Staff of The New York Times

Hamas gunmen surged into Israel in a highly organized and meticulously planned operation that suggested a deep understanding of Israel’s weaknesses. Here is how the attacks unfolded.

By Patrick Kingsley and Ronen Bergman

The 10 gunmen from Gaza knew exactly how to find the Israeli intelligence hub — and how to get inside.

After crossing into Israel, they headed east on five motorcycles, two gunmen on each vehicle, shooting at passing civilian cars as they pressed forward.

Ten miles later, they veered off the road into a stretch of woodland, dismounting outside an unmanned gate to a military base. They blew open the barrier with a small explosive charge, entered the base and paused to take a group selfie. Then they shot dead an unarmed Israeli soldier dressed in a T-shirt.

For a moment, the attackers appeared uncertain about where to go next. Then one of them pulled something from his pocket: a color-coded map of the complex.

Reoriented, they found an unlocked door to a fortified building. Once inside, they entered a room filled with computers — the military intelligence hub. Under a bed in the room, they found two soldiers taking shelter.

The gunmen shot both dead.

This sequence was captured on a camera mounted on the head of a gunman who was later killed. The New York Times reviewed the footage, then verified the events by interviewing Israeli officials and checking Israeli military video of the attack as well.

They provide chilling details of how Hamas, the militia that controls the Gaza Strip, managed to surprise and outmaneuver the most powerful military in the Middle East last Saturday — storming across the border, overrunning more than 30 square miles, taking more than 150 hostages and killing more than 1,300 people in the deadliest day for Israel in its 75-year history.

With meticulous planning and extraordinary awareness of Israel’s secrets and weaknesses, Hamas and its allies overwhelmed the length of Israel’s front with Gaza shortly after dawn, shocking a nation that has long taken the superiority of its military as an article of faith.

Using drones, Hamas destroyed key surveillance and communications towers along the border with Gaza, imposing vast blind spots on the Israeli military. With explosives and tractors, Hamas blew open gaps in the border barricades, allowing 200 attackers to pour through in the first wave and another 1,800 later that day, officials say. On motorcycles and in pickup trucks, the assailants surged into Israel, overwhelming at least eight military bases and waging terrorist attacks against civilians in more than 15 villages and cities.

Hamas planning documents, videos of the assault and interviews with security officials show that the group had a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of how the Israeli military operated, where it stationed specific units, and even the time it would take for reinforcements to arrive.

The Israeli military says that, once the war is over, it will investigate how Hamas managed to breach its defenses so easily.

But whether the armed forces were careless with their secrets or infiltrated by spies, the revelations have already unnerved officials and analysts who have questioned how the Israeli military — renowned for its intelligence gathering — could have inadvertently revealed so much information about its own operations.

The outcome was a staggering series of atrocities and massacres, in what the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, has described as the worst mass killing of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust.

It shattered Israel’s aura of invincibility and provoked an Israeli counterattack on Gaza that has killed more than 1,900 Palestinians in a week, the ferocity of which has never been seen in Gaza.

It also upended assumptions that Hamas, long designated a terrorist group by Israel and many Western nations, had gradually become more interested in running Gaza than in using it to launch major assaults on Israel.

Hamas made Israelis think it was “busy with governing Gaza,” said Ali Barakeh, a Hamas leader, in a television interview on Monday. “All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack,” he added.

‘Hamas In the Kibbutz!’

The terrorists were inside Addi Cherry’s home, on the other side of an unlocked door.

Ms. Cherry, her husband and their three children were hiding inside their eldest son’s bedroom, listening to the gunmen wander around their living room.

“Please help us,” Ms. Cherry texted a friend, as one of the assailants walked closer and closer to the bedroom door.

Then he gripped the door handle.

The Cherry family’s day had begun with a burst of rockets from Gaza, not long after 6 a.m.

Ms. Cherry, an economist, and her husband, Oren, an engineer, rushed with their children into their eldest son’s bedroom, which doubled as a bomb shelter.

Initially, the events of the morning felt distressingly familiar. The Cherry family lives in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, a rural village of some 500 residents, a few hundred yards east of the border with Gaza. Early morning rocket fire — and the ensuing rush to the safe room — is a frequent feature of life in the region.

“Like always,” Ms. Cherry remembered thinking.

But this morning soon felt different. The rockets kept coming, many of them headed deep into Israeli territory.

Then, from the fields around the village, came the sound of gunshots.

Mr. Cherry left the bedroom, and peeked through the shutters on their living room windows.

“Oh God,” Ms. Cherry remembered her husband shouting. “Hamas in the kibbutz! Hamas in the kibbutz!”

It was 7:20 a.m.

Hundreds of Hamas invaders, carrying guns, shoulder-borne rocket launchers and wearing the group’s green headband, were streaming through the village fields.

It was part of a coordinated assault that, documents and video show, assigned squads of assailants to precise targets. As some swept through military bases, others charged into residential areas, ruthlessly kidnapping and killing civilians.

They would reach the Cherrys’ street within minutes.

The family had to act quickly. Their bomb shelter — a teenager’s bedroom — had no lock.

The parents grabbed a chair, and wedged it under the door handle — making it harder to open.

They dragged a small cabinet, and pressed it against the chair.

Then they waited. There was an army base next to the village. Its troops would be here within minutes, Ms. Cherry remembered thinking.

What she didn’t know was that many of them were already dead.

‘Take soldiers and civilians’

All along the border, the Hamas gunmen had already overrun most, if not all, of the Israeli border bases.

Footage from the attackers’ head-mounted cameras, including the video of the raid on the intelligence hub, showed Hamas gunmen — from its highly trained Nukhba brigade — smashing through the barricades of several bases in the first light of the morning.

After breaching, they were merciless, gunning down some soldiers in their beds and underwear. In several bases, they knew exactly where the communications servers were and destroyed them, according to a senior Israeli army officer.

With much of their communications and surveillance systems down, the Israelis often couldn’t see the commandos coming. They found it harder to call for help and mount a response. In many cases, they were unable to protect themselves, let alone the surrounding civilian villages.

A Hamas planning document — found by Israeli emergency responders in one village — showed that the attackers were organized into well-defined units with clear goals and battle plans.

One platoon had designated navigators, saboteurs and drivers — as well as mortar units in the rear to provide cover for the attackers, the document shows.

The group had a specific target — a kibbutz — and the attackers were tasked with storming the village from specific angles. They had estimates for how many Israeli troops were stationed in nearby posts, how many vehicles they had at their disposal, and how long it would take those Israeli relief forces to reach them.

The document is dated October 2022, suggesting that the attack had been planned for at least a year.

Elsewhere, other assailants were posted to key road junctions to ambush Israeli reinforcements, according to four senior officers and officials.

Some units had specific instructions to capture Israelis for use as bargaining chips in future prisoner exchanges with Israel.

“Take soldiers and civilians as prisoners and hostages to negotiate with,” the document said.

‘We Are Going to Die’

The terrorists smashed their way into the Cherrys’ house shortly before 10 a.m., according to texts that Ms. Cherry sent friends at the time.

They had already killed the kibbutz guards, as well as a civilian security volunteer who had rushed to confront them in the opening moments of the assault, according to the village leadership.

Now, the terrorists were going house by house, trying to find people to kill and kidnap.

“Please send help,” Ms. Cherry typed into her phone.

At the Cherrys’ house, they forced in the door. Then they charged in, shouting and ransacking the house, Ms. Cherry said.

“We are going to die,” Ms. Cherry remembered thinking.

The family waited in terrified silence, hoping the intruders would ignore the door to the bedroom and assume everyone was away.

Mr. and Mrs. Cherry put all their weight against the cabinet, to brace the chair underneath the door handle.

Guy, 15, their eldest son, stood next to the door, holding an 18-pound dumbbell. If someone did break in, the plan was to drop it on the assailant’s head.

Then the handle twitched.

The parents began to push the cabinet.

The handle continued to rattle.

Then it stopped. The assailant walked away.

A few streets away, the family of Miki Levi, who oversees the kibbutz gardens, had an even closer call.

After a terrorist squad chased Mr. Levi, 47, inside his safe room, the attackers sprayed bullets at the reinforced door, Mr. Levi said in an interview.

Some of the bullets pierced the door, creating large openings, and Mr. Levi said he also fired back with his pistol, shredding it further. His wife and two young daughters sheltered to the side.

Changing tactics, the terrorists later brought two of his neighbors — a mother and her 12-year-old daughter, Mr. Levi said.

At gunpoint, the mother and child were told to persuade him to open up, Mr. Levi said.

“‘Come out and stop shooting,’” Mr. Levi recounted one of them saying. “‘The terrorists won’t do anything to you.’”

Eventually, the terrorists gave up that approach and returned with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, Mr. Levi said.

It was only when Mr. Levi shot one attacker in the thigh that they finally left, he added.

The mother and child, Mr. Levi suspects, are now captives in Gaza.

‘Bodies Were Burning’

Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus said he drove south without knowing where exactly he should go.

General Goldfus, 46, a paratrooper commander, had been on leave at home, jogging in his neighborhood north of Tel Aviv. Then he saw a video from the south, showing terrorists cruising through a city, entirely unimpeded.

Without waiting for orders, the general said he ran home, changed into his uniform and headed south.

He picked up guns and two soldiers from his base in central Israel, and called friends and colleagues to find out what was happening.

Only a few picked up. Of the rest, “There was nobody really understanding the full picture,” General Goldfus said in an interview.

The speed, precision and scale of Hamas’s attack had thrown the Israeli military into disarray, and for many hours afterward civilians were left to fend for themselves.

Using the few scraps of information he could glean, General Goldfus said he and the soldiers headed to a village north of Nahal Oz, and then gradually worked their way south.

It was around 10 a.m. All around him was carnage and atrocity.

Dead Israelis lined the roads, alongside the husks of burned-out, overturned cars.

At the site of an all-night outdoor rave, gunmen had killed an estimated 260 partygoers.

“Bodies were burning,” General Goldfus remembered seeing at the site.

The attack by Hamas had unleashed a violent free-for-all. Some residents of Gaza had poured over the undefended border after it was breached, at times streaming what they were doing on their phones. Gazans were looting and ransacking homes, taking computers, clothes, crockery, televisions and phones, survivors said.

In some Israeli villages, residents had been burned alive in their homes, while terrorists stalked civilians at every turn, looking for people to capture and kill. Grandparents, toddlers and a nine-month-old baby were seized and taken back to Gaza, some of them squeezed between their kidnappers on motorcycles.

And during much of the mayhem, the Israeli army was almost nowhere to be seen.

Near Kibbutz Reim, General Goldfus said he ran into another senior commander by chance. Like him, the officer had rushed to the scene on instinct, without any instructions, and had assembled a small group of soldiers.

There and then, the two men came up with their own ad hoc strategy.

“There’s no orders here,” General Goldfus said. “I said: ‘You take from this place and further south — and I’ll take from this place and further north.’”

That was how some of the Israeli counterattack took place: soldiers or civilian volunteers — including retired generals in their 60s — rushing to the region and doing what they could.

Israel Ziv, a former general, reached a nearby battle in his Audi.

Yair Golan, a retired deputy chief of staff and former leftist lawmaker, said he took a gun and began rescuing survivors of a massacre at a rave, who were hiding in nearby bushes.

“We are brought up to run as fast as possible toward the fire,” said General Goldfus. “So that we can be the first one there.”

‘It’s O.K. We’re Jewish.’

The intelligence hub near Gaza was one of the first places to be recaptured by Israel.

In the late morning, soldiers and reservists from different units reached the base from separate directions, overpowering the 10 Gazan gunmen who had filmed their deadly assault on video.

The camera mounted on the Hamas commander’s head captured the moment he was shot and killed. The camera falls off, bouncing along the ground. By the time the video stops, the commander can be seen slumped on the ground, revealing his long beard and thinning hairline.

In other parts of southern Israel, the first formal reinforcements came from an Israeli commando unit that arrived in helicopters, according to the senior Israeli officer.

They were followed by other special operations units, including Israeli navy seals and a reconnaissance unit trained to operate deep inside enemy lines, rather than on Israeli soil.

Sometimes, the commandos joined forces with volunteers without body armor who had rushed into the fray to rescue family members.

Noam Tibon, a former general, drove south with his pistol to try to retake Kibbutz Nahal Oz, where his son, Amir, a journalist, was trapped.

In the early afternoon, the elder Mr. Tibon joined a squad that was making its way through the kibbutz, house by house.

By Sunday afternoon, several villages and bases still had some kind of Hamas presence. The whole area would not be fully secured for days.

Ms. Cherry emerged around 5 p.m. on Saturday in Kibbutz Nahal Oz to find her home turned upside down, the microwave torn from the wall, drawers ripped from their cabinets and a pool of drying blood on the floor.

She had heard a gun battle in and around her home earlier in the day. She believed a terrorist had died in the house — and that his bloodied corpse had been carried off by fellow fighters.

Some survivors refused to open up, even after the army arrived.

When soldiers reached the home of Oshrit Sabag, another resident of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, she feared they were terrorists in disguise.

Even after the soldiers began chatting to one another in Hebrew, to prove who they were, Ms. Sabag, 48, was unconvinced.

It was only their Jewish prayers that made her relax.

“‘It’s O.K., it’s O.K.,’” Ms. Sabag remembered them saying. “‘We’re Jewish.’”

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

A blueprint reviewed by The Times laid out the attack in detail. Israeli officials dismissed it as aspirational and ignored specific warnings.

By Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman

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.

The plan also included details about the location and size of Israeli military forces, communication hubs and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks inside the Israeli security establishment.

The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities, according to documents and officials. It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document, as well.

Last year, shortly after the document was obtained, officials in the Israeli military’s Gaza division, which is responsible for defending the border with Gaza, said that Hamas’s intentions were unclear.

“It is not yet possible to determine whether the plan has been fully accepted and how it will be manifested,” read a military assessment reviewed by The Times.

Then, in July, just three months before the attacks, a veteran analyst with Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, warned that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint.

But a colonel in the Gaza division brushed off her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by The Times.

“I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, fully matched “the content of Jericho Wall.”

“It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”

Officials privately concede that, had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them.

Instead, the Israeli military was unprepared as terrorists streamed out of the Gaza Strip. It was the deadliest day in Israel’s history.

Israeli security officials have already acknowledged that they failed to protect the country, and the government is expected to assemble a commission to study the events leading up to the attacks. The Jericho Wall document lays bare a yearslong cascade of missteps that culminated in what officials now regard as the worst Israeli intelligence failure since the surprise attack that led to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.

Underpinning all these failures was a single, fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so ingrained in the Israeli government, officials said, that they disregarded growing evidence to the contrary.

The Israeli military and the Israeli Security Agency, which is in charge of counterterrorism in Gaza, declined to comment.

Officials would not say how they obtained the Jericho Wall document, but it was among several versions of attack plans collected over the years. A 2016 Defense Ministry memorandum viewed by The Times, for example, says, “Hamas intends to move the next confrontation into Israeli territory.”

Such an attack would most likely involve hostage-taking and “occupying an Israeli community (and perhaps even a number of communities),” the memo reads.

The Jericho Wall document, named for the ancient fortifications in the modern-day West Bank, was even more explicit. It detailed rocket attacks to distract Israeli soldiers and send them hurrying into bunkers, and drones to disable the elaborate security measures along the border fence separating Israel and Gaza.

Hamas fighters would then break through 60 points in the wall, storming across the border into Israel. The document begins with a quote from the Quran: “Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will certainly prevail.”

The same phrase has been widely used by Hamas in its videos and statements since Oct. 7.

One of the most important objectives outlined in the document was to overrun the Israeli military base in Re’im, which is home to the Gaza division responsible for protecting the region. Other bases that fell under the division’s command were also listed.

Hamas carried out that objective on Oct. 7, rampaging through Re’im and overrunning parts of the base.

The audacity of the blueprint, officials said, made it easy to underestimate. All militaries write plans that they never use, and Israeli officials assessed that, even if Hamas invaded, it might muster a force of a few dozen, not the hundreds who ultimately attacked.

Israel had also misread Hamas’s actions. The group had negotiated for permits to allow Palestinians to work in Israel, which Israeli officials took as a sign that Hamas was not looking for a war.

But Hamas had been drafting attack plans for many years, and Israeli officials had gotten hold of previous iterations of them. What could have been an intelligence coup turned into one of the worst miscalculations in Israel’s 75-year history.

In September 2016, the defense minister’s office compiled a top-secret memorandum based on a much earlier iteration of a Hamas attack plan. The memorandum, which was signed by the defense minister at the time, Avigdor Lieberman, said that an invasion and hostage-taking would “lead to severe damage to the consciousness and morale of the citizens of Israel.”

The memo, which was viewed by The Times, said that Hamas had purchased sophisticated weapons, GPS jammers and drones. It also said that Hamas had increased its fighting force to 27,000 people — having added 6,000 to its ranks in a two-year period. Hamas had hoped to reach 40,000 by 2020, the memo determined.

Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan.

Hamas had “decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope,” analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division.

But the Gaza division referred to the plan as a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go but had not arrived there yet.

On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing.

The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times.

The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out.

The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off.

“In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.

The back-and-forth continued, with some colleagues supporting the analyst’s original conclusion. Soon, she invoked the lessons of the 1973 war, in which Syrian and Egyptian armies overran Israeli defenses. Israeli forces regrouped and repelled the invasion, but the intelligence failure has long served as a lesson for Israeli security officials.

“We already underwent a similar experience 50 years ago on the southern front in connection with a scenario that seemed imaginary, and history may repeat itself if we are not careful,” the analyst wrote to her colleagues.

While ominous, none of the emails predicted that war was imminent. Nor did the analyst challenge the conventional wisdom among Israeli intelligence officials that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was not interested in war with Israel. But she correctly assessed that Hamas’s capabilities had drastically improved. The gap between the possible and the aspirational had narrowed significantly.

The failures to connect the dots echoed another analytical failure more than two decades ago, when the American authorities also had multiple indications that the terrorist group Al Qaeda was preparing an assault. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were largely a failure of analysis and imagination, a government commission concluded.

“The Israeli intelligence failure on Oct. 7 is sounding more and more like our 9/11,” said Ted Singer, a recently retired senior C.I.A. official who worked extensively in the Middle East. “The failure will be a gap in analysis to paint a convincing picture to military and political leadership that Hamas had the intention to launch the attack when it did.”

No Israeli town suffered more bloodshed on Oct. 7 than the village of Be’eri. Here is what happened during a rampage that has traumatized a nation.

By Patrick Kingsley, Aaron Boxerman, Natan Odenheimer, Ronen Bergman and Marco Hernande

In a small Israeli farming community, the Bachar family saw little need to lock their door.

Then Hamas gunmen charged into their town. Hadar, 13, along with her father, mother and older brother, rushed into their safe room.

After the terrorists set their home ablaze, smoke seeped into the shelter.

The gunmen had already fired through the door, hitting her father and brother.

For 13 hours, the family hid in this room.

Their tormentors blasted open the shutters and threw grenades inside.

The Bachars were among the dozens of families terrorized in Be’eri, where more people were killed in the Oct. 7 attack than in any other Israeli community. Here is how a day of horror that traumatized a nation unfolded.

THE MASSACRE AT BE’ERI was not a single outburst of violence, over in a terrifying instant. It was a prolonged rampage, in which dozens of terrorists roamed freely through a pastoral village, killing methodically and with cruelty.

A 10-week New York Times investigation into what happened at Be’eri, based on interviews with scores of survivors and witnesses as well as on videos, text messages and recordings of phone calls, revealed a nightmare that lasted from just after dawn until well into the next day.

For a nation founded as a safe haven for Jews, the atrocities of Be’eri stand out as a defining trauma of the Oct. 7 attacks. An estimated 1,200 people died after Hamas and its allies surged across the border that day, provoking an Israeli campaign in Gaza that has killed roughly 20,000 people.

We interviewed more than 80 survivors, victims’ relatives, village leaders, soldiers and medics, and verified more than nine hours of security camera footage as well as phone and bodycam video shot by Gazans. We also reviewed more than 1,000 text messages and voice recordings, and used three-dimensional footage of Be’eri taken by Treedis, an Israeli software company, in the days after the massacre to reconstruct several sites where people were killed.

That allowed us to identify where most of the people at the kibbutz were killed. The loss of at least 97 civilians constituted almost one in every 10 people who lived in Be’eri, a community just east of Gaza that is roughly as small as Greenwich Village in New York City.

Hamas gunmen and their allies focused their attack on the western parts of the village, the area closest to Gaza. They ransacked those neighborhoods house by house, systematically setting fire to scores of homes, killing many of those they found inside and abducting others.

In the center of the village, the gunmen slaughtered most of the people hiding inside a besieged health clinic. On the eastern flank of Be’eri, another squad of attackers gathered 14 hostages inside a ransacked home and used them as human shields during a standoff with Israeli forces; some of the hostages were killed in the crossfire, during a delayed and chaotic military response.

Residents were shot in their bedrooms, on the sidewalk, and under trees, where they lay like rag dolls in a heap. Others were trapped in burning buildings, their bodies found charred beyond recognition. The oldest victim was 88, and the youngest was less than a year old.

If there was method to the assault, there was also randomness to it. Some residents who hid in bathrooms or shrubbery survived while many who sheltered in safe rooms were killed.

Spouses lost lifelong partners. Parents lost children. Children lost parents.

Hadar Bachar, a poised 13-year-old who had planned to spend the day at a village festival, was determined to save her father after he was shot.

From the safe room, she made a video call to the ambulance service, which it recorded and later shared with the family.

To show her father’s wounds to the dispatcher, Hadar panned around the room.

Her father, Avida Bachar, a 50-year-old farmer, was lying on the couch, unconscious but alive. His trousers were bloodied by bullets and grenade shrapnel.

Hoping to stem the bleeding, the dispatcher tried to tell Hadar how to make a tourniquet from a piece of clothing.

“No way I can,” she said. “I can’t even get up.”

She, too, was bleeding from the shrapnel of a grenade.

6:56 a.m.: A Rampage Begins

Surveillance footage shows the first Hamas militants emerging from the woods on the edge of Be’eri shortly after sunrise. There were two of them, clad in combat uniforms and carrying assault rifles. They crept cautiously toward the village entrance, one wearing a green Hamas bandanna and the other a back-to-front cap.

Many residents were already awake, jolted from sleep roughly 25 minutes earlier by an unusually intense barrage of rockets from Gaza. The rockets had been mostly intercepted by Israel’s air-defense system, and some villagers resumed their Saturday routines.

One man was out jogging. Several loaded their cars with bicycles, ready for a day in the countryside. A team of chefs had begun to prepare breakfast at the dining hall.

Nirit Hunwald, a nurse, was preparing to take her children to a village-wide treasure hunt.

Rinat Even, a social worker, was planning a family trip to see her siblings and parents in a nearby kibbutz.

Mr. Bachar was standing outside his home, gazing at the sky, wondering when the Israeli Air Force would respond to the rocket fire from Gaza.

Like most Israeli collective farms, or kibbutzim, Be’eri is a tightly knit community, sheltered from the outside world by a fence and a high yellow gate.

Residents often shared meals at a large communal dining hall and celebrated Jewish holidays together. Many left their doors unlocked and let their children play outside unsupervised until late at night.

They pooled their salaries into a central pot, which was then divided among the villagers. In addition to their farms, they ran an art gallery, a culture center and a large printworks.

The night before the attack, many residents had sipped wine and sung together in the village hall to mark the 77th anniversary of Be’eri.

The kibbutz was founded on the night of Oct. 5, 1946, one of 11 Jewish outposts established at the same time in an area largely populated by Arabs. In 1948, Arabs and Jews fought over the area during a war that forged the boundaries of the new state of Israel.

Egypt captured a sliver of nearby coastal land that became known as the Gaza Strip, and Be’eri became an Israeli border town, a short drive from Gaza’s eastern edge.

Israel occupied Gaza during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, withdrawing its troops in 2005 to allow Palestinians to run the territory. Hamas, an Islamist group opposed to Israel’s existence, seized power there in 2007, prompting Israel and Egypt to place Gaza under a crippling blockade.

Ever since, Be’eri has been on the frontline of several wars between Israel and Hamas. Whenever Hamas fired rockets from Gaza, families hurried into rocket-proof safe rooms, often a child’s bedroom.

Yet in a country that had shifted to the right, Be’eri was also known as a left-wing stronghold, filled with those who still believed in peace with the Palestinians. Some helped transport Gazans to and from medical treatment in Israel.

The yellow village gate embodied the sense of sanctuary that Be’eri offered its residents. It was a safe haven. Until that morning.

Using the butt of his rifle, one Hamas gunman smashed the window of the empty guardroom beside the gate.

He climbed inside. A second gunman hid in the trees.

Less than 20 seconds later, Benayahu Bitton, 22, approached Be’eri from the main road in a dark gray sedan, along with two friends.

The three had spent the night at a rave held roughly two miles away. Minutes earlier, Hamas gunmen had attacked the rave, and they fled.

Now, they were at the threshold of the nearest refuge they could find: the yellow gate of the Be’eri kibbutz.

The gate began to open.

Unseen by Mr. Bitton, the second gunman sneaked out from behind a tree, weapon raised, and fired into the car.

Mr. Bitton twisted in his seat, twitched, before slumping motionless.

The car rolled slowly through the open gate, coming to a halt 20 yards inside the village.

Mr. Bitton and his two friends were dead.

The massacre at Be’eri had begun.

7:42 a.m.: ‘Where Is the Army?’

The fear spread quickly in Be’eri, as scores of gunmen flowed into the village. The attackers almost immediately killed the head of the local emergency squad, a group of residents trained to help in moments of crisis.

Their leader dead, the surviving volunteers could not unlock the community storeroom where many of their guns were kept. Some of them were left unarmed.

They retreated to a dentist’s clinic, one of them shot and gravely wounded. Ms. Hunwald, the nurse, rushed through the streets to treat him.

On the village messaging app, residents repeatedly wondered why they had been left to fend for themselves.

The Israeli military had been overwhelmed by the scale of the Hamas attack. The main army headquarters in the area had been breached. Troops were ambushed on a main road, restricting access to almost all the affected kibbutzim, including Be’eri.

A small group of police officers managed to reach Be’eri at 7:37 a.m., driving an unmarked car. Security footage shows them parking near the entrance and dashing chaotically into the village.

While they were gone, a squad of gunmen arrived on motorbikes, rummaging through Mr. Bitton’s car. They also unsuccessfully attempted to steal the police officers’ jeep. When the police returned, nearly an hour later, they found some contents of Mr. Bitton’s car — clothes and a cooler — strewn across the sidewalk.

The body of one of Mr. Bitton’s slain friends was hanging limply from an open door.

Overwhelmed and outmanned, the police fled.

Once again, the village’s emergency squad was left to defend Be’eri alone.

10:05 a.m.: A Terrorist at the Door

Avida Bachar had lived in Be’eri all his life and managed the village farms, cultivating wheat, mangoes and avocados. His wife, Dana, 48, ran one of the village nursery schools, and was so skilled at caring for young children that some in the kibbutz called her a “baby whisperer.”

They had met as teenagers when Mr. Bachar was serving as a conscript in the navy, close to where Ms. Bachar was also doing mandatory service. They spent a year together in New York, where she worked as a nanny and he as a mover, before deciding to build a life together back in Be’eri.

They had raised their four children in a two-story home with beige walls on the western edge of the village, in the neighborhood closest to Gaza.

Carmel, 15, was an energetic teenager who loved surfing. Hadar was seen as mature for her age, an independent-minded young teenager who enjoyed baking and often helped her mother, Dana, at the nursery. Their elder brothers were away.

After news spread of the attack, the couple hurried with Hadar and Carmel into their safe room, a spare bedroom on the ground floor. Carmel grabbed several kitchen knives, in case he needed to defend his family.

The couple realized the militants had entered from the ring of the Austrian cowbell hanging on their front door.

“We hear them,” Dana Bachar wrote in a family WhatsApp group at 10:05 a.m.

As the Bachars hid in their safe room, groups of men were rampaging across the kibbutz — killing, looting and burning, surveillance video shows. Some were uniformed militants from Hamas. Others appeared to be civilians from Gaza who had followed in their wake. At least 120 men raided Be’eri that day, according to an Israeli commander who led the fight to retake the village, while village leaders put the number at over 200.

Scores arrived at the village’s side entrance, most in cars and one riding a horse-and-cart. At first, they heaved themselves over the 10-foot fence, one of them with a cigarette casually dangling from his lips.

Then one man kicked open a pedestrian gate, allowing the intruders to enter more easily. Young men, wearing T-shirts and jeans, sprinted inside. An elderly man with a white beard, leaning on two walking sticks, followed after them.

By now, a small group of Israeli special forces had arrived by helicopter. They tried to fight their way through the kibbutz, but were heavily outnumbered. One soldier was shot dead, and another was wounded by a gunshot to the chest, according to two members of the unit and a civilian who accompanied them.

By late morning, they had retreated to the main gate, where they tried to repel a new wave of attackers. Footage from the gate shows Israeli soldiers shooting at a car of militants, two of whom flee before the car catches fire.

The attackers were largely free to plunder, murder and kidnap.

Residents were rounded up and taken at gunpoint to the terrorists’ vehicles. Footage showed one squad of militants corralling barefoot residents along a village street, and another group leading an 85-year-old woman through a garden.

Gazans who roamed the kibbutz stole bicycles, a television, a golf buggy, even a tractor, video feeds reviewed by The Times showed.

Militants also made off with Mr. Bitton’s car, discarding his body in the street, security cameras show. Later, two men arrived in a jeep, picked up the body of one of Mr. Bitton’s passengers, and drove away with it.

For roughly four hours, the Bachar family hid in their safe room unnoticed. They silenced their phones and communicated with relatives by text and whispered voice notes. Unable to venture outside, they relieved themselves in a pot whenever they needed the bathroom.

By 11:23 a.m., a group of men was trying to break inside the safe room, according to messages sent by the family and their friends.

While safe rooms have reinforced walls designed to protect against rocket fire, they usually have no locks. They were never intended to keep out intruders.

So when the intruders tried to wrench the door open, Mr. Bachar could only grab its handle from the inside, struggling to keep the door shut.

That is when one of the attackers began firing at the door, piercing it.

One burst hit Carmel in the hand and abdomen.

A second burst struck Mr. Bachar’s legs.

Wounded and exhausted, Mr. Bachar fell back into the room, expecting the attackers to enter.

Instead, smoke began to seep under the door. The attackers had set their home on fire.

Desperate for air, the Bachars opened the window, which was protected by reinforced iron shutters. Minutes later, the attackers blasted open the shutters, throwing in grenades and firing on the family.

The grenades wounded Hadar and her father.

12:05 p.m: Running Out of Air

A few houses down the street, Rinat Even, the social worker, texted her final goodbyes to friends and relatives.

“I don’t see a way out of this,” Ms. Even, 44, wrote to her brothers.

“I don’t believe we will make it,” she wrote to a friend.

Ms. Even was sweltering with her family and their dog in their safe room.

Ms. Even had grown up nine miles away, in another farming village where her parents still live. She had moved to Be’eri in her 20s, initially working in the kindergarten, and eventually meeting Chen Even, a water engineer who later oversaw the irrigation of the village fields. They married in a modest ceremony beside the kibbutz swimming pool, and raised four sons, ages 8 to 16.

Now, their home was on fire, as was most of the neighborhood.

Outside, plumes of smoke were rising from several houses, turning the sky from bright blue to dark gray, security camera footage showed. The attackers burned dozens of homes in the village, in what appeared to be a systematic attempt to force residents to leave their safe rooms.

Families had to choose between being burned alive or shot to death.

One family of five waited until the magnets stuck to their safe room door began to melt. Then they jumped from a second-floor window, one child breaking his foot upon landing.

In another apartment in the same burning building, gunmen reached an 80-year-old retiree, Avlum Miles. In a call with his daughter at 1 p.m., he said they had removed the fingers on his left hand, without explaining how. He then began to drift in and out of consciousness.

“Dad, can you stay with me?” his daughter said, in a recording of the call provided to The Times. “I want you to stay with me.”

“I can’t hear anything,” Mr. Miles replied.

“I want you to stay with me the rest of my life, Dad,” his daughter said.

“Goodbye,” Mr. Miles said.

It was the last time she heard his voice.

At the Evens’ home, soot began to cover the walls of the house. Smoke filled their safe room. The heat rising, they stripped to their underwear.

“We must get out,” Ms. Even said in a text.

The parents and their sons prepared to die.

“No air,” Ms. Even wrote. “No rescue.”

In desperation, they opened a window and jumped. They left behind their dog, Marco, a Hungarian vizsla, fearing that he would attract attention.

With no other place to hide, the family lay down beneath a line of trees, according to photographs Ms. Even sent a friend.

After abandoning their clothes in the fire, the six of them were nearly naked.

As news spread that more soldiers had arrived, Ms. Even’s hopes rose.

“With God’s help it will end soon,” Ms. Even wrote a friend.

2:05 p.m.: Last Stand at the Clinic

A group of gunmen surged into the village dental clinic.

The civilian volunteers had been besieged here for nearly seven hours.

They had just run out of bullets, forcing them to retreat inside to hide.

Ms. Hunwald, the village nurse, crouched in a fetal position behind the bathroom door.

“I won’t survive,” she texted her wife. “They are right here.”

Until they ran out of ammunition, the volunteers from the emergency squad had slowed the attackers’ advance, fending them off for hours around the clinic. Two of them stood at the entrance to the clinic, opening fire on every gunman they saw.

Every few minutes the volunteers received another alert about another family in danger in Be’eri. Pinned down in the clinic, there was little they could do to respond.

“Everyone who leaves is shot,” Ms. Hunwald, 38, texted her wife.

The defense of the clinic had given Ms. Hunwald and two other medics time to treat some volunteers hurt in the raid. While one died, Ms. Hunwald and her team managed to save two — one hit in the back, and another hit in the pelvis.

Ms. Hunwald left a religious community to be with Einat Kornfeld, also 38, after they met as conscripts in the military. The couple moved to Be’eri five years ago, and had expected to spend the day playing and flying kites with their four children, ages 2 through 9.

Instead, Ms. Kornfeld was in the safe room with their children as attackers wandered near their home. After one child wet himself, the family lay for hours in a pool of urine.

Ms. Hunwald was crouched in a bathroom at the clinic, waiting for the gunmen to find her.

Another medic begged for mercy. The gunmen shot her dead.

Over the next few minutes, they killed three more people at the clinic, strafing its walls with gunfire.

One man survived after burrowing himself beneath a sink and pretending to be dead.

The gunmen didn’t check the bathroom where Ms. Hunwald hid.

3:25 p.m.: ‘Take Them All to Gaza’

The couple had thought they were safe after fleeing the massacre at the nearby music festival. Instead, they found a village under lockdown, facing a similar attack.

The couple, Yasmin Porat, 44, and Tal Katz, 37, knocked on several doors, hoping to find a resident who might give them shelter.

No one dared open up — until they reached the home of Hadas Dagan, a yoga teacher living on the southeastern side of the village.

Ms. Dagan, 70, and her husband, Adi, 68, were left-wing Israelis who regularly drove Palestinian invalids to hospitals across Israel, most recently earlier that week. They hurried the ravers inside and made them coffee.

The two couples rested inside the Dagans’ safe room and spent the morning watching television reports about the music festival.

Roughly six hours later around 2 p.m., the terrorists reached the home, according to texts sent by Ms. Porat at the time.

They blasted open the Dagans’ safe room door with an explosive.

Captured by Hamas militants, the two couples were led to a nearby house.

Inside, they found 10 other hostages, surrounded by gunmen. Nine were seated around a dining table, including the 68-year-old owner of the house, Pesi Cohen; two of Ms. Cohen’s houseguests; as well as four retirees and 12-year-old twins who had been abducted from nearby homes.

One hostage stood nearby, a Palestinian minibus driver from East Jerusalem captured after he waited to collect people attending the music festival. Another of Ms. Cohen’s guests was dead, slumped on the floor.

Using the minibus driver as a translator, the captors explained that they intended to take the hostages back to Gaza.

The Israeli security forces were beginning to regain control of Be’eri, so they asked Ms. Porat to help them negotiate safe passage.

She set up a call between the Hamas commander and an Arabic-speaking police officer.

“Hello, God give you health,” the Hamas commander told the officer in Arabic, in a call recorded by the police and obtained by The Times.

“God give you health,” said the officer. “Who’s speaking with me? What’s your name?”

“God bless you, I’m from the Qassam brigades,” the commander replied, referring to Hamas’s military wing. “If you cause us any trouble, I’ll kill one of the hostages with me.”

“What’s the problem?” the officer asked. “Talk to me.”

“The problem is that I want to take them all to Gaza,” the commander replied.

“If you shoot us,” he said, “I’ll kill one of them.”

4 p.m.: A General’s Dilemma

With the military in disarray, Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram had suddenly been placed in charge of the Israeli effort to take back Be’eri and the surrounding area.

General Hiram was considered a rising star in the military. He lost an eye during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, and was set to take charge of the army’s Gaza division next year. His division operated in northern Israel and in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where General Hiram also lived.

He reached Be’eri around 4 p.m. to find a disorganized hodgepodge of Israeli units fighting in different parts of the village.

One group of special forces was focused on advancing through the western part of Be’eri, while another was assigned the eastern flank. Surveillance footage showed soldiers recapturing the village dining hall, fanning out across a parking lot, and evacuating wounded residents through the same side gate that attackers, hours earlier, had used to breach the village.

A single tank was just arriving.

And a complicated situation was developing at Pesi Cohen’s house, where the 14 hostages were being held.

To slow the soldiers’ advance, the captors had forced roughly half of the hostages, including the Dagans, into Ms. Cohen’s backyard. They positioned the hostages between the troops and the house, according to Ms. Dagan and Ms. Porat.

Expecting crossfire, the Dagans lay down beside the wall of the house, Ms. Dagan cradling her husband from behind.

Around 4 p.m., a police SWAT team and the gunmen began exchanging fire, both women recalled. The hostages in the backyard were trapped in the middle.

Hiding in the kitchen, the Hamas commander began taking off his clothes. Nearly naked, he held Ms. Porat and walked her out of the house, toward the SWAT team, prompting the officers to stop firing.

The Hamas fighter was surrendering, and Ms. Porat was his human shield.

After the two safely reached the police, the gunfire continued, on and off, for more than an hour.

During another lull, Ms. Dagan opened her eyes to see at least two hostages and a captor killed in the gunfire. It wasn’t clear who killed them, she said.

As the dusk approached, the SWAT commander and General Hiram began to argue. The SWAT commander thought more kidnappers might surrender. The general wanted the situation resolved by nightfall.

Minutes later, the militants launched a rocket-propelled grenade, according to the general and other witnesses who spoke to The Times.

“The negotiations are over,” General Hiram recalled telling the tank commander. “Break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties.”

The tank fired two light shells at the house.

Shrapnel from the second shell hit Mr. Dagan in the neck, severing an artery and killing him, his wife said.

During the melee, the kidnappers were also killed.

Only two of the 14 hostages — Ms. Dagan and Ms. Porat — survived.

8 p.m.: ‘Wow, This Was a Massacre’

It was dark by the time Israeli troops finally reached the home of the Bachar family.

One soldier peered through the window of the Bachars’ safe room — the same window through which the gunmen had, hours earlier, thrown several grenades.

The soldier flashed the light fixed to the barrel of his gun.

The light fell on Hadar and her father, both still alive. Her mother and brother were dead.

“Wow, this was a massacre,” Mr. Bachar remembered the soldier saying. His leg was later amputated.

Ms. Hunwald, the nurse who hid in the clinic bathroom, was reunited with her family around the same time.

As they awaited a bus to take them to safety, rockets flying overhead, the family watched a steady stream of survivors emerge from Be’eri. Some were covered in ash and many were in tears, Ms. Hunwald recalled.

“We’re sitting there helplessly, hugging and crying, still thinking about who might be alive and who might be dead,” Ms. Hunwald said.

It would be another day before the soldiers regained full control over the neighborhood.

By then, bodies lay strewn on sidewalks across the village. More than 120 homes stood smoldering or in ruins. Scores of cars had been burned to ashen husks. Two first responders said they found a dead woman tied to a tree, naked.

At least 25 people had been abducted to Gaza.

As the sun set, a soldier spotted and photographed several half-naked bodies lying under a line of trees.

There were four of them: a woman, a man and two teenage boys — all curled into a fetal position.

Six soldiers stared at their bodies in silence.

It was the Evens and their two eldest sons.

They had all been shot dead.

Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel. Produced by Rumsey Taylor and Alan Yuhas. Additional work by Meg Felling

Additional sources

The three-dimensional footage inside the Bachar family home and the dental clinic was captured by employees of Treedis, an Israeli software company, who sought to document the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks in detail. Treedis, which makes a platform to turn physical spaces into immersive environments, has captured and published 3-D visualizations online about a number of sites of the attacks.

Correction: Dec. 23, 2023

An earlier version of this article misstated which part of the army Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram was set to take charge of next year. It was the Gaza division, not the Gaza brigade.

Correction: Dec. 23, 2023

An earlier version of a video caption misstated the location of a farmyard. It was in a nearby kibbutz, not Be’eri.

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.

By Raja Abdulrahim

Photographs by Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud

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.”

But the furious pace of the strikes — more than 15,000 to date, according to the Israeli military, including in southern Gaza as well — makes the Israeli bombing campaign on the Palestinian territory one of the most intense of the 21st century. And it is happening in a dense urban enclave under siege with high concentrations of civilians, particularly children, setting off mounting global alarm, even from some of Israel’s closest allies.

After initially questioning the death toll reported by health officials in Gaza, the Biden administration now says that “far too many” Palestinians have been killed, conceding that the true figures for civilian casualties may be “even higher than are being cited.”

So many children are brought into the morgue at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al Balah that the morgue director, Yassir Abu Amar, says he has to cut his burial shrouds into child-size fragments to handle the influx of corpses.

“The children’s bodies come to us broken and in pieces,” he said. “It’s chilling.”

“We’ve never seen this number of children killed,” he added. “We cry every day. Every day, we cry while we’re working to prepare the children.”

During previous wars, parents in Gaza, a crowded strip with more than two million people, sometimes put their children to bed in different rooms of their homes. If an airstrike damaged one part of the house, the other children might live.

Given the scale of the bombardment this time — which many Gazans describe as indiscriminate and without warning — some parents have put much greater distances between their children, splitting them up and sending them to relatives in different parts of the Gaza Strip to try to increase their odds of survival. Others have taken to scrawling names directly onto their children’s skin, in case they are lost, orphaned or killed and need to be identified.

In the emergency room of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah said that many children had been brought in alone and in shock, with burns, shrapnel wounds or severe injuries from being crushed by rubble. In many cases, he said, no one knew who they were.

“They are given a designation — ‘Unknown Trauma Child’ — until someone recognizes them,” he said. “The crippling thing is that some of them are the sole survivors of their family, so no one ever comes.”

“More and more, it seems like a war against children,” said Dr. Abu-Sittah.

Two weeks ago, the emergency room at Al-Shifa registered “Unknown Trauma Child 1,500,” Dr. Abu-Sittah said.

Then, in recent days, Israeli forces stormed the hospital, where thousands of Gazans had been sheltering, saying that the facility sat above an underground Hamas command center. United Nations officials warned that the raid put Gaza’s most vulnerable in even greater jeopardy.

International experts who have worked with health officials in Gaza during this and other wars say that hospitals and morgues in the enclave gather and report the names, ID numbers and other details of people who have been killed in the territory. While the experts urged caution around public statements about the specific number of people killed in a particular strike — especially in the immediate aftermath of a blast — they said the aggregate death tolls reported by health workers in Gaza have typically proven to be accurate.

The Israeli military says it “regrets any harm caused to civilians (especially children),” adding that it is examining “all its operations” to ensure that it follows its own rules and adheres to international law.

But a growing number of human rights groups and officials contend that Israel has already broken that law.

After condemning the “heinous, brutal and shocking” attacks by Hamas as war crimes, Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said this month, “The collective punishment by Israel of Palestinian civilians amounts also to a war crime, as does the unlawful forcible evacuation of civilians.”

“The massive bombardments by Israel have killed, maimed and injured in particular women and children,” he added. “All of this has an unbearable toll.”

Some international officials warn that children are in danger no matter where they go. “There is nowhere safe for Gaza’s one million children to turn,” said Catherine Russell, the director of UNICEF.

On Oct. 15, Dr. Mohammad Abu Moussa said that he was on a 24-hour shift at Al-Nasr Hospital in Khan Younis — south of the evacuation line drawn by Israel — when he heard a loud explosion nearby. He called his wife at home, but when she answered, he said, all he heard were screams.

Soon, he said, his wife, 12-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son were brought into the emergency room, bloodied, hysterical and covered in dust from rubble. He tried to comfort them, but panicked when he noticed that his youngest son, 7-year-old Yousef, was not with them.

“Where’s Yousef?” he recalled asking.

No one would answer.

When he pressed again about his son, he said a neighbor simply responded, “May God have mercy on his soul.”

Dr. Abu Moussa didn’t want to believe it. Video from journalists at the hospital shows him frantically searching for Yousef. Dr. Abu Moussa recounted how he had asked other departments, including the intensive care unit, whether his son had been rushed there instead.

Then, he said, a journalist showed him pictures of their demolished home. Dr. Abu Moussa said he recognized the gray clothing Yousef had been wearing when he kissed him goodbye before leaving the house.

With dread, Dr. Abu Moussa walked from the emergency room to the hospital morgue. That’s where he said he finally found Yousef, a jokester with a cheeky smile who stuck out his tongue in photographs. Now, his lifeless body was lying on a gurney.

The shock was too much to bear. Dr. Abu Moussa recalled looking away before a colleague embraced him.

Multiple relatives said that airstrikes had hit their home without warning, and that Dr. Abu Moussa’s family had been pulled from the rubble. The Israeli military said it could not address questions about a strike on the family.

“Yousef was a very loved child,” said his mother, Rawan, a fitness instructor. “He was always smiling. He loved to laugh and make people laugh.”

At home, the boy had wanted to eat every meal next to his father, or in his lap, sometimes even sharing the same spoon.

“He would emulate me in everything I did,” Dr. Abu Moussa said, adding that his son had wanted to become a doctor as well.

Yousef was not the only one killed. Dr. Abu Moussa’s brother, Jasir Abu Moussa, lost both of his sons and his wife, family members said.

Dr. Abu Moussa’s nephew Hmaid, 18, had recently graduated from high school with high marks, the family said. He got his love of cars from his father and, from his mother, a love of poetry and art. He had hopes of studying mechanical engineering in Europe, relatives said, and had begun studying German even as he was studying for his high school exams.

His younger brother, Abdulrahman, 8, was even smarter, the family said. He was killed, too.

“He was a handful,” Jasir Abu Moussa said of his younger son. “But he was also very smart, and delightful.”

Death colors the living, as well.

Many children are showing clear signs of trauma, including night terrors, said Nida Zaeem, a mental health field officer with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza.

“They are waking up shouting, screaming,” Ms. Zaeem said from a Red Cross shelter in Rafah, in the south, where she is staying with her family, including four children. Each night, she added, children in the shelter yell, “We’re going to die, we’re going to die.”

“They are shouting, pleading, ‘Please protect me, please, please hide me. I don’t want to die,’” she added.

In an encampment sheltering thousands of people around a United Nations center, Hammoud Qadada, 4, tried to focus on a video game inside a tent as the thundering sound of strikes were close enough to shake the ground beneath him.

When the soccer players on the screen scored, everyone in the tent — his siblings, cousins and other children from the makeshift encampment — yelled “goooaaal” so loudly that people in nearby tents thought a cease-fire had been announced.

Their parents had hooked up a television to a solar panel and, when it seemed safe enough, people played real soccer outside between the tents — trying to distract the children.

It wasn’t enough.

The next morning, Hammoud’s grandmother said he woke up and said, “I’m going to die.”

“I told him no,” said his grandmother, Hanaan Jaber, 53. “God willing, you will grow up and you will get married and tell your children what happened with us here, like a story.”

Hammoud’s vocabulary has already been shaped by the war. Soon after it started, he asked his parents what “martyrdom” meant. When asked what is happening around him, he answers without hesitation: “Airstrikes. Airstrikes and war.”

Gaza, a coastal strip where cabanas and food shacks line the Mediterranean, once had a lively beach culture. Yasser Abou Ishaq, 34, recalled how he used to teach his three young daughters how to swim.

“They were always asking me to go to the beach, to the amusement park, to the parks,” he said. “I loved watching them play.”

Amal, his oldest, 7, was named after his mother. At school, she was a good student with excellent penmanship, he recalled. At home, she became the teacher who made her younger sister Israa, a 4-year-old who loved chocolate and Kinder toys, play along as the student.

When his home was destroyed by what he said was an airstrike, he lost them both, he said. His wife was killed as well, he said.

In all, 25 members of his family, 15 of them children, have been killed, he said. Local journalists reported a strike and shared footage of bodies in burial shrouds — members of the Abou Ishaq family, they said — lined up on the ground as relatives cried over them. The Israeli military said it could not address questions about a strike on the family.

Mr. Abou Ishaq said that he and his 1-year-old daughter, Habiba, had been wounded and taken to the hospital. Most of his family, including his wife and Amal, were pulled from the rubble the same day and buried by relatives, he said, while he was still being treated. He never got the chance to say goodbye, he said.

The next day, Israa’s body was pulled from the rubble, he said. He was able to see her in the hospital’s morgue and hold her one last time.

“I hugged and kissed her. I said goodbye and I cried,” he said. “God only knows how much I cried.”

Reporting was contributed by Alan Yuhas, Samar Abu Elouf, Ameera Harouda and Abu Bakr Bashir

By Robin Stein, Haley Willis, Ishaan Jhaveri, Danielle Miller, Aaron Byrd and Natalie Reneau

A Times investigation used aerial imagery and artificial intelligence to detect bomb craters that showed that one of Israel’s biggest bombs was used routinely in south Gaza.

Agents worried as millions poured in. Hamas bought weapons and plotted an attack. The authorities now say the money helped lay the groundwork for the Oct. 7 assault on Israel.

By Jo Becker and Justin Scheck

Israeli security officials scored a major intelligence coup in 2018: secret documents that laid out, in intricate detail, what amounted to a private equity fund that Hamas used to finance its operations.

The ledgers, pilfered from the computer of a senior Hamas official, listed assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Hamas controlled mining, chicken farming and road building companies in Sudan, twin skyscrapers in the United Arab Emirates, a property developer in Algeria, and a real estate firm listed on the Turkish stock exchange.

The documents, which The New York Times reviewed, were a potential road map for choking off Hamas’s money and thwarting its plans. The agents who obtained the records shared them inside their own government and in Washington.

Nothing happened.

For years, none of the companies named in the ledgers faced sanctions from the United States or Israel. Nobody publicly called out the companies or pressured Turkey, the hub of the financial network, to shut it down.

A Times investigation found that both senior Israeli and American officials failed to prioritize financial intelligence — which they had in hand — showing that tens of millions of dollars flowed from the companies to Hamas at the exact moment that it was buying new weapons and preparing an attack.

That money, American and Israeli officials now say, helped Hamas build up its military infrastructure and helped lay the groundwork for the Oct. 7 attacks.

“Everyone is talking about failures of intelligence on Oct. 7, but no one is talking about the failure to stop the money,” said Udi Levy, a former chief of Mossad’s economic warfare division. “It’s the money — the money — that allowed this.”

At its peak, Israeli and American officials now say, the portfolio had a value of roughly half a billion dollars.

Even after the Treasury Department finally levied sanctions against the network in 2022, records show, Hamas-linked figures were able to obtain millions of dollars by selling shares in a blacklisted company. The Treasury Department now fears that such money flows will allow Hamas to finance its continuing war with Israel and to rebuild when it is over.

“It’s something we are deeply worried about and expect to see given the financial stress Hamas is under,” said Brian Nelson, the Treasury Department’s under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. “What we are trying to do is disrupt that.”

That was what Israel’s terrorism-finance investigators hoped to do with their 2018 discovery. But at the top echelons of the Israeli and American governments, officials focused on putting together a series of financial sanctions against Iran. Neither country prioritized Hamas.

Israeli leaders believed that Hamas was more interested in governing than fighting. By the time the agents discovered the ledgers in 2018, the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was encouraging the government of Qatar to deliver millions of dollars to the Gaza Strip. He gambled that the money would buy stability and peace.

Mr. Levy recalled briefing Mr. Netanyahu personally in 2015 about the Hamas portfolio.

“I can tell you for sure that I talked to him about this,” Mr. Levy said. “But he didn’t care that much about it.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s Mossad chief shut down Mr. Levy’s team, Task Force Harpoon, that focused on disrupting the money flowing to groups including Hamas.

Former Harpoon agents grew so frustrated with the inaction that they uploaded some documents to Facebook, hoping that companies and investors would find them and stop doing business with Hamas-linked companies.

In the years that followed the 2018 discovery, Hamas’s money network burrowed deeper into the mainstream financial system, records show.

The Turkish company at the heart of the operation had such a sheen of legitimacy that major American and European banks managed shares on behalf of clients. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints invested tens of thousands of dollars before the company was placed under sanction.

The Times reviewed previously undisclosed intelligence documents and corporate records and interviewed dozens of current officials from the United States, Israel, Turkey and Hamas’s financial network. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

Israeli intelligence and security agencies have apologized for the failings that led up to the Oct. 7 attacks.

Mr. Netanyahu has acknowledged that his government failed to protect its people and said that he would face, and answer, tough questions after the war. He has denied, though, that he took his eye off Hamas. But he declined to answer questions from The Times about the ledgers or the hunt for Hamas’s money.

2015: Task Force Harpoon

Israeli security and intelligence officials, working from a secure compound outside Tel Aviv, spent years tracking Hamas’s money. By 2015, they were on to what they called Hamas’s “secret investment portfolio.”

Terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State often use front companies to launder money. But here, Israeli agents saw something different, more ambitious: a multinational network of real businesses churning out real profits.

On paper, they looked like unrelated companies. But over and over, the Israelis said they identified the same Hamas-linked figures as shareholders, executives and board members.

There were people like Hisham Qafisheh, a white-goateed Jordanian who studied in Saudi Arabia and had a knack for finding political support. One of his companies won a $500 million highway contract in Sudan.

Then there was Amer Al-Shawa, a Turkish man of Palestinian descent who studied electrical engineering in Ohio and more recently spent five months under interrogation in an Emirati jail on suspicion of funding Hamas.

At the top was Ahmed Odeh, a heavyset Jordanian businessman with years of experience in Saudi Arabia. The Israelis learned — and the Americans now say much of this publicly — that Hamas’s governing Shura Council had given Mr. Odeh seed money to build and manage a portfolio of companies.

Hamas, the de facto governing body of Gaza, relied principally on Iran to fund its military wing. But Hamas wanted its own funding stream, too.

The Israeli security services operated a terrorism-finance investigative team at the time called Task Force Harpoon. It put people from across counterterrorism — spies, soldiers, police officers, accountants, lawyers — under the same umbrella and gave them a direct report to the prime minister. The task force even had an economic warfare unit within the Mossad intelligence agency that could covertly act on the intelligence it had gathered.

“We didn’t have any rivalries,” Tamir Pardo, the Mossad chief at the time, said in an interview. “No one got credit for any one operation. It just worked.”

Harpoon, he said, was “one of the most important tools the Mossad had.” It churned out intelligence to financial regulators, law enforcement agencies, politicians and allies in Washington, helping Israel win financial sanctions targeting Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah.

Mr. Levy, who ran Harpoon and its dedicated economic warfare unit, recalled the first time he heard about Hamas’s portfolio.

“One of the guys on my team, a Mossad guy, showed it to me,” Mr. Levy said. “What we understood then was that they had these companies to make a little bit of money and to use them as a legal platform to transfer money from place to place.”

Back then, the consensus among Israeli officials was that Iran was the bigger threat. It had nuclear ambitions and armed both Hamas and the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. So the bulk of the task force’s attention remained focused there.

Still, Mr. Levy said the discovery was enough of a “red flag” that he told Mr. Netanyahu about it.

2016: Shut Down

A 2014 war between Israel and Hamas had left Hamas’s fortifications in ruins and its arsenal depleted.

Hamas, though, was able to rebuild. In 2016, Israeli intelligence officials noted that the group was obtaining GPS jammers, drones and precision weapons, according to a military document reviewed by The Times.

Hamas had added about 6,000 operatives to its ranks since the war ended, and the military had learned that Hamas was developing plans to storm Israeli communities and take hostages.

By 2016, Mr. Netanyahu’s government had begun pursuing a strategy to contain Hamas by allowing the Qataris to send money to Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu says that money was humanitarian aid. Privately, he told others that stabilizing Hamas would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state.

That same year, the new Mossad chief, Yossi Cohen, dismantled Harpoon as part of an agency reorganization, according to Mr. Levy and others.

Mr. Levy left government that year. A new group of intelligence agents and specialists from a few other agencies kept chasing the money, only without the organizational structure and direct access to senior policymakers.

This new group soon made another alarming discovery.

Up until that point, members of the team told The Times, they had estimated that Hamas was taking about $10 million to $15 million annually from their companies’ profits.

Then they learned, based on sources and other intelligence, that Hamas had sold off some of the secret portfolio’s assets, raising more than $75 million. That money, according to an Israeli intelligence assessment, was sent to Gaza, where it was used to rebuild Hamas’s military infrastructure.

The Israeli authorities have now concluded that this influx of money not only helped Hamas prepare for the Oct. 7 attacks, but gave leaders confidence that they would have the money to rebuild afterward, according to five Israeli security officials.

Exactly how significant that money was to the Oct. 7 attacks is unknown. Israeli officials have promised an inquiry into the intelligence failures that led up to the attacks, and new details may emerge.

But what is clear is that the Israeli government took no public action against the Hamas-linked companies. Instead, it decided to build a case to get the United States government to shut the companies off from the global financial system. But that would take time, and more evidence.

2018: The Big Break

Exactly how Israeli intelligence obtained the ledgers — whether from an informant or a computer hack — remains unclear. But in 2018, the team got the proof it had been seeking.

The documents were created by Mahmoud Ghazal, a man whom the Israelis had identified as the Hamas portfolio’s bookkeeper.

The ledgers spanned 2012 to 2018 and contained entries and valuations for companies that the agents had been monitoring in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkey and elsewhere. The records also contained familiar names, including Mr. Qafisheh and Mr. Al-Shawa.

The documents were hard evidence of what the Israelis had long suspected: Despite what public records said, Hamas was in control.

“It was a big breakthrough,” said one official involved in the investigation. “Hamas could hide behind frontmen and shareholders, but the money always talks.”

The ledgers also contained coded entries that puzzled investigators, but one document was a sort of Rosetta Stone: “QG” for instance, referred to Qitaa Ghaza, or the Gaza Strip. “D” referred to Daffa, or the West Bank. Beside each was a large dollar figure. From this, the Israelis deduced where Hamas was sending its money.

This discovery was quickly bolstered by intelligence from Saudi Arabia. In mid-2018, the Saudis arrested Mr. Ghazal, the Hamas accountant, and two other men who corporate records show held positions in 18 companies in the portfolio.

Under interrogation, Mr. Ghazal confessed that the portfolio existed to transfer money to Hamas, according to records related to the three men’s arrests that were viewed by The Times. He also said that, just as the Israelis had long suspected, Mr. Odeh directed where the money went.

The two other men told their interrogators that they were shareholders in name only. Their stakes were actually owned by Mr. Qafisheh, the goateed Jordanian who had also been on the Israeli radar screen for years. Mr. Qafisheh, the men said, was a Hamas operative.

The documents do not say what the Saudis did to elicit the confessions. The kingdom’s harsh interrogation techniques have earned it international condemnation.

The Saudis shared the materials with Washington, according to officials with direct knowledge of the matter, knowing that Washington would share them with its close ally Israel. The Saudi monarchy has no tolerance for Hamas and hoped that Washington would blacklist the companies, the officials said.

The Israeli team shared the ledgers and its intelligence with American officials in early 2019, hoping to encourage financial sanctions.

But then, nothing.

The Trump administration did not act. Treasury Department officials said that they did not delay any decisions. Issuing sanctions, they said, is a complicated process. And Israel, which was more focused on getting the Americans to issue Iranian sanctions, did not press for more urgent actions, both Israeli and American officials say.

“We have great people still who are trying to do this work,” Mr. Levy said. “But if no one at a high level is putting this as a priority, what can they do?”

2019: Turkey

Though the investment portfolio spanned many countries, Turkey was key.

The Saudis had made clear with their arrests that Hamas was not welcome. And the financiers had lost much of their Sudanese income with the fall of the autocratic leader Omar al-Bashir.

Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, however, has not criminalized Hamas nor has it clearly restricted Hamas’s activities in Turkey.

By 2019, Mr. Odeh was in Turkey, as was Mr. Qafisheh.

Mr. Al-Shawa, the Ohio-educated engineer who had been in Israel’s sights for years, spent 135 days in Emirati jails before being released in 2015 — without explanation “and without breakfast,” he told The Times in an interview. He returned to Turkey.

Mr. Erdogan was a major proponent of the nation’s building industry, which was good news for the company at the center of the Hamas portfolio: a real estate developer named Trend GYO.

Trend took advantage of Mr. Erdogan’s building boom. It brought in an investor, Hamid Al Ahmar, with ties to the president. And it reorganized itself as a real estate investment trust, which had Turkish tax advantages, and went public.

Trend’s general manager, Mr. Al-Shawa, said he had no real power at the company. The board, he said, made all of the decisions. He denied being involved with Hamas, but he said that he suspected others at Trend were.

“Do I have proof? No. But sometimes you just have a feeling,” he said. “I really didn’t care. Why should I? I was there to make money.”

Mr. Odeh and Mr. Al Ahmar declined to comment through intermediaries. Trend would not pass messages seeking comment to Mr. Qafisheh, and a spokeswoman said he and Mr. Al Ahmar were no longer involved with the company. The spokeswoman said the question of whether Hamas owned the company was “ridiculous and meaningless.” She said Trend was appealing its Treasury designation. Hamas, through its media office in Lebanon, declined to comment.

Foreign investors piled in. In 2019, while Washington sat on the ledgers, American and European banks held more than 3 percent of the company’s publicly traded shares on behalf of clients, Turkish financial records show. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’s investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, bought more than 200,000 shares.

There is no indication that the church or the Western banks knew about any Hamas ties at the time. A church spokesman said that a U.S.-based investment adviser, Acadian Asset Management, bought the shares on its behalf. An Acadian spokesman said the company had “complied with all relevant laws.”

While the sanctions proposal languished, Israeli and American officials now say, Hamas appointed a new investment chief, Musa Dudin. Unlike his predecessors, he was a well-known Hamas military operative who had spent 18 years in an Israeli prison for his role in deadly attacks.

Mr. Dudin, too, has resettled in Turkey. Mr. Dudin declined to comment through an intermediary.

Meanwhile, Hamas-linked owners began cashing out. In 2019, Mr. Qafisheh sold more than $500,000 worth of stock, corporate filings show. In 2020, Mr. Al Ahmar sold shares worth $1.6 million.

The company’s owners got money out of the company another way, too. Mr. Al-Shawa, in his interview, said that the board pushed him to award Trend contracts to a construction company that Mr. Qafisheh owned with two other Trend shareholders.

Company records show that Trend paid that company more than $7.5 million from 2018 to 2022 — one example of how Hamas-linked figures pulled cash from the portfolio.

Trend, in a written statement, said it had paid the construction company “in accordance with commercial practices and legal rules” and no longer has a relationship with the company.

The Israeli agents understood that Iranian sanctions would take precedence over Hamas but were frustrated by the delays. At their wits’ end, former Task Force Harpoon members took a desperate step. In June 2021, they uploaded some of the Hamas financial records to Facebook. The documents revealed a few nodes of the secret network, including Trend. It is unclear whether that was authorized.

The goal was to create a trail of online breadcrumbs for journalists, financial investigators and others to follow. The Facebook post generated a smattering of news coverage.

“There wasn’t any way to use the intelligence we had,” said Uzi Shaya, a former Mossad agent and Harpoon member. “It was almost done as a last resort.”

Finally, in May 2022, the Treasury Department announced financial sanctions against what it called an expansive Hamas funding network. Mr. Odeh and Mr. Qafisheh were named as financiers.

“The United States is committed to denying Hamas the ability to generate and move funds and to holding Hamas accountable for its role in promoting and carrying out violence,” the department said.

Trend was financially blacklisted, as were several other associated companies.

All had been named in the ledgers that the Israeli team had given the Americans three years earlier.

2023: Aftermath

Late last month, Mr. Nelson, the Treasury Department official, flew to Turkey to urge the Turkish government to stop sheltering Hamas’s money.

“It’s the highest priority in our building,” he said in an interview this month. The department recently added Mr. Dudin, Mr. Al-Shawa and others to the financial blacklist. Mr. Al-Shawa said he was appealing the decision.

Mr. Erdogan has given no indication that he intends to recognize those sanctions. After the Oct. 7 attacks, he declared that Hamas was not a terrorist organization, but a “liberation group.”

Americans “are the only ones who set the law in the world and all others follow,” Hasan Turan, a member of Parliament from Mr. Erdogan’s governing party, said in a recent interview. “It is not acceptable.”

Mr. Turan even met with Mr. Al Ahmar, the former Trend investor, last month to discuss ways to support the Palestinians.

The value of Trend’s stock, which is still traded on the Istanbul exchange, has more than doubled since it was added to the sanctions list. During that same period, two Trend shareholders now under sanction sold $4.3 million in stock, corporate filings show. Asked if that money went to Hamas, the company’s chairman said he did not know and it would be inappropriate to ask.

And as recently as this year, Hamas-tied companies and people under sanction were still able to hold Turkish bank accounts in U.S. dollars, banking records reviewed by The Times show, despite ostensibly being cut off from the American financial system.

Mr. Pardo, the former Mossad chief, said he did not know what happened after he left in 2016. But “from the results,” he said, “you can judge that they had a lot of money.”

“I believe that if someone would have chased the money and stopped it,” he added, “we wouldn’t be seeing the results of what we see today.”

Mr. Levy, the former Harpoon deputy, grows emotional when he talks about the Hamas money. “I want to do everything we can to prevent war,” he said. “I really believed that we could do that by going after the financial infrastructure of terrorist groups. But we have to be serious.”

Ronen Bergman contributed reporting from Tel Aviv, and Patrick Kingsley from Jerusalem.

A correction was made on Dec. 17, 2023: 

An earlier version of this article misstated the title of the Turkish official Hasan Turan. He is a member of Parliament, not a minister.