On Sept. 12, Hamas published a propaganda video in which it showed terrorists practicing tactics very similar to those used last Saturday to massacre more than 1,300 civilians. In the post, which they uploaded to social media, terrorists can be seen breaking through a replica of the border fence with explosives, crossing a fake border aboard vans and finally reaching a series of full-scale buildings, going house to house shooting human-shaped paper silhouettes with assault weapons.
Hamas practiced in plain sight, posting a propaganda video just weeks before the deadly Israel attack showing militants blowing through a mock “Iron Wall” and firing automatic weapons at human-silhouetted paper targets. https://t.co/m9R5ummaOp
— The Associated Press (@AP) October 13, 2023
Rehearsing tactics with live fire a month before the massacre
The video also includes images of terrorists wearing bulletproof vests and combat suits destroying models of the wall's concrete towers and a communications antenna, just as they did during the real attack.
The Associated Press analyzed the images and verified key details from dozens of videos uploaded to social media by Hamas, especially on Telegram. The AP used satellite images to locate where the replica of the Israeli city attacked in the terrorists’ training was located.
Comparison of the images in the last video with a desert area on the outskirts of Al-Mawasi (a Palestinian city located on the southern coast of the Gaza Strip) suggests that this was the place where the live-fire exercises were carried out. The agency notes the presence of "a large sign in Hebrew and Arabic on the door reads 'Horesh Yaron,'" the name of an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
