at the start of this article is only one of many. Rapid debriefings on the ground led to many spur-of-the-moment operations, and sometimes, as in that case, to operations being called off at the last moment. Hezbollah operates like an organized military, not like insurgents. And in one sense, that worked in the IDF’s favor. When every plan is carefully documented, they’re easier to intercept.

In many cases, intel extracted during the fighting led to immediate route changes for soldiers on the ground. Sometimes, complex operations were postponed or brought forward, based solely on intel gathered on the ground.

For example, a raid on one Shiite village in southern Lebanon was delayed at the last moment after a notebook containing detailed information about Hezbollah arms depots at the site was discovered in one of the tunnels, information that hadn’t previously been known.

The consequences of the discovery were immediate. The troops immediately realized that they’d exposed a sophisticated diversionary plan by Hezbollah to save its armaments. The document detailed the plans for clearing the depots and transferring the equipment between different houses, in a complex logistical system meant to maintain the group’s ability to operate even in active combat conditions.

The document revealed that in each of the main complexes, two evacuation routes were planned in advance. One involved the rapid transfer of essential weapons to nearby homes that had been prepared beforehand, and the second was the dispersal of the equipment in smaller warehouses scattered throughout the area.

“They built what was to all intents and purposes a military system,” says the source. “They had a backup plan for the backup plan.”

In Compound No. 1, for instance, it was planned to transfer the equipment to three separate houses, with each one used for different types of weapons.

“If we hit one warehouse, the other two warehouses would allow the terrorists to remain operational,” explains a source who was present at the incident. “This is the thinking of an army, not a terrorist organization.”

What particularly surprised the intelligence personnel was the accuracy and level of detail of the instructions. “For example, in Compound 29, they explicitly state that there are two ‘magals’ — an abbreviation for ‘large warehouses’ — and another small warehouse. This indicates a very high level of planning.”

This document, along with other documents seized in the same compound, led to an immediate change in the IDF’s operational plans. “As soon as we understood the strategy, we could monitor suspicious activities indicating the movement of equipment. This allowed us to locate more and more warehouses we’d had no prior knowledge of.”

Window of Time

The campaign in Lebanon revealed the disturbing reality of a genuine military threat to the state of Israel. The infrastructure, the tunnel networks, the enormous weapons depots, and the paperwork documenting operational plans on an unprecedented scale illustrated the depth of the threat and the scope of the preparations made in recent years.

If Hezbollah had succeeded in carrying out even a fraction of its plans, we could have faced a disaster of unprecedented proportions. This reality has forced Israel not only to neutralize the threat on the ground, but also to reevaluate its intelligence, operational, and logistical approaches.

The recent events are a painful reminder of the importance of intelligence, military, and strategic preparation against an enemy willing to invest unimaginable resources in Israel’s destruction. With all the challenges it has posed, the current conflict is also a unique opportunity for Israel to deter its enemies and demonstrate its operational and intelligence superiority. The detection and destruction of the tunnel networks, the destruction of arms depots, and the capture of strategic documents are heavy blows to Hezbollah and its allies.

At the same time, it’s clear that the threat won’t just disappear. Hezbollah will try to regroup, learn from its mistakes, and adapt to the new reality. Which is why Israel has to take advance of this window of time to become ever stronger.

The conflict may seem dormant at the moment, but it’s clear to everyone that it’s far from over.

As they prepare for Hezbollah’s next moves, some of those exposed to the frightening reality of what almost happened have come to see Israel’s reality in a new light.

“I’m not so religious,” a senior reserve officer in the Intelligence Directorate admitted to me in the first months of the war. “But from what I’ve been exposed to, I can say that October 7 was one of the greatest miracles we’ve ever had.” —

Hezbollah’s Hoard

News reports and the IDF’s own advance intelligence about Hezbollah’s capabilities didn’t do justice to the reality that the Intelligence and Technological Exploitation Unit  personnel found.

“First of all, it’s the sheer quantity,” the ITEU source explains. “We’re talking about arsenals on a military scale. We found depots that nearly rival the IDF’s yamachim [Emergency Warehouse Units, which keep equipment ready for reserve forces in case they’re thrown into combat on short notice]. They had enormous hangars, alongside arms depots inside houses and children’s rooms. We destroyed most of the weapons from the air or on the ground, because the cost of moving it isn’t worth it, not to mention the dangers involved. What we brought back was only a small fraction of the total.”

That small fraction would have been enough to keep an entire brigade operational for several months, from the uniforms and protective gear to the drones and long-range missiles.

The second shock was the quality.

“In Gaza, we were surprised by the advanced equipment we found,” says the ITEU source. “There was a lot of it, including equipment we weren’t familiar with, as well as equipment we knew of but didn’t know Hamas held — but most of the arms we found were improvised and low grade.

“With Hezbollah it’s a different story. Extremely advanced weaponry, surveillance devices, powerful explosives, precision missiles and advanced weapons systems. Equipment for an army, not a terrorist group.”

In total, the IDF brought back some 85,170 captured items of equipment from Lebanon, including 6,840 RPGs, anti-tank-missiles, and launchers; 9,000 explosive charges; 60,800 communication devices, electronic equipment, computers and documents; 2,250 shells and indirect fire missiles; 2,700 “light” weapons; 2,860 assorted armaments; 300 observation tools and binoculars; 60 anti-aircraft missiles; and 20 military vehicles.

But the real treasure is the reams of intelligence documents. “If we managed to locate and destroy arms depots in southern Lebanon, that would only be a minor setback for them — they had other arms depots in the Beqaa Valley. If we destroyed depots in the Beqaa, they had others in Beirut. And if we destroyed the ones in Beirut, they’d import new weapons from Iran.

“But when it comes to documents detailing operational plans years in the making, that’s something they can’t reconstruct.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1047)