Report Says Hamas Used Icons to Signal Oct. 7 Attack • Jewish Breaking News

Cleared by the military censor, a report aired on Channel 12 News on Monday revealing that Hamas used sequences of emojis as codes for launching the Oct. 7 attack. IDF investigations of phones seized from Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 showed what the IDF believes are instructions encoded in strings of emojis to install Israeli SIM cards for use in Israel, locations of gathering points (such as tunnels and mosques) and appointed times for battle readiness.

The report further revealed that Hamas had used the coded emojis to instruct its operatives to launch the invasion at two previous times — May 2023 and September 2022 — though ultimately the group decided against attacking both times. These instructions reveal the length of time that the operation had been planned.

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The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security and counterintelligence service, discovered that a number of Israeli SIM cards had been activated by Hamas terrorists the night before the attack, Oct. 6, 2023, at 9 p.m. Later that night, officials reportedly found dozens more were activated. The Shin Bet found that these phones belonged to operatives from the Nukhba unit, Hamas’ elite commando fighting force.

The IDF did not discover the coded emojis at the time of the attack, only later when investigators examined phones captured from Hamas.

Military intelligence failed to notice the warning signs because it had thoroughly misjudged Hamas’ intentions, leading it to misinterpret the signals.

Hamas deliberately cultivated a false sense of complacency, leading Israel to believe that the group would be content to stay out of conflict in exchange for economic opportunities for Gazans. As a result, Israel issued tens of thousands of work permits to Gazans in the months preceding the Oct. 7 attack. Following the attack, Israel revoked those work permits, assigning an illegal status to all Gazans who remained in Israel and either deporting them back to Gaza or sending them to the territories of Judea and Samaria.