Shin Bet report: Gazans laborers in Israel did not provide Hamas with intelligence prior to Oct. 7

Israel’s Shin Bet security agency concluded an investigation into whether Gazans who entered Israel for work before the Oct. 7 attack had broadly been assisting the Hamas terrorist organization with intelligence information that led to mass rapes, burnings, mutilations, torture, abductions and murder of more than 1,200 people.

Shin Bet concluded in a report that there was no “broad effort” by Gazans to provide Hamas with intelligence, according to local Israel news media on Wednesday.

“There’s no concern that the people who were investigated passed information to Hamas as a result of their work in Israel,” Channel 12 news quoted Shin Bet as saying.

However, the report did not completely rule out that some Gazan workers were involved in the attack.

Shin Bet investigated around 3,000 Gazans, out of a total of 18,500, who held Israeli work permits prior to Oct. 7, which represents roughly 16% of the workforce being examined.

The report came after media outlets claimed that workers from Gaza had provided information to Hamas to aid their October 7 massacre.

The Shin Bet report flies in the face of testimony by survivors of the Oct. 7 attack, who said it was evident that the terrorists had detailed information about their communities.

At Kibbutz Nir Oz, where 100 of its 427 members were either brutally murdered or kidnapped into Gaza, one survivor, Eran Smilansky, asserted: “It was very clear that the terrorists had a lot of intelligence on the kibbutz. They seemed to know exactly where they were going and what they were doing.”

Survivors have also described how ordinary Gazans gleefully participated in the looting and the slaughter. Not just Palestinian men participated, but also women, children and the elderly citizens of Gaza.

Eyal Barad, another survivor from Nir Oz, revealed footage from a reporter's webcam that included a young Palestinian girl in a pink shirt happily riding past his home on a stolen kibbutz bicycle. Some have reported that civilians stole bicycles, scooters and golf carts, while others loaded the private belongings of kibbutz members onto their vehicles.

According to the Times of Israel, Shin Bet did not confirm the report, however, the agency is rarely known to respond to inquiries.

Following Oct. 7, several Gazan laborers in Israel were detained following the revocation of their work permits, with many being to Gaza in November.

Before Oct. 7, Israel had increased the number of Gazan laborers allowed to work in Israel in the hopes that such moves would keep the peace, but the attack on Oct. 7 eliminated that possibility.

“Israel is severing all contact with Gaza. There will be no more Palestinian workers from Gaza,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said in a statement in early November. “Those workers from Gaza who were in Israel on the day of the outbreak of the war will be returned to Gaza.”