Jerusalem, November 26, 2025 — Total News Agency — TNA — Israel's latest military investigation has exposed a deeply unsettling and hitherto underestimated aspect of the October 7 attacks: for at least five years, Hamas developed a systematic digital espionage network that collected sensitive information from up to 100,000 soldier and officer accounts of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Even during post-October 7 operations in Gaza, soldiers were documented uploading images from personal devices while on active duty, inadvertently feeding the adversary's intelligence cycle. The IDF announced that as part of post-war reforms, digital and operational discipline will be a cornerstone of profound transformation, with new restrictions, reinforced protocols, and harsher penalties for violations. Hamas not only monitored public accounts: it also created fake profiles to infiltrate private recruit groups, exploiting the daily carelessness of soldiers who shared images of weaponry, access points, positions, or operational routines, often in direct violation of military regulations. With the volume of accumulated information, Hamas built a 'complete operational picture' of the IDF's movements and capabilities. An Israeli officer went so far as to bluntly state that Hamas 'knew an IDF base better than those who served there for years.' The report also exposes a structural problem that Israel recognizes but whose resolution still faces resistance: the widespread use of personal phones in sensitive areas. According to the IDF, the only reason Hamas failed to introduce captured tanks into Gaza was that while they were able to disable them, they could not reactivate them. The revelations also indicate that some 2,500 Hamas operatives participated in the digital espionage network, organized into cells responsible for monitoring specific soldier profiles and producing intelligence reports. Only after interrogating captured terrorists and discovering the underground infrastructure in Gaza was the full magnitude of the threat understood. Physical mock-ups of Israeli bases, found in tunnels and underground structures dubbed by Israel as the 'Pentagon of Gaza,' included doors, cameras, weapons depots, and internal routes. This continuous flow of data, extracted from social media through image, video, and profile analysis, would have allowed the terrorist group to reconstruct military bases, simulate deployments, train its commandos, and even operate three-dimensional mock-ups of Merkava tanks. The investigation, disseminated by Army Radio and prepared by military correspondent Doron Kadosh, reveals that the operation began in 2018 and combined open-source intelligence with covert tactics. Virtual reality simulators that reproduced military installations were also detected, allowing terrorists to train, even with digitized models of Merkava Mark 4 tanks. One of the most striking findings was the existence of internal replicas of these tanks, which allowed the Nukhba force to understand their workings, identify weak points, and even learn how to disable them via a hidden button whose mechanism was known only to trained personnel. The challenge will be to balance operational needs with the cultural pressure of a generation that lives permanently connected. The investigation confirms that hybrid warfare is no longer fought only with weapons, rockets, or tunnels, but also with phones, selfies, and social media. Among them were detailed analyses of the internal layout of bases, number of personnel in each facility, presence of cameras, guard routines, and vulnerabilities detected from seemingly innocuous posts. Although Israeli intelligence agencies had partial knowledge of this activity, they underestimated it, considering it rudimentary or irrelevant. And that, in the case of October 7, the lack of control over this digital dimension contributed to facilitating one of the most devastating attacks in Israel's recent history.
