The footage is from the last two years, but it is chillingly prescient.
In a December 2022 video, Hamas fighters can be seen flooding a training area, shooting rockets and capturing pretend prisoners as they surround mock Israeli buildings.
The camp, CNN analysis shows, had just been constructed, and was very close to Erez Crossing, the pedestrian passageway between Gaza and Israel that Hamas fighters ultimately breached last weekend in a bloody attack — which killed over 1,200 people in Israel.
Another video taken more than a year ago, shows Hamas fighters practicing take-offs, landings and assaults with paragliders — the same unusual mode that Hamas deployed with lethal effect in the same October 7 attack.
A CNN investigation analyzed almost two years of training and propaganda video released by Hamas and its affiliates to reveal the months of preparations that went into last week’s attack, finding that militants trained for the onslaught in at least six sites across Gaza.
Two of those sites, including the arid training site shown in the December video, were a little more than a mile from the most fortified and patrolled section of the Gaza-Israel border. Of the remaining sites: one is located in central Gaza, and the other three in far south Gaza.
Two years of satellite imagery, also reviewed by CNN, show no indication of an offensive Israeli military action against any of the six identified sites.
Not only was there activity in the last several months at the camps, but some camps also absorbed surrounding farmland, converting it from agriculture to barren area for training in the last two years, according to satellite imagery.
In the aftermath of Hamas’ ruthless incursion — where militants abducted up to 150 people, overran Israeli military bases, and laid waste to towns and farms — questions are being raised about the intelligence and operational failures of Israel’s security apparatus.
The fact that Hamas trained for the attack in plain sight for at least two years raises questions as to why Israel, home to the Middle East’s most sophisticated military and spying operation, was unable to pick up on and stop the attack?
When CNN reached out to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for comment, its international spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said the findings were “nothing new.”
He added that Hamas has “had many training areas” and Israel’s military had “struck many training areas over the years in the different rounds of escalation.”
Conricus noted that Israel has not had a major escalation with Hamas in over two years, in reference to when hostilities between Israel and Hamas erupted in 2021. It followed weeks of tension in Jerusalem, where a group of Palestinian families faced eviction from their homes in East Jerusalem in favor of Jewish nationalists.
Conricus also said that Hamas may have made the facilities “look civilian.”
However, five of the sites — the sixth is a landing strip — do not have civilian features and are nearly identical in how they are constructed and arranged.
Read more about Hamas’ training that led up to the October 7 attack.
