(The article in NYT is unbelievable. Israel knew about Hamas plans of attack one year in advance, but ignored it. It is possible Israel may have even lured Hamas to attack Israel so that it can be an excuse to flatten Gaza, occupy it and have access to Gaza shoreline gas reserves. Perhaps Israel did not expect that Hamas could do so much damage. f.sheikh)

Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.

The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.

The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.

Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot — all of which happened on Oct. 7.

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There has almost been too much to read since Henry Kissinger, the former national security adviser and secretary of state who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, died on Wednesday. But I think the best obituaries and retrospectives on Kissinger have emphasized his paramount role in the spread of human misery across the globe, in the name of realpolitik and what he determined were America’s “national interests.”

Let’s start with Kissinger’s full participation, as Nixon’s national security adviser, in the decision to authorize the secret carpet bombing of Cambodia, during which the United States dropped more than 500,000 tons of explosives on the country, killing as many as 150,000 civilians. These bombings, which destabilized the country, played a role in the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who went on to kill approximately 2 million people during his four-year stint in power.

Kissinger was also an architect of the U.S. effort to undermine the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. In the wake of the 1973 coup d’état that installed Gen. Augusto Pinochet at the head of a military dictatorship, Kissinger also pushed the United States to back the new regime, which killed, tortured or imprisoned tens of thousands of Chileans.

“I think we should understand our policy — that however unpleasant they act, this government is better for us than Allende was,” Kissinger said to his deputies, according to declassified transcripts, in the weeks after the coup. A few years later, in 1976, Kissinger would tell Pinochet, “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.”

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Thousands of children have been killed in the enclave since the Israeli assault began, officials in Gaza say. The Israeli military says it takes “all feasible precautions” to avoid civilian deaths.

Barefoot and weeping, Khaled Joudeh, 9, hurried toward the dozens of bodies wrapped in white burial shrouds, blankets and rugs outside the overcrowded morgue.

“Where’s my mom?” he cried next to a photographer for The New York Times. “I want to see my mom.”

“Where is Khalil?” he continued, barely audible between sobs as he asked for his 12-year-old brother. A morgue worker opened a white shroud, so Khaled could kiss his brother one final time.

Then, he bid farewell to his 8-month-old sister. Another shroud was pulled back, revealing the blood-caked face of a baby, her strawberry-red hair matted down. Khaled broke into fresh sobs as he identified her to the hospital staff. Her name was Misk, Arabic for musk.

“Mama was so happy when she had you,” he whispered, gently touching her forehead, tears streaming down his face onto hers.

She was the joy of his family, relatives later said — after three boys, his parents were desperate for a girl. When she was born, they said, Khaled’s mother delighted in dressing Misk in frilly, colorful dresses, pinning her tiny curls in bright hair clips.

Through his tears, Khaled bid farewell to his mother, father, older brother and sister, their bodies lined up around him. Only Khaled and his younger brother, Tamer, 7, survived what relatives and local journalists said was an airstrike on Oct. 22 that toppled two buildings sheltering their extended family.

A total of 68 members of the Joudeh family were killed that day as they slept in their beds in Deir al Balah, in central Gaza, three of Khaled’s relatives recounted in separate interviews.

Several branches and generations of the Joudehs, a Palestinian family, had been huddling together before the strike, relatives said, including some who had fled northern Gaza, as Israel had ordered residents to do. The Israeli military said it could not address questions about a strike on the family.

In the end, members of the family were buried together, side by side in a long grave, relatives said, showing footage of the burial and sharing a picture of Misk before she was killed.

Gaza, the United Nations warns, has become “a graveyard for thousands of children.”

Determining the precise number of children killed in Gaza — in the midst of a fierce bombing campaign, with hospitals collapsing, children missing, bodies buried under rubble and neighborhoods in ruins — is a Sisyphean task. Health officials in Gaza say that 5,000 Palestinian children have been killed since the Israeli assault began, and possibly hundreds more. Many international officials and experts familiar with the way death tolls are compiled in the territory say the overall numbers are generally reliable.

If the figures are even close to accurate, far more children have been killed in Gaza in the past six weeks than the 2,985 children killed in the world’s major conflict zones combined — across two dozen countries — during all of last year, even with the war in Ukraine, according to U.N. tallies of verified deaths in armed conflict.

The Israeli military says that, unlike the “murderous assault against women, children, elderly and the disabled” by Hamas on Oct. 7, Israeli forces take “all feasible precautions” to “mitigate harm” to civilians.

Hamas, the military said, deliberately caused “the maximum amount of harm and brutality possible to civilians.” During the attack on Israel, parents and their children were gunned down inside their homes, witnesses and officials say, with children taken as hostages.

In response, the Israeli military says, it is waging a war “forcefully to dismantle Hamas military and administrative capabilities.” It notes that Israeli forces have told residents to flee to southern Gaza, and says that they issue warnings before airstrikes “when possible.”

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Experts say that inflammatory statements by prominent Israelis are normalizing ideas like the killing of civilians and mass deportations.

Shock, grief and pain have cascaded across Israel since Hamas gunmen poured out of Gaza to kill an estimated 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers on Oct. 7. So have anger and a thirst for vengeance, which the country’s leaders are verbalizing in language that critics in Israel say often crosses the line into incitement.

“We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly,” said Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, two days after the attacks, as he described how the Israeli military planned to eradicate Hamas in Gaza.

“We’re fighting Nazis,” declared Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister.

“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible — we do remember,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites, in scripture interpreted by scholars as a call to exterminate their “men and women, children and infants.”

Inflammatory language has also been used by journalists, retired generals, celebrities, and social media influencers, according to experts who track the statements. Calls for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased” or “destroyed” had been mentioned about 18,000 times since Oct. 7 in Hebrew posts on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, said FakeReporter, an Israeli group that monitors disinformation and hate speech. The phrases were only mentioned 16 times in the month and a half before the war.

The cumulative effect, experts say, has been to normalize public discussion of ideas that would have been considered off limits before Oct. 7: talk of “erasing” the people of Gaza, ethnic cleansing, and the nuclear annihilation of the territory.

Incendiary statements are not limited to Israel, of course. Ghazi Hamad, a senior leader of Hamas, vowed on Oct. 24 that the group would wipe out Israel as a country, and appeared to exult in the barbaric acts that his militants had carried out against Israeli civilians. “We are not ashamed to say it with full force,” he said. “We have to teach Israel a lesson, and we will do it again and again.”

But the proliferation of such language by Israelis has opened a debate in Israel, where far-right and ultranationalist politicians were testing the boundaries of acceptable speech even before Oct. 7. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a right-wing settler who went from fringe figure to minister of national security in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet, has a long history of making incendiary remarks about Palestinians. He said in a recent TV interview that anyone who supports Hamas should be “eliminated.”

Concerns about the spread of extremist rhetoric are an extension of a political battle within Israel that has been raging all year between Mr. Netanyahu’s ultraright government and a civic opposition, some of whom now worry that it will inure Israelis to the civilian toll in Gaza as the war goes on.

The idea of a nuclear strike on Gaza was raised last week by another right-wing minister, Amichay Eliyahu, who told a Hebrew radio station that there was no such thing as noncombatants in Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu suspended Mr. Eliyahu, saying that his comments were “disconnected from reality.”

Mr. Netanyahu says that the Israeli military is trying to prevent harm to civilians. But with the death toll rising to more than 11,000, according to the Gaza health ministry, those claims are being met with skepticism, even in the United States, which has pressed Israel to allow daily four-hour humanitarian pauses in the combat.

Such reassurances are also belied by the language Mr. Netanyahu uses with audiences in Israel. His reference to Amalek came in a speech delivered in Hebrew on Oct. 28 as Israel was launching the ground invasion. While some Jewish scholars argue that the scripture’s message is metaphoric not literal, his words resonated widely, as video of his speech was shared on social media, often by critics.

“These are not just one-off statements, made in the heat of the moment,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer and author of “The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine and the Legal Battle for Human Rights.”

“When ministers make statements like that,” Mr. Sfard added, “it opens the door for everyone else.”

Yehuda Shaul, co-director of Ofek, a think tank in Jerusalem, has collected 286 statements since Oct. 7 that he classifies as having the potential to incite unlawful behavior. His list includes Eyal Golan, an Israeli pop singer; Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Mr. Netanyahu; and Yinon Magal, a host on Israel’s right-wing Channel 14.

“Erase Gaza. Don’t leave a single person there,” Mr. Golan said in an interview with Channel 14 on Oct. 15.

“I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals,” Ms. Netanyahu said during a radio interview on Oct. 10, referring to Hamas.

“It’s time for Nakba 2,” Mr. Magal wrote on X on Oct. 7, a reference to the mass displacement and flight of Palestinians before and after Israel’s creation in 1948, which Palestinians refer to as the “nakba,” or “catastrophe.”

In the West Bank last week, several academics and officials cited Mr. Eliyahu’s remark about dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza as evidence of Israel’s intention to clear the enclave of all Palestinians — a campaign they call a latter-day nakba.

On Saturday, the Israeli agriculture minister, Avi Dichter, said that the military campaign in Gaza was explicitly designed to force the mass displacement of Palestinians. “We are now rolling out the Gaza nakba,” he said in a television interview. “Gaza nakba 2023.”

The rise in incendiary statements comes against a backdrop of rising violence in the West Bank. Since Oct. 7, according to the United Nations, Israeli soldiers have killed 150 Palestinians, including 44 children, in clashes. Jewish settlers, some of whom are armed and informally allied with the military, have killed eight people, one of them a child, according to the United Nations.

Israeli officials point out that Hamas is also active in the West Bank and say that many of those clashes resulted from the military’s efforts to root out militants. Three Israelis have been killed in attacks by Palestinians since Oct. 7.

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