How the IDF failed Sderot on October 7th 

At 6:58 a.m. on October 7, 2023, Sderot, a quiet border city of 30,000, became a killing field. Two pickup trucks and a Hyundai i10 roared into town, disgorging 41 Hamas terrorists bent on slaughter. By day’s end, 53 lay dead: 37 civilians, 11 police officers, 3 IDF soldiers, and 2 rescue workers. Another 53 were wounded.

The freshly released IDF investigation, led by Colonel Nitai Okashi, peels back the chaos of that Shabbat morning, revealing a tale of heroism, horror, and haunting failures. Yet, as the dust settles on this meticulous postmortem, one truth emerges: Sderot’s scars run deeper than the numbers, and the lessons are as urgent as they are unresolved.

The Onslaught: A City Unprepared

The terrorists struck from three fronts, their plan chillingly precise. Seized documents from Gaza show they targeted six key sites: the police station, the security officer’s office, the train station, the Route 7 shopping center, Peretz Center Mall, and the municipal resilience hub. They hit three, the police station, train station, and Route 7 mall, with lethal efficiency. At 7:01, they massacred 13 elderly civilians on a minibus bound for the Dead Sea, then rampaged through Rami Levy’s store, killing shoppers and workers. By 7:30, five infiltrated the Ahuzah neighborhood, turning homes into death traps.

The police station became the epicenter. Twenty-six terrorists stormed it, isolating it with squads to the north and south, gunning down anyone approaching. Officers climbed to the roof, picking off four attackers before the rest breached inside. For 19 grueling hours, Yamam elite units and police fought a relentless siege, firing LAW missiles, deploying drones, even bringing a tank at 23:35 to shell the building. Only at 8:46 the next morning did the last terrorist fall. The toll: 16 dead, including 10 officers.

The Failure: A Security Vacuum Exposed

Sderot’s defenses crumbled under scrutiny. The IDF’s Northern Brigade and Battalion 77, tasked with safeguarding the city, were nowhere to be found that day. No perimeter fence, no electric gates, just an open invitation. The rapid response team, the city’s first line, was disarmed. In August 2022, 18 months before the war, they surrendered their long-barreled rifles due to a missing armory, a logistical blunder never rectified.

When Hamas struck, they fought with pistols alone. No training drills had prepared them for an infiltration, let alone one of this scale. The investigation calls it “a colossal failure,” a damning indictment of oversight.

Colonel Okashi’s report uncovers a deeper rot: the Northern Brigade lacked a defense plan for Sderot. Commanders later admitted attempts to rearm the team faltered in the pre-war months, a confession too late to matter. Meanwhile, Home Front Command’s infiltration alerts, standard elsewhere, were absent in Sderot. By 9:00 a.m., religious residents, deaf to news on Shabbat, still prayed in synagogues, oblivious to the carnage. A single siren tweak could have saved lives.

The Bottleneck: Chaos in Command

Sderot turned into a magnet. Over 1,000 fighters flooded in that first day, a tidal wave sparked by a General Staff order to prioritize urban defense, Sderot, Netivot, Ofakim, Beersheba, fearing mass civilian slaughter. Early media images of a terrorist truck in Sderot cemented it as the focal point, skewing attention while other hotspots bled dry of troops. Its crossroads location trapped reinforcements; Sha’ar HaNegev junction, a choke point under fire, stalled southward movement.

Coordination collapsed. No joint IDF-police command post emerged. Local commanders improvised, but the lack of a unified chain led to friendly fire and confusion. The investigation paints a grim picture: battalion systems were blind, Brigade 77 unaware of the breach despite higher command’s knowledge. For hours, Sderot was a free-for-all—heroic, yes, but rudderless.

The Fight: Valor Amid the Void

Yet despite the failures, bravery shone. At the police station, officers held the roof until Superintendent Amir Cohen’s 20-man team breached at 7:20, joined later by Yamam to extract survivors. In Ahuzah, Lotar and Yamam fighters swept in by 8:40, neutralizing five terrorists, though one fell. At Route 7, Yamam cut down three, chasing the rest as they fled in a stolen car, all were later killed. Of the 41 invaders, 39 were eliminated, 2 captured. None escaped back to Gaza.

The cost was staggering: 53 dead, a city traumatized. The investigation lauds the fighters’ grit but can’t mask the systemic cracks. Sderot’s survival hinged on individual courage, not institutional readiness.

Sderot demands that the IDF and government fix the fractures, or risk them widening. The terrorists didn’t win, but the failures nearly did.