Hassan Al-Somal
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Gaza-Israel Conflict | October 2023
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sammuel
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Hassan Al-Somal
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An Israeli military force was ambushed by Al-Qassam fighters near the Friends of the Sick Association in western Gaza
Hassan Al-Somal
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Interesting article in Hebrew media. IDF knew Hamas was about to attack but did nothing.
That headline echoes in its arrogance the less-than prophetic words of Frank Knox, the U.S. secretary of the navy, three days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, that the U.S. Navy “is not going be caught napping.” It also recalls the assessment of the director of the Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence, Eli Zeira, in a General Staff meeting held 24 hours before the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, in October 1973. The probability of an all-out war, he said “is low – even lower than low.”
Nevertheless, the blunders of Pearl Harbor and the Yom Kippur War pale in comparison to the failure of October 7, 2023. Accordingly, attempts to play down the scale of the debacle and treat it forgivingly are untenable and merit a response.
We do not yet have a picture, even a partial one, of how Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet security service arrived at their assessments about the feasibility of a sweeping attack from across the Gaza border. Still, basic logic and partial information that has come to light about Hamas’ preparations for the assault, and about signs that accumulated in Israel in the days preceding it, make it possible to begin to fathom the scale of the blunder.
The point of departure for analyzing the failure is clear. On one side of the border is a hard, determined enemy, which is relentlessly building up a military force and making preparations to attack targets in Israel. On the other side, and in some cases almost abutting the security fence, are civilian communities and military facilities that could constitute a target for a ground attack. Even without concrete information about offensive intentions, the sheer geographical proximity should have generated awareness of the existing danger. That awareness had long existed in the IDF, but not in recent years.
Spotters along the Gaza border in 2020. Recent reports of these soldiers echoed almost exactly the reports of spotters from the IDF outposts along the Suez Canal on the eve of the 1973 war.Credit: Eliyahu Hershkovitz
By early 2021, when construction of the underground obstacle along the Gaza Strip border was completed, Hamas’ plans to attack Israel via tunnels had become unfeasible. At the same time, in light of past efforts invested by the organization in raids on Israeli communities, the assumption should have been not that it had abandoned this aspiration, but rather that it would try to carry out such raids by other means. Because of the critical significance of a successful attack on even one or two communities, the threat should have occupied a high place in the intelligence order of priorities (EEI – essential elements of information), even if it was assessed as being of low probability. Indeed, the inscription on the wall of the operations center of the commander of the Gaza Division stated, “The mission: defending the communities of the western Negev.” In practice, it would appear, intelligence, army and government made light of the possibility that Hamas would operate in a way that would create the most dangerous threat to Israel.
Two factors underlay that approach. One was what looks, at this stage, to have been a basic failure to collect intelligence about the decision made by the Hamas leadership to unleash the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” and about advance preparations. The Shin Bet is the central body engaged in the collection of information from human sources in the territories, and its agents are supposed to possess intimate knowledge of what is happening in Gaza, even though it has not had an official presence there since 2007. As the organization learned as long ago as the early 1980s, in Lebanon, cultivating sources in extremist Islamic organizations is a difficult mission – but that is not enough to explain why the Shin Bet did not have adequate warning sources.
Information collection via SIGINT (electronic eavesdropping) by MI and the Shin Bet was also unproductive, as far as we know. This was due to various hitches, including a failed operation of the Sayeret Matkal commando unit in the Strip in 2018, and the caution displayed by the Hamas leaders in light of Israel’s sophistication in the realm of telephony. It’s likely they also learned about this threat from the endless boasting in recent years about the achievements of IDF Unit 8200, which engages in signals intelligence. Compounding this was the incomprehensible decision about a year ago to stop tapping the unencrypted personal walkie-talkies that Hamas militants used regularly, including during the October 7 assault.
The end result of the information collection failure is clear. In contrast to 1973, when the Mossad came up with excellent information about a change in Egypt’s concept of war almost a year before the war broke out, setting off red lights among the military and political decision-makers, this time no such lights flashed.
The second cause of the complacency was a combination of government policy and intelligence underestimation of the threat – two mutually nurturing elements.
Since returning to power in 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu viewed Hamas rule in Gaza as a useful tool for warding off the threat of a diplomatic peace process. From his viewpoint, that threat was embodied in the peace proposal put forward by the Arab League as early as 2002, centering around the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, together with the termination of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Netanyahu and his camp do not believe in the validity of this solution and did all they could to prevent its realization. Hamas, which is unwilling to recognize Israel and is committed to its destruction, also rejected the Arab League’s peace initiative. As long as Hamas rule continued in Gaza, Netanyahu was able to use it as an excuse for a lack of progress toward a diplomatic settlement with the Palestinian Authority, which is in charge in the West Bank. Thus, even though military opportunities arose, Netanyahu not only refrained from eliminating Hamas rule in Gaza, but actually strengthened the organization by allowing it to receive suitcases of money from Qatar.
The heads of the intelligence community grasped the basic flaw in Netanyahu’s policy. But as noted by Prof. Matti Steinberg – perhaps Israel’s leading expert on the Palestinian issue and an adviser to a number of Shin Bet directors – none of the ranking intelligence officials dared say so to Netanyahu, in part because they feared that clashing with him would cost them their jobs. If this turns out to be the case, it would entail the criminal mixing of political considerations with professional intelligence assessments in order to please the leader. Such a pattern of behavior, which would cast a heavy shadow on the professional integrity of the intelligence organizations, is unprecedented in intelligence-leadership relations in Israel.
The intelligence directors usually express themselves without mincing words, even if what they have to say is not consistent with the posture of the leadership. A case in point is the behavior of former Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon. In April 1998, when the ministers in the first Netanyahu government tried to extract from Ayalon an appraisal to the effect that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was involved in terrorism, Ayalon made it very clear to them that he knew what they wanted to hear, but that he would not voice it.
The combination of a policy of restraint by Hamas, also aimed at lulling Israel into complacency, and the prime minister’s desire to maintain the status quo, led to the formulation of an unequivocal intelligence appraisal that Hamas had been deterred. Assessments like this were presented to the political and military leadership and also to the public. For example, the current director of MI, Aharon Haliva, noted last May, at the annual Herzliya Conference, that Hamas had an interest in maintaining quiet in Gaza since Operation Guardian of the Walls, in May 2021. Haliva added that his organization had emerged from that operation “with the perception that engaging in combat and clashing with Israel in the form of rocket fire into the south from the Gaza Strip does not really serve [its purposes].”
That basic assumption, to the effect that Hamas had no desire for a flare-up, was the complacent conception through whose prism intelligence personnel examined a series of contradictory pieces of evidence indicating that the organization was preparing large-scale offensive operations. On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War this fall, top figures in MI reiterated how well they had learned the lessons of the blunder that led to Israel’s surprise – but in practice they had apparently learned nothing. The root of the debacle in 1973 was “clinging to the konseptzia” (a fixed concept) unquestioningly. The root of the 2023 debacle appears to be astonishingly similar.
Although there is much we still do not know, it is already clear that Hamas’ October 7 assault required extensive preparations. According to the Iranian news agency Tasnim, those efforts went on for four years, and within their framework a central operations room was established and four exercises, code-named “Firm Support,” were held, which simulated attacks on the Gaza Envelope via the security fence and from the sea.
The precise planning of the attack on Kibbutz Nir Oz, the preparations for the attack on the Yarkon Base of Unit 8200 near Kibbutz Urim, and documents left at the site during the attack on Kibbutz Mifalsim that Israel succeeding in repelling, attest to meticulous intelligence and operational planning, and a well-coordinated chain of command. All of these things must have been known to hundreds of members of Hamas. It’s hard to believe that nothing about these preparations was picked up by the high-grade collection assets of the Shin Bet and MI in the Gaza Strip; and if that was indeed the case, it was a collection failure of the first order. But it’s far more likely that the good information arrived and was assessed through the filter of the concept, which said there was nothing to it, because “Hamas has been deterred.” Hence the failure to draw the proper conclusions.
What was seen is also what was heard. Menachem Gida and 26 of his friends living in the communities in the area, who established a WhatsApp group called Field Security Operational Monitor, listened in to the wireless traffic of Hamas over a period of years. Time after time they heard how the organization’s combat personnel were practicing the breaching of the fence and arriving from the sea, conquering kibbutzim such as Zikim, Netiv Ha’asara and Nir Oz, seizing hostages and destroying everything in their path.
The group grasped the significance of the daily training exercises as being preparations for real operations, and they passed on all the information to the IDF. The army personnel they were in contact with were less worried – “fantasies” was their term for the talk about preparations to capture territory in Israel. Finally, last April the army restricted the group’s ability to monitor Hamas’ wireless traffic. Despite this, the group discerned an intensification of the training, and that information was reported by Kan 11, the public broadcaster, a few days before the attack.
A tweet posted by Kan 11 reporter Asaf Pozailov four days before the Hamas attack: "The Islamic Jihad organization has launched a loud exercise very close to the border, including missile launches, breaking into Israel and kidnapping soldiers. Dedi Peled, a resident of Netiv Ha'Asara [says]: This was significantly closer than previous times, the kids wake up during their holiday break and ask what happened, there are explosions. It's not like previous exercises."
What Gida and his friends heard just before the war was also picked up by the female soldiers who served as spotters on the Gaza border. Their reports, which echo almost exactly the reports of spotters from the IDF outposts along the Suez Canal on the eve of the 1973 war, should have made it clear that a concrete change had occurred in routine activity taking place in the area adjacent to the fence. One spotter, Yael Rothenberg, told the website Zman Emet that she had reported to her superior seeing Hamas men with maps, “counting steps, digging there.” Similarly, the reports of the spotters at the Suez Canal exactly 50 years earlier made reference to Egyptian officers who were standing on the other side of the canal with maps and planning the attack. At that time, MI dismissed the significance of the reports, claiming these were Egyptian exercises; this time they claimed the digging detected by the spotters was farmwork.
It was clear to the spotters that an incursion was imminent; they discussed among themselves where it would happen and in which sector. It’s not clear what happened to their reports as they made their way up through the MI hierarchy, but it is clear that they didn’t bring about any change in the certainty that Hamas had been deterred and that, consequently, the warnings were not meaningful. Neglecting to put back into use the observation balloons that were intended to provide warnings from deep within the Gaza Strip is evidence of yet another painful expression of the rigid “concept.” (Use of the balloons had stopped just weeks prior to the attack.)
On top of the intelligence idée fixe, there is the immense gap between the way the IDF coped with potential attempts to infiltrate by way of the fence, and the ease with which Hamas was able to work around the underground obstacle that was built along the border of the Gaza Strip. When the obstacle was inaugurated, IDF officers boasted that the amount of concrete used to construct the subterranean barrier was enough to build a highway from Gaza to Bulgaria, and that any attempt to penetrate on the surface would trap the Palestinians in a killing field between two fences. The defense minister at the time, Benny Gantz, promised that “this wall affords a sense of personal security that will allow this beautiful area [the so-called Gaza Envelope] to grow.” But the height of the promise is matched only by the depth of the disappointment.
The almost exclusive reliance on technology for purposes of deterrence, and the management of the war via “see-shoot” weapons systems, remotely controlled by spotters from their underground positions, came at the expense of the method by which the IDF had traditionally coped with significant threats across the border: orderly defensive procedures, well-trained combat forces and an “alert at dawn” routine against possible enemy attack – measures that were intended to head off an enemy even without concrete warnings.
In 1973, the tank crews of the regular-army division in Sinai practiced repeatedly the defensive command “Shovech Yonim” (dovecote), and knew very well where they needed to be and how to get there as soon as the order came to throw back the Egyptians. At that time, because of a blunder by the head of Southern Command, the order wasn’t given. Fifty years later, history repeated itself almost exactly, although it’s not yet clear whether the forces in the sector were sufficiently trained that they could have contained an attack of the kind that was executed, or the degree to which the line was prepared for such an eventuality.
The technological failure cried out to the heavens in other senses, too. The war in Ukraine led to countless videos in which Ukrainian troops were seen activating small, inexpensive drones that released explosive devices above Russian tanks, artillery or soldiers – and destroying them.
The lesson should have been clear, yet the observation facilities along the fence remained vulnerable to attack from the air, as Hamas videos also showed. To the IDF’s credit, that lesson was learned quickly. The tanks that are presently operating in Gaza – which had already been equipped with the highly expensive Me’il Ruach (Windbreaker) active protection system, have been further bolstered since the start of the war with metal coverings that protect the turret from drone threats. But on the critical day, those coverings, whose cost is minimal, were not in place to protect systems that cost millions against means of attack that any child can buy from AliExpress (and may actually have been acquired there).
When the commission of inquiry to investigate the intelligence failure is finally established, much will be heard about the information that was available to the Israeli intelligence community about preparations for the attack, and about how that information got lost. But even now, several basic causes of the shameful failure are clear.
A major cause is the organizational culture of the Shin Bet and apparently also of MI. In the case of the former, we need to go back to slightly distant history. At the start of the first intifada, in 1987, when it emerged that the Israeli intelligence system did not have a unit whose role it was to provide a strategic warning about the development of significant threats in the occupied territories, a research department was created in the Shin Bet with the aim of addressing this lacuna. But because the culture of the Shin Bet is such that it sees its task as being to prevent point-specific terrorism, that department, which was the natural candidate to integrate, identify and warn about an existential threat, gradually atrophied. According to multiple sources, it also underwent processes of politicization, thus ruling out the possibility of assessments that were contrary to the dominant concept.
We don’t know enough about the research division of MI, but it’s clear that its failure to provide a warning about Hamas’ preparations ahead of the attack was unprecedented. In this body, too, which is responsible for the national intelligence appraisal and for warning about impending wars, a tendency has been discerned in recent years, and more especially since the 2006 Lebanon war, of placing the emphasis on creating a “bank of targets” for future attack, at the expense of investing resources in identifying strategic processes underway.
It’s not clear how much research attention the threat of Hamas’ general offensive drew, where it was ranked in the organizational EEI, or whether there were research officers who pointed to it as a concrete threat, contrary to the dominant assessment that “Hamas has been deterred.” But we know that the director of MI – who was on vacation in Eilat the weekend that the war broke out – dismissed the warnings that were received and which nonetheless prompted the chief of staff, the head of the Shin Bet and other ranking officers to examine the situation during the night before the attack. It’s clear that if MI’s research division had indicated a threat beforehand, even the threat of one community being captured, MI’s director could have been more vigilant, along with others in the system.
An additional partial explanation for the absence of a warning is what the commission that investigated the events of September 11 in the United States termed a “lack of imagination.” In 2001, the failure lay in the fact that no one imagined a mega-attack carried out by means of passenger planes. In 2023, the “lack of imagination” lay in the fact that no one imagined the possibility of a murderous attack by Hamas across the entire region across from Gaza. But in the Israeli case the explanatory force of the “lack of imagination” is relatively limited, in part because of the large quantity of information that must have flowed to the intelligence bodies about Hamas’ preparations for a large-scale attack, and also because the significance of the threat of even one or two communities being overrun should have been sufficient to bring about a far higher level of preparedness at dawn on October 7.
The threat of one community being overrun had been on the agenda for some time, but there is no sign that it was considered sufficiently concrete or that it was weighed seriously in the hours before the attack – as evidenced by the response of the decision-makers and the unpreparedness of the IDF when the war started.
Ultimately, I believe, the root of the failure will be found, as it was in 1973, at the psychological level: the conventional tendency to believe that what has been, will be; the belief that a “black swan,” in the form of a coordinated, lethal attack by limited forces that lack defenses and are inferior in firepower, like those that Hamas built up in Gaza, is untenable; and the “groupthink” that led MI researchers and other officers to believe that they should rely on the wisdom of the group.
MI often took pride in the “devil’s advocate” mechanism it developed after 1973 – a control unit whose task was to promote within the research division an alternate assessment to the dominant one. However, it appears that the personnel of the control unit did not set forth an alternate threat appraisal, one that acknowledged the tremendous temptation Hamas would have had to launch a large-scale operation, one that would put the organization on the map and undermine fundamentally Israel’s sense of security and its image as a regional power. Groupthink also helped entrench the collective belief, which was shared by the army, that Hamas could not execute a broad operation without MI and the Shin Bet being aware of it in advance.
To all of this we need to add the tendency that took root in MI to rely almost exclusively on technological means of warning and to make light of the lessons of the past.
I saw that tendency myself less than two months ago. On the 50th anniversary of the intelligence blunder in the Yom Kippur War, I presented to a forum of high-level MI personnel what my research had identified as the roots of the failure. First and foremost was the psychological tendency of a number of ranking MI personnel, who clung to the “concept” until the last minute, even though all the information they were receiving cried out that war was imminent. A second talk to that forum dealt with an experiment in which the data that was available on the eve of the war was fed into an artificial intelligence program, in order to examine whether AI could be used as a substitute for human thought. The major focus of interest in the discussion that developed after these talks was on various issues relating to the ability of the machine to identify threats. The psychology of the human failures to heed warnings was not of any special interest to MI.
Emerging from that discussion, I realized that the lessons of 1973 had not been learned. But I never thought for a moment that this would be exemplified so painfully, so shamefully and so soon.
Israel's Deadly Complacency Wasn't Just an Intelligence Failure
People in the communities next to Gaza heard Hamas training to infiltrate Israel, but the army disregarded their warnings and curtailed their surveillance capabilities. The army’s spotters detected suspicious digging, but their superiors claimed it was for farmwork. The blindness of intelligence wasn’t due only to a failure to identify the signs. Political considerations also played a part in September 28, nine days before the Hamas attack on the Israeli communities adjacent to the Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces website published a comprehensive article on the information-gathering units of Military Intelligence. The title says it all: “To mark the fall harvest festival: We have picked seven units that know everything about the enemy.”That headline echoes in its arrogance the less-than prophetic words of Frank Knox, the U.S. secretary of the navy, three days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, that the U.S. Navy “is not going be caught napping.” It also recalls the assessment of the director of the Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence, Eli Zeira, in a General Staff meeting held 24 hours before the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, in October 1973. The probability of an all-out war, he said “is low – even lower than low.”
Nevertheless, the blunders of Pearl Harbor and the Yom Kippur War pale in comparison to the failure of October 7, 2023. Accordingly, attempts to play down the scale of the debacle and treat it forgivingly are untenable and merit a response.
We do not yet have a picture, even a partial one, of how Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet security service arrived at their assessments about the feasibility of a sweeping attack from across the Gaza border. Still, basic logic and partial information that has come to light about Hamas’ preparations for the assault, and about signs that accumulated in Israel in the days preceding it, make it possible to begin to fathom the scale of the blunder.
The point of departure for analyzing the failure is clear. On one side of the border is a hard, determined enemy, which is relentlessly building up a military force and making preparations to attack targets in Israel. On the other side, and in some cases almost abutting the security fence, are civilian communities and military facilities that could constitute a target for a ground attack. Even without concrete information about offensive intentions, the sheer geographical proximity should have generated awareness of the existing danger. That awareness had long existed in the IDF, but not in recent years.
Spotters along the Gaza border in 2020. Recent reports of these soldiers echoed almost exactly the reports of spotters from the IDF outposts along the Suez Canal on the eve of the 1973 war.Credit: Eliyahu Hershkovitz
By early 2021, when construction of the underground obstacle along the Gaza Strip border was completed, Hamas’ plans to attack Israel via tunnels had become unfeasible. At the same time, in light of past efforts invested by the organization in raids on Israeli communities, the assumption should have been not that it had abandoned this aspiration, but rather that it would try to carry out such raids by other means. Because of the critical significance of a successful attack on even one or two communities, the threat should have occupied a high place in the intelligence order of priorities (EEI – essential elements of information), even if it was assessed as being of low probability. Indeed, the inscription on the wall of the operations center of the commander of the Gaza Division stated, “The mission: defending the communities of the western Negev.” In practice, it would appear, intelligence, army and government made light of the possibility that Hamas would operate in a way that would create the most dangerous threat to Israel.
Two factors underlay that approach. One was what looks, at this stage, to have been a basic failure to collect intelligence about the decision made by the Hamas leadership to unleash the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” and about advance preparations. The Shin Bet is the central body engaged in the collection of information from human sources in the territories, and its agents are supposed to possess intimate knowledge of what is happening in Gaza, even though it has not had an official presence there since 2007. As the organization learned as long ago as the early 1980s, in Lebanon, cultivating sources in extremist Islamic organizations is a difficult mission – but that is not enough to explain why the Shin Bet did not have adequate warning sources.
Information collection via SIGINT (electronic eavesdropping) by MI and the Shin Bet was also unproductive, as far as we know. This was due to various hitches, including a failed operation of the Sayeret Matkal commando unit in the Strip in 2018, and the caution displayed by the Hamas leaders in light of Israel’s sophistication in the realm of telephony. It’s likely they also learned about this threat from the endless boasting in recent years about the achievements of IDF Unit 8200, which engages in signals intelligence. Compounding this was the incomprehensible decision about a year ago to stop tapping the unencrypted personal walkie-talkies that Hamas militants used regularly, including during the October 7 assault.
The end result of the information collection failure is clear. In contrast to 1973, when the Mossad came up with excellent information about a change in Egypt’s concept of war almost a year before the war broke out, setting off red lights among the military and political decision-makers, this time no such lights flashed.
The second cause of the complacency was a combination of government policy and intelligence underestimation of the threat – two mutually nurturing elements.
Since returning to power in 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu viewed Hamas rule in Gaza as a useful tool for warding off the threat of a diplomatic peace process. From his viewpoint, that threat was embodied in the peace proposal put forward by the Arab League as early as 2002, centering around the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, together with the termination of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Netanyahu and his camp do not believe in the validity of this solution and did all they could to prevent its realization. Hamas, which is unwilling to recognize Israel and is committed to its destruction, also rejected the Arab League’s peace initiative. As long as Hamas rule continued in Gaza, Netanyahu was able to use it as an excuse for a lack of progress toward a diplomatic settlement with the Palestinian Authority, which is in charge in the West Bank. Thus, even though military opportunities arose, Netanyahu not only refrained from eliminating Hamas rule in Gaza, but actually strengthened the organization by allowing it to receive suitcases of money from Qatar.
The heads of the intelligence community grasped the basic flaw in Netanyahu’s policy. But as noted by Prof. Matti Steinberg – perhaps Israel’s leading expert on the Palestinian issue and an adviser to a number of Shin Bet directors – none of the ranking intelligence officials dared say so to Netanyahu, in part because they feared that clashing with him would cost them their jobs. If this turns out to be the case, it would entail the criminal mixing of political considerations with professional intelligence assessments in order to please the leader. Such a pattern of behavior, which would cast a heavy shadow on the professional integrity of the intelligence organizations, is unprecedented in intelligence-leadership relations in Israel.
The intelligence directors usually express themselves without mincing words, even if what they have to say is not consistent with the posture of the leadership. A case in point is the behavior of former Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon. In April 1998, when the ministers in the first Netanyahu government tried to extract from Ayalon an appraisal to the effect that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was involved in terrorism, Ayalon made it very clear to them that he knew what they wanted to hear, but that he would not voice it.
The combination of a policy of restraint by Hamas, also aimed at lulling Israel into complacency, and the prime minister’s desire to maintain the status quo, led to the formulation of an unequivocal intelligence appraisal that Hamas had been deterred. Assessments like this were presented to the political and military leadership and also to the public. For example, the current director of MI, Aharon Haliva, noted last May, at the annual Herzliya Conference, that Hamas had an interest in maintaining quiet in Gaza since Operation Guardian of the Walls, in May 2021. Haliva added that his organization had emerged from that operation “with the perception that engaging in combat and clashing with Israel in the form of rocket fire into the south from the Gaza Strip does not really serve [its purposes].”
That basic assumption, to the effect that Hamas had no desire for a flare-up, was the complacent conception through whose prism intelligence personnel examined a series of contradictory pieces of evidence indicating that the organization was preparing large-scale offensive operations. On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War this fall, top figures in MI reiterated how well they had learned the lessons of the blunder that led to Israel’s surprise – but in practice they had apparently learned nothing. The root of the debacle in 1973 was “clinging to the konseptzia” (a fixed concept) unquestioningly. The root of the 2023 debacle appears to be astonishingly similar.
Although there is much we still do not know, it is already clear that Hamas’ October 7 assault required extensive preparations. According to the Iranian news agency Tasnim, those efforts went on for four years, and within their framework a central operations room was established and four exercises, code-named “Firm Support,” were held, which simulated attacks on the Gaza Envelope via the security fence and from the sea.
The precise planning of the attack on Kibbutz Nir Oz, the preparations for the attack on the Yarkon Base of Unit 8200 near Kibbutz Urim, and documents left at the site during the attack on Kibbutz Mifalsim that Israel succeeding in repelling, attest to meticulous intelligence and operational planning, and a well-coordinated chain of command. All of these things must have been known to hundreds of members of Hamas. It’s hard to believe that nothing about these preparations was picked up by the high-grade collection assets of the Shin Bet and MI in the Gaza Strip; and if that was indeed the case, it was a collection failure of the first order. But it’s far more likely that the good information arrived and was assessed through the filter of the concept, which said there was nothing to it, because “Hamas has been deterred.” Hence the failure to draw the proper conclusions.
Signs that the concept was invalid were in part visible to all. CNN reported, on October 12, that Hamas fighters trained repeatedly in the open ahead of the attack. The network broadcast a video from December 2022 in which Hamas men are seen training to take over a community, using a full-scale model built for that purpose near the Erez Crossing on the Strip’s northern border with Israel. Similar life-size models were also built in the center and south of the Gaza Strip, CNN added, and broadcast clips showing the use of motorized paragliders to attack from the air and other forms of training.
What was seen is also what was heard. Menachem Gida and 26 of his friends living in the communities in the area, who established a WhatsApp group called Field Security Operational Monitor, listened in to the wireless traffic of Hamas over a period of years. Time after time they heard how the organization’s combat personnel were practicing the breaching of the fence and arriving from the sea, conquering kibbutzim such as Zikim, Netiv Ha’asara and Nir Oz, seizing hostages and destroying everything in their path.
The group grasped the significance of the daily training exercises as being preparations for real operations, and they passed on all the information to the IDF. The army personnel they were in contact with were less worried – “fantasies” was their term for the talk about preparations to capture territory in Israel. Finally, last April the army restricted the group’s ability to monitor Hamas’ wireless traffic. Despite this, the group discerned an intensification of the training, and that information was reported by Kan 11, the public broadcaster, a few days before the attack.
A tweet posted by Kan 11 reporter Asaf Pozailov four days before the Hamas attack: "The Islamic Jihad organization has launched a loud exercise very close to the border, including missile launches, breaking into Israel and kidnapping soldiers. Dedi Peled, a resident of Netiv Ha'Asara [says]: This was significantly closer than previous times, the kids wake up during their holiday break and ask what happened, there are explosions. It's not like previous exercises."
What Gida and his friends heard just before the war was also picked up by the female soldiers who served as spotters on the Gaza border. Their reports, which echo almost exactly the reports of spotters from the IDF outposts along the Suez Canal on the eve of the 1973 war, should have made it clear that a concrete change had occurred in routine activity taking place in the area adjacent to the fence. One spotter, Yael Rothenberg, told the website Zman Emet that she had reported to her superior seeing Hamas men with maps, “counting steps, digging there.” Similarly, the reports of the spotters at the Suez Canal exactly 50 years earlier made reference to Egyptian officers who were standing on the other side of the canal with maps and planning the attack. At that time, MI dismissed the significance of the reports, claiming these were Egyptian exercises; this time they claimed the digging detected by the spotters was farmwork.
It was clear to the spotters that an incursion was imminent; they discussed among themselves where it would happen and in which sector. It’s not clear what happened to their reports as they made their way up through the MI hierarchy, but it is clear that they didn’t bring about any change in the certainty that Hamas had been deterred and that, consequently, the warnings were not meaningful. Neglecting to put back into use the observation balloons that were intended to provide warnings from deep within the Gaza Strip is evidence of yet another painful expression of the rigid “concept.” (Use of the balloons had stopped just weeks prior to the attack.)
On top of the intelligence idée fixe, there is the immense gap between the way the IDF coped with potential attempts to infiltrate by way of the fence, and the ease with which Hamas was able to work around the underground obstacle that was built along the border of the Gaza Strip. When the obstacle was inaugurated, IDF officers boasted that the amount of concrete used to construct the subterranean barrier was enough to build a highway from Gaza to Bulgaria, and that any attempt to penetrate on the surface would trap the Palestinians in a killing field between two fences. The defense minister at the time, Benny Gantz, promised that “this wall affords a sense of personal security that will allow this beautiful area [the so-called Gaza Envelope] to grow.” But the height of the promise is matched only by the depth of the disappointment.
The almost exclusive reliance on technology for purposes of deterrence, and the management of the war via “see-shoot” weapons systems, remotely controlled by spotters from their underground positions, came at the expense of the method by which the IDF had traditionally coped with significant threats across the border: orderly defensive procedures, well-trained combat forces and an “alert at dawn” routine against possible enemy attack – measures that were intended to head off an enemy even without concrete warnings.
In 1973, the tank crews of the regular-army division in Sinai practiced repeatedly the defensive command “Shovech Yonim” (dovecote), and knew very well where they needed to be and how to get there as soon as the order came to throw back the Egyptians. At that time, because of a blunder by the head of Southern Command, the order wasn’t given. Fifty years later, history repeated itself almost exactly, although it’s not yet clear whether the forces in the sector were sufficiently trained that they could have contained an attack of the kind that was executed, or the degree to which the line was prepared for such an eventuality.
The technological failure cried out to the heavens in other senses, too. The war in Ukraine led to countless videos in which Ukrainian troops were seen activating small, inexpensive drones that released explosive devices above Russian tanks, artillery or soldiers – and destroying them.
The lesson should have been clear, yet the observation facilities along the fence remained vulnerable to attack from the air, as Hamas videos also showed. To the IDF’s credit, that lesson was learned quickly. The tanks that are presently operating in Gaza – which had already been equipped with the highly expensive Me’il Ruach (Windbreaker) active protection system, have been further bolstered since the start of the war with metal coverings that protect the turret from drone threats. But on the critical day, those coverings, whose cost is minimal, were not in place to protect systems that cost millions against means of attack that any child can buy from AliExpress (and may actually have been acquired there).
When the commission of inquiry to investigate the intelligence failure is finally established, much will be heard about the information that was available to the Israeli intelligence community about preparations for the attack, and about how that information got lost. But even now, several basic causes of the shameful failure are clear.
A major cause is the organizational culture of the Shin Bet and apparently also of MI. In the case of the former, we need to go back to slightly distant history. At the start of the first intifada, in 1987, when it emerged that the Israeli intelligence system did not have a unit whose role it was to provide a strategic warning about the development of significant threats in the occupied territories, a research department was created in the Shin Bet with the aim of addressing this lacuna. But because the culture of the Shin Bet is such that it sees its task as being to prevent point-specific terrorism, that department, which was the natural candidate to integrate, identify and warn about an existential threat, gradually atrophied. According to multiple sources, it also underwent processes of politicization, thus ruling out the possibility of assessments that were contrary to the dominant concept.
We don’t know enough about the research division of MI, but it’s clear that its failure to provide a warning about Hamas’ preparations ahead of the attack was unprecedented. In this body, too, which is responsible for the national intelligence appraisal and for warning about impending wars, a tendency has been discerned in recent years, and more especially since the 2006 Lebanon war, of placing the emphasis on creating a “bank of targets” for future attack, at the expense of investing resources in identifying strategic processes underway.
It’s not clear how much research attention the threat of Hamas’ general offensive drew, where it was ranked in the organizational EEI, or whether there were research officers who pointed to it as a concrete threat, contrary to the dominant assessment that “Hamas has been deterred.” But we know that the director of MI – who was on vacation in Eilat the weekend that the war broke out – dismissed the warnings that were received and which nonetheless prompted the chief of staff, the head of the Shin Bet and other ranking officers to examine the situation during the night before the attack. It’s clear that if MI’s research division had indicated a threat beforehand, even the threat of one community being captured, MI’s director could have been more vigilant, along with others in the system.
An additional partial explanation for the absence of a warning is what the commission that investigated the events of September 11 in the United States termed a “lack of imagination.” In 2001, the failure lay in the fact that no one imagined a mega-attack carried out by means of passenger planes. In 2023, the “lack of imagination” lay in the fact that no one imagined the possibility of a murderous attack by Hamas across the entire region across from Gaza. But in the Israeli case the explanatory force of the “lack of imagination” is relatively limited, in part because of the large quantity of information that must have flowed to the intelligence bodies about Hamas’ preparations for a large-scale attack, and also because the significance of the threat of even one or two communities being overrun should have been sufficient to bring about a far higher level of preparedness at dawn on October 7.
The threat of one community being overrun had been on the agenda for some time, but there is no sign that it was considered sufficiently concrete or that it was weighed seriously in the hours before the attack – as evidenced by the response of the decision-makers and the unpreparedness of the IDF when the war started.
Ultimately, I believe, the root of the failure will be found, as it was in 1973, at the psychological level: the conventional tendency to believe that what has been, will be; the belief that a “black swan,” in the form of a coordinated, lethal attack by limited forces that lack defenses and are inferior in firepower, like those that Hamas built up in Gaza, is untenable; and the “groupthink” that led MI researchers and other officers to believe that they should rely on the wisdom of the group.
MI often took pride in the “devil’s advocate” mechanism it developed after 1973 – a control unit whose task was to promote within the research division an alternate assessment to the dominant one. However, it appears that the personnel of the control unit did not set forth an alternate threat appraisal, one that acknowledged the tremendous temptation Hamas would have had to launch a large-scale operation, one that would put the organization on the map and undermine fundamentally Israel’s sense of security and its image as a regional power. Groupthink also helped entrench the collective belief, which was shared by the army, that Hamas could not execute a broad operation without MI and the Shin Bet being aware of it in advance.
To all of this we need to add the tendency that took root in MI to rely almost exclusively on technological means of warning and to make light of the lessons of the past.
I saw that tendency myself less than two months ago. On the 50th anniversary of the intelligence blunder in the Yom Kippur War, I presented to a forum of high-level MI personnel what my research had identified as the roots of the failure. First and foremost was the psychological tendency of a number of ranking MI personnel, who clung to the “concept” until the last minute, even though all the information they were receiving cried out that war was imminent. A second talk to that forum dealt with an experiment in which the data that was available on the eve of the war was fed into an artificial intelligence program, in order to examine whether AI could be used as a substitute for human thought. The major focus of interest in the discussion that developed after these talks was on various issues relating to the ability of the machine to identify threats. The psychology of the human failures to heed warnings was not of any special interest to MI.
Emerging from that discussion, I realized that the lessons of 1973 had not been learned. But I never thought for a moment that this would be exemplified so painfully, so shamefully and so soon.
khansaheeb
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This is the real beginning, but never trust a Jew's word,we have seen them time and time again to break their pledges. What they say and what they do are two different things.
khansaheeb
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Interesting article in Hebrew media. IDF knew Hamas was about to attack but did nothing.
Israel's Deadly Complacency Wasn't Just an Intelligence Failure
People in the communities next to Gaza heard Hamas training to infiltrate Israel, but the army disregarded their warnings and curtailed their surveillance capabilities. The army’s spotters detected suspicious digging, but their superiors claimed it was for farmwork. The blindness of intelligence wasn’t due only to a failure to identify the signs. Political considerations also played a part in September 28, nine days before the Hamas attack on the Israeli communities adjacent to the Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces website published a comprehensive article on the information-gathering units of Military Intelligence. The title says it all: “To mark the fall harvest festival: We have picked seven units that know everything about the enemy.”
That headline echoes in its arrogance the less-than prophetic words of Frank Knox, the U.S. secretary of the navy, three days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, that the U.S. Navy “is not going be caught napping.” It also recalls the assessment of the director of the Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence, Eli Zeira, in a General Staff meeting held 24 hours before the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, in October 1973. The probability of an all-out war, he said “is low – even lower than low.”
Nevertheless, the blunders of Pearl Harbor and the Yom Kippur War pale in comparison to the failure of October 7, 2023. Accordingly, attempts to play down the scale of the debacle and treat it forgivingly are untenable and merit a response.
We do not yet have a picture, even a partial one, of how Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet security service arrived at their assessments about the feasibility of a sweeping attack from across the Gaza border. Still, basic logic and partial information that has come to light about Hamas’ preparations for the assault, and about signs that accumulated in Israel in the days preceding it, make it possible to begin to fathom the scale of the blunder.
The point of departure for analyzing the failure is clear. On one side of the border is a hard, determined enemy, which is relentlessly building up a military force and making preparations to attack targets in Israel. On the other side, and in some cases almost abutting the security fence, are civilian communities and military facilities that could constitute a target for a ground attack. Even without concrete information about offensive intentions, the sheer geographical proximity should have generated awareness of the existing danger. That awareness had long existed in the IDF, but not in recent years.
Spotters along the Gaza border in 2020. Recent reports of these soldiers echoed almost exactly the reports of spotters from the IDF outposts along the Suez Canal on the eve of the 1973 war.Credit: Eliyahu Hershkovitz
By early 2021, when construction of the underground obstacle along the Gaza Strip border was completed, Hamas’ plans to attack Israel via tunnels had become unfeasible. At the same time, in light of past efforts invested by the organization in raids on Israeli communities, the assumption should have been not that it had abandoned this aspiration, but rather that it would try to carry out such raids by other means. Because of the critical significance of a successful attack on even one or two communities, the threat should have occupied a high place in the intelligence order of priorities (EEI – essential elements of information), even if it was assessed as being of low probability. Indeed, the inscription on the wall of the operations center of the commander of the Gaza Division stated, “The mission: defending the communities of the western Negev.” In practice, it would appear, intelligence, army and government made light of the possibility that Hamas would operate in a way that would create the most dangerous threat to Israel.
Two factors underlay that approach. One was what looks, at this stage, to have been a basic failure to collect intelligence about the decision made by the Hamas leadership to unleash the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” and about advance preparations. The Shin Bet is the central body engaged in the collection of information from human sources in the territories, and its agents are supposed to possess intimate knowledge of what is happening in Gaza, even though it has not had an official presence there since 2007. As the organization learned as long ago as the early 1980s, in Lebanon, cultivating sources in extremist Islamic organizations is a difficult mission – but that is not enough to explain why the Shin Bet did not have adequate warning sources.
Information collection via SIGINT (electronic eavesdropping) by MI and the Shin Bet was also unproductive, as far as we know. This was due to various hitches, including a failed operation of the Sayeret Matkal commando unit in the Strip in 2018, and the caution displayed by the Hamas leaders in light of Israel’s sophistication in the realm of telephony. It’s likely they also learned about this threat from the endless boasting in recent years about the achievements of IDF Unit 8200, which engages in signals intelligence. Compounding this was the incomprehensible decision about a year ago to stop tapping the unencrypted personal walkie-talkies that Hamas militants used regularly, including during the October 7 assault.
The end result of the information collection failure is clear. In contrast to 1973, when the Mossad came up with excellent information about a change in Egypt’s concept of war almost a year before the war broke out, setting off red lights among the military and political decision-makers, this time no such lights flashed.
The second cause of the complacency was a combination of government policy and intelligence underestimation of the threat – two mutually nurturing elements.
Since returning to power in 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu viewed Hamas rule in Gaza as a useful tool for warding off the threat of a diplomatic peace process. From his viewpoint, that threat was embodied in the peace proposal put forward by the Arab League as early as 2002, centering around the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, together with the termination of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Netanyahu and his camp do not believe in the validity of this solution and did all they could to prevent its realization. Hamas, which is unwilling to recognize Israel and is committed to its destruction, also rejected the Arab League’s peace initiative. As long as Hamas rule continued in Gaza, Netanyahu was able to use it as an excuse for a lack of progress toward a diplomatic settlement with the Palestinian Authority, which is in charge in the West Bank. Thus, even though military opportunities arose, Netanyahu not only refrained from eliminating Hamas rule in Gaza, but actually strengthened the organization by allowing it to receive suitcases of money from Qatar.
The heads of the intelligence community grasped the basic flaw in Netanyahu’s policy. But as noted by Prof. Matti Steinberg – perhaps Israel’s leading expert on the Palestinian issue and an adviser to a number of Shin Bet directors – none of the ranking intelligence officials dared say so to Netanyahu, in part because they feared that clashing with him would cost them their jobs. If this turns out to be the case, it would entail the criminal mixing of political considerations with professional intelligence assessments in order to please the leader. Such a pattern of behavior, which would cast a heavy shadow on the professional integrity of the intelligence organizations, is unprecedented in intelligence-leadership relations in Israel.
The intelligence directors usually express themselves without mincing words, even if what they have to say is not consistent with the posture of the leadership. A case in point is the behavior of former Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon. In April 1998, when the ministers in the first Netanyahu government tried to extract from Ayalon an appraisal to the effect that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was involved in terrorism, Ayalon made it very clear to them that he knew what they wanted to hear, but that he would not voice it.
The combination of a policy of restraint by Hamas, also aimed at lulling Israel into complacency, and the prime minister’s desire to maintain the status quo, led to the formulation of an unequivocal intelligence appraisal that Hamas had been deterred. Assessments like this were presented to the political and military leadership and also to the public. For example, the current director of MI, Aharon Haliva, noted last May, at the annual Herzliya Conference, that Hamas had an interest in maintaining quiet in Gaza since Operation Guardian of the Walls, in May 2021. Haliva added that his organization had emerged from that operation “with the perception that engaging in combat and clashing with Israel in the form of rocket fire into the south from the Gaza Strip does not really serve [its purposes].”
That basic assumption, to the effect that Hamas had no desire for a flare-up, was the complacent conception through whose prism intelligence personnel examined a series of contradictory pieces of evidence indicating that the organization was preparing large-scale offensive operations. On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War this fall, top figures in MI reiterated how well they had learned the lessons of the blunder that led to Israel’s surprise – but in practice they had apparently learned nothing. The root of the debacle in 1973 was “clinging to the konseptzia” (a fixed concept) unquestioningly. The root of the 2023 debacle appears to be astonishingly similar.
Although there is much we still do not know, it is already clear that Hamas’ October 7 assault required extensive preparations. According to the Iranian news agency Tasnim, those efforts went on for four years, and within their framework a central operations room was established and four exercises, code-named “Firm Support,” were held, which simulated attacks on the Gaza Envelope via the security fence and from the sea.
The precise planning of the attack on Kibbutz Nir Oz, the preparations for the attack on the Yarkon Base of Unit 8200 near Kibbutz Urim, and documents left at the site during the attack on Kibbutz Mifalsim that Israel succeeding in repelling, attest to meticulous intelligence and operational planning, and a well-coordinated chain of command. All of these things must have been known to hundreds of members of Hamas. It’s hard to believe that nothing about these preparations was picked up by the high-grade collection assets of the Shin Bet and MI in the Gaza Strip; and if that was indeed the case, it was a collection failure of the first order. But it’s far more likely that the good information arrived and was assessed through the filter of the concept, which said there was nothing to it, because “Hamas has been deterred.” Hence the failure to draw the proper conclusions.
Signs that the concept was invalid were in part visible to all. CNN reported, on October 12, that Hamas fighters trained repeatedly in the open ahead of the attack. The network broadcast a video from December 2022 in which Hamas men are seen training to take over a community, using a full-scale model built for that purpose near the Erez Crossing on the Strip’s northern border with Israel. Similar life-size models were also built in the center and south of the Gaza Strip, CNN added, and broadcast clips showing the use of motorized paragliders to attack from the air and other forms of training.
What was seen is also what was heard. Menachem Gida and 26 of his friends living in the communities in the area, who established a WhatsApp group called Field Security Operational Monitor, listened in to the wireless traffic of Hamas over a period of years. Time after time they heard how the organization’s combat personnel were practicing the breaching of the fence and arriving from the sea, conquering kibbutzim such as Zikim, Netiv Ha’asara and Nir Oz, seizing hostages and destroying everything in their path.
The group grasped the significance of the daily training exercises as being preparations for real operations, and they passed on all the information to the IDF. The army personnel they were in contact with were less worried – “fantasies” was their term for the talk about preparations to capture territory in Israel. Finally, last April the army restricted the group’s ability to monitor Hamas’ wireless traffic. Despite this, the group discerned an intensification of the training, and that information was reported by Kan 11, the public broadcaster, a few days before the attack.
A tweet posted by Kan 11 reporter Asaf Pozailov four days before the Hamas attack: "The Islamic Jihad organization has launched a loud exercise very close to the border, including missile launches, breaking into Israel and kidnapping soldiers. Dedi Peled, a resident of Netiv Ha'Asara [says]: This was significantly closer than previous times, the kids wake up during their holiday break and ask what happened, there are explosions. It's not like previous exercises."
What Gida and his friends heard just before the war was also picked up by the female soldiers who served as spotters on the Gaza border. Their reports, which echo almost exactly the reports of spotters from the IDF outposts along the Suez Canal on the eve of the 1973 war, should have made it clear that a concrete change had occurred in routine activity taking place in the area adjacent to the fence. One spotter, Yael Rothenberg, told the website Zman Emet that she had reported to her superior seeing Hamas men with maps, “counting steps, digging there.” Similarly, the reports of the spotters at the Suez Canal exactly 50 years earlier made reference to Egyptian officers who were standing on the other side of the canal with maps and planning the attack. At that time, MI dismissed the significance of the reports, claiming these were Egyptian exercises; this time they claimed the digging detected by the spotters was farmwork.
It was clear to the spotters that an incursion was imminent; they discussed among themselves where it would happen and in which sector. It’s not clear what happened to their reports as they made their way up through the MI hierarchy, but it is clear that they didn’t bring about any change in the certainty that Hamas had been deterred and that, consequently, the warnings were not meaningful. Neglecting to put back into use the observation balloons that were intended to provide warnings from deep within the Gaza Strip is evidence of yet another painful expression of the rigid “concept.” (Use of the balloons had stopped just weeks prior to the attack.)
On top of the intelligence idée fixe, there is the immense gap between the way the IDF coped with potential attempts to infiltrate by way of the fence, and the ease with which Hamas was able to work around the underground obstacle that was built along the border of the Gaza Strip. When the obstacle was inaugurated, IDF officers boasted that the amount of concrete used to construct the subterranean barrier was enough to build a highway from Gaza to Bulgaria, and that any attempt to penetrate on the surface would trap the Palestinians in a killing field between two fences. The defense minister at the time, Benny Gantz, promised that “this wall affords a sense of personal security that will allow this beautiful area [the so-called Gaza Envelope] to grow.” But the height of the promise is matched only by the depth of the disappointment.
The almost exclusive reliance on technology for purposes of deterrence, and the management of the war via “see-shoot” weapons systems, remotely controlled by spotters from their underground positions, came at the expense of the method by which the IDF had traditionally coped with significant threats across the border: orderly defensive procedures, well-trained combat forces and an “alert at dawn” routine against possible enemy attack – measures that were intended to head off an enemy even without concrete warnings.
In 1973, the tank crews of the regular-army division in Sinai practiced repeatedly the defensive command “Shovech Yonim” (dovecote), and knew very well where they needed to be and how to get there as soon as the order came to throw back the Egyptians. At that time, because of a blunder by the head of Southern Command, the order wasn’t given. Fifty years later, history repeated itself almost exactly, although it’s not yet clear whether the forces in the sector were sufficiently trained that they could have contained an attack of the kind that was executed, or the degree to which the line was prepared for such an eventuality.
The technological failure cried out to the heavens in other senses, too. The war in Ukraine led to countless videos in which Ukrainian troops were seen activating small, inexpensive drones that released explosive devices above Russian tanks, artillery or soldiers – and destroying them.
The lesson should have been clear, yet the observation facilities along the fence remained vulnerable to attack from the air, as Hamas videos also showed. To the IDF’s credit, that lesson was learned quickly. The tanks that are presently operating in Gaza – which had already been equipped with the highly expensive Me’il Ruach (Windbreaker) active protection system, have been further bolstered since the start of the war with metal coverings that protect the turret from drone threats. But on the critical day, those coverings, whose cost is minimal, were not in place to protect systems that cost millions against means of attack that any child can buy from AliExpress (and may actually have been acquired there).
When the commission of inquiry to investigate the intelligence failure is finally established, much will be heard about the information that was available to the Israeli intelligence community about preparations for the attack, and about how that information got lost. But even now, several basic causes of the shameful failure are clear.
A major cause is the organizational culture of the Shin Bet and apparently also of MI. In the case of the former, we need to go back to slightly distant history. At the start of the first intifada, in 1987, when it emerged that the Israeli intelligence system did not have a unit whose role it was to provide a strategic warning about the development of significant threats in the occupied territories, a research department was created in the Shin Bet with the aim of addressing this lacuna. But because the culture of the Shin Bet is such that it sees its task as being to prevent point-specific terrorism, that department, which was the natural candidate to integrate, identify and warn about an existential threat, gradually atrophied. According to multiple sources, it also underwent processes of politicization, thus ruling out the possibility of assessments that were contrary to the dominant concept.
We don’t know enough about the research division of MI, but it’s clear that its failure to provide a warning about Hamas’ preparations ahead of the attack was unprecedented. In this body, too, which is responsible for the national intelligence appraisal and for warning about impending wars, a tendency has been discerned in recent years, and more especially since the 2006 Lebanon war, of placing the emphasis on creating a “bank of targets” for future attack, at the expense of investing resources in identifying strategic processes underway.
It’s not clear how much research attention the threat of Hamas’ general offensive drew, where it was ranked in the organizational EEI, or whether there were research officers who pointed to it as a concrete threat, contrary to the dominant assessment that “Hamas has been deterred.” But we know that the director of MI – who was on vacation in Eilat the weekend that the war broke out – dismissed the warnings that were received and which nonetheless prompted the chief of staff, the head of the Shin Bet and other ranking officers to examine the situation during the night before the attack. It’s clear that if MI’s research division had indicated a threat beforehand, even the threat of one community being captured, MI’s director could have been more vigilant, along with others in the system.
An additional partial explanation for the absence of a warning is what the commission that investigated the events of September 11 in the United States termed a “lack of imagination.” In 2001, the failure lay in the fact that no one imagined a mega-attack carried out by means of passenger planes. In 2023, the “lack of imagination” lay in the fact that no one imagined the possibility of a murderous attack by Hamas across the entire region across from Gaza. But in the Israeli case the explanatory force of the “lack of imagination” is relatively limited, in part because of the large quantity of information that must have flowed to the intelligence bodies about Hamas’ preparations for a large-scale attack, and also because the significance of the threat of even one or two communities being overrun should have been sufficient to bring about a far higher level of preparedness at dawn on October 7.
The threat of one community being overrun had been on the agenda for some time, but there is no sign that it was considered sufficiently concrete or that it was weighed seriously in the hours before the attack – as evidenced by the response of the decision-makers and the unpreparedness of the IDF when the war started.
Ultimately, I believe, the root of the failure will be found, as it was in 1973, at the psychological level: the conventional tendency to believe that what has been, will be; the belief that a “black swan,” in the form of a coordinated, lethal attack by limited forces that lack defenses and are inferior in firepower, like those that Hamas built up in Gaza, is untenable; and the “groupthink” that led MI researchers and other officers to believe that they should rely on the wisdom of the group.
MI often took pride in the “devil’s advocate” mechanism it developed after 1973 – a control unit whose task was to promote within the research division an alternate assessment to the dominant one. However, it appears that the personnel of the control unit did not set forth an alternate threat appraisal, one that acknowledged the tremendous temptation Hamas would have had to launch a large-scale operation, one that would put the organization on the map and undermine fundamentally Israel’s sense of security and its image as a regional power. Groupthink also helped entrench the collective belief, which was shared by the army, that Hamas could not execute a broad operation without MI and the Shin Bet being aware of it in advance.
To all of this we need to add the tendency that took root in MI to rely almost exclusively on technological means of warning and to make light of the lessons of the past.
I saw that tendency myself less than two months ago. On the 50th anniversary of the intelligence blunder in the Yom Kippur War, I presented to a forum of high-level MI personnel what my research had identified as the roots of the failure. First and foremost was the psychological tendency of a number of ranking MI personnel, who clung to the “concept” until the last minute, even though all the information they were receiving cried out that war was imminent. A second talk to that forum dealt with an experiment in which the data that was available on the eve of the war was fed into an artificial intelligence program, in order to examine whether AI could be used as a substitute for human thought. The major focus of interest in the discussion that developed after these talks was on various issues relating to the ability of the machine to identify threats. The psychology of the human failures to heed warnings was not of any special interest to MI.
Emerging from that discussion, I realized that the lessons of 1973 had not been learned. But I never thought for a moment that this would be exemplified so painfully, so shamefully and so soon.
Utter nonsense, the trigger was planned (the spike in murder of Palestinians), the reaction was planned ( Revenge by Palestinians and the facilitation of crossing the border) and the barbarity was planned ( the Systematic genocide and ethnic cleansing). But Allah has his ways , let's see if the occupiers can swallow Gaza or it gets stuck in their throat.
Falcon29
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Allah(SWT) blessed us with many states in the region and blessed us with Islam. Some of these have borders with Palestine. And they need to do something.
Novus ordu seclorum
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Useless organization which should be disbanded. They do nothing. Asked 'international community' to do everything, everything outsourced, and diluted. Also, they never had such conference over Muslim groups who were genocided, such as Rohingya and Darfur, those concerns were raised by 'international community'. But, when it is about oil price, this is Saudi message to US.
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