Israel Police Files on the Nova Festival Were Deleted — And No One Knows Who Erased Them.

More than two and a half years after Hamas gunmen turned the Nova music festival into the deadliest single site of the October 7, 2023 attack, a piece of the paper trail behind it is gone. Israel’s public broadcaster, KAN, reported on June 26, 2026 that at least 20 police documents about security for the festival were deleted from the Israel Police computer system.

According to the report, relayed by The Jerusalem Post, the files were removed in January 2024 — roughly three months after the massacre, and while multiple investigations into the security failures were already under way. It is not known who deleted them, on whose authority, or whether copies survive anywhere else.

This page lays out what the reporting establishes, what it does not, and why deleted evidence is a serious problem for the official reckoning over Oct. 7 — a reckoning that already involves the State Comptroller, the military, and the police commanders who were in charge that morning.

• At least 20 — police documents on Nova festival security deleted from the Israel Police computer system, including files labeled 'Event requirements' · Source: KAN via Jerusalem Post
• January 2024 — when the files were removed — about three months after the massacre; it is unknown who deleted them or whether copies still exist · Source: KAN; Jerusalem Post
• Sept 20 – Oct 29 — span of the deleted filings: security plans submitted before the festival, on the day it began (Oct. 5), and even after the war started (Oct. 13 and 29) · Source: KAN; Jerusalem Post
• 378 killed — the IDF's April 2025 final count for the Nova festival — 344 civilians and 34 security personnel — the deadliest single site of the Oct. 7 attack · Source: IDF probe; Wikipedia
• 44 abducted — people taken hostage from the festival grounds near Re'im, about 5 km from the Gaza barrier · Source: IDF probe; Wikipedia
• Comptroller probe — State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman sent draft findings to ex-IDF chief Herzi Halevi and ex-Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai; his office reported difficulty obtaining documents · Source: Times of Israel; Haaretz

The core claim is narrow and specific. KAN, Israel’s public broadcaster, reported that a set of police files documenting the security arrangements for the Nova festival — the permits, the event requirements, the deployment plans — were deleted from the Israel Police’s internal computer system. The Jerusalem Post, summarizing the broadcast, put the number at at least 20 documents, among them files explicitly labeled “Event requirements.”

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Two facts in the report are doing the heavy lifting. The first is timing: the deletion is dated to January 2024, months after the attack, when the security failures were already a national scandal and several formal inquiries had begun. The second is the absence of an explanation. According to the reporting, it is not known who removed the documents, whether the removal was authorized, or whether backups exist. Those are exactly the questions an investigation into deleted records would need to answer — and, as of this writing, they are open.

The deleted material was not a single memo. Per the report, the police paper trail for the festival ran across weeks. The earliest items date to early September 2023 — a Magen David Adom approval for the event, followed the next day by the formal request to hold the party — and additional security plans, including documents from law enforcement and fire services, were filed in the run-up. KAN’s account describes filings submitted as early as September 20, others on October 5 (the day the festival opened), and still others logged on October 13 and 29, after the war had already begun.

That span matters. Documents created both before and after Oct. 7 are precisely the records an inquiry uses to reconstruct who knew what, when. Pre-attack security plans speak to whether the threat was assessed at all; post-attack filings can show how the police understood and recorded their own conduct in the immediate aftermath. Whatever the intent behind the deletion, the effect is to remove from the system the kind of contemporaneous paperwork that investigators treat as the hardest evidence.

The Israel Police did not deny that documents are missing from the system. Instead, in a statement quoted in the coverage, the force pushed back hard on the framing of the report. The information presented, police said, “indicates a fundamental lack of understanding in the police system,” and they cast the report’s purpose as an attempt to assign blame to officers who, in their telling, ran toward the gunfire on Oct. 7.

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The police pointed to the cost officers paid that day — commanders and fighters who, the statement said, “saved the State of Israel from the expansion of the massacre” at the price of 58 police officers and fighters killed. That toll is real and is not in dispute. But it is also a separate question from the one the report raises. Heroism on the ground during the attack does not explain why security records were deleted from a computer system three months later, nor who authorized it — and the police statement, as quoted, did not address those points directly.

“The information presented in the report indicates a fundamental lack of understanding in the police system.”

Israel Police, responding to the report of deleted Nova festival documents

The deletion does not sit in isolation. It surfaces inside a years-long fight over how Oct. 7 will be officially examined. State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman has been conducting a review of the Nova failures, and his office has reported that drafts of his conclusions were sent as “warnings” to former officials — among them former IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi and former Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai — flagging the criticism they will face when the full findings are published. The comptroller’s director-general, Yishai Vaknin, has described the findings as “earthshaking.”

Crucially, the comptroller’s office has itself reported difficulty obtaining the documents it needed and getting senior officials to sit for interviews — complaints that predate the latest report but that the deletion now sharpens. Separately, the military’s own April 2025 investigation found that the IDF and police ignored the security risks around the festival, that troops on the Gaza border did not even know it was happening, and that the breakdown in coordination left thousands of civilians effectively undefended. The deleted police files belong to the same chapter of failures those probes are trying to document.

Strip away the politics and the core problem is procedural. Investigations into a catastrophe live or die on the contemporaneous record — the documents created at the time, before anyone knew how the story would be told. When those records vanish from the system that is supposed to hold them, an inquiry loses its baseline. Even if every deletion turns out to be innocent — a migration error, a misfiled archive, a routine purge — the burden now falls on the police to prove it, because the files that would settle the question are the ones that are gone.

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There is also the matter of trust. Bereaved Nova families have spent more than two years pressing for a full, independent state commission of inquiry rather than internal probes by the same institutions under scrutiny, and Israel’s High Court has at points frozen parts of the comptroller’s review amid disputes over its scope. A report that security records simply disappeared — with no named custodian and no clear account of who deleted them — feeds the precise fear those families have voiced: that the bodies being asked to investigate themselves cannot be relied on to preserve the evidence against them.

Precision matters on a story this sensitive. What is confirmed by the reporting is that documents are missing from the police system and that the police, asked about it, did not claim the files are still there. What is not confirmed — and should not be assumed — is motive. No source quoted in the coverage alleges that the deletion was a deliberate cover-up; the report itself frames the central facts as unknown. Attributing intent without evidence would be exactly the kind of overreach that lets the underlying problem be dismissed.

Equally, the police’s rebuttal — that officers fought and died saving lives — is true but non-responsive. Both things can hold at once: police on the ground acted with courage on Oct. 7, and security records were later removed from the police system with no public explanation. The accountability question is not about the bravery of individual officers. It is about whether the institution preserved the evidence of its own decisions — and, on the face of this report, in at least 20 cases it did not.

At least 20 Israel Police documents about security for the Nova festival — the deadliest single site of the Oct. 7 attack, where 378 people were killed and 44 abducted — were deleted from the police computer system in January 2024, and the reporting cannot say who did it or whether copies remain. The police dispute the framing but not the absence; the State Comptroller, already reporting trouble getting records, is preparing “earthshaking” findings against the IDF and police commanders who were in charge. Until someone can account for who erased those files and why, the deletion stands as its own indictment of how Israel’s institutions have handled the evidence of their worst day — and we will track what the comptroller’s final report, and any inquiry into the deletion itself, ultimately establishes.

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Last updated June 26, 2026