How Israel’s spymasters misread Hamas
Overconfident intelligence agencies missed multiple warnings before October 7 attacks in a ‘failure of imagination’
For two years, Menachem Gida wrestled with a dark sense of foreboding.
The communications hobbyist was part of a team of volunteers who, using a “satellite farm” in southern Israel, compulsively monitored Gaza’s communications networks and Arab media, passing on nuggets of information to the Israeli military.
It was a semi-formal relationship. But when they repeatedly warned that Hamas fighters were conducting elaborate war games near the border, the amateur snoops were brushed aside. “The Israeli military officer told us: ‘You’re not important, we don’t need you,’” Gida said.
Gida was not alone. Michael Milstein, an ex-military intelligence officer, told his former colleagues and wrote numerous articles in the press saying that Israel’s approach to Hamas wasn’t working — although nobody paid much attention. “The writing was on the wall,” said Milstein, a former government adviser on Palestinian affairs in Gaza and the West Bank. “Hamas was preaching war.”
Even warnings from Israel’s Combat Intelligence Corps, which monitors the country’s frontier with Gaza, were ignored. One soldier, Noa Melman, told her superiors earlier this year that Hamas militants were practising attacks on a mock fence, blowing it up again and again.
“But everyone treated it like it was normal, like it was routine,” she said in a subsequent television interview.
On October 7, Hamas unleashed a disaster even worse than the bleakest premonitions of Gida, Milstein and Melman. At about 6.30am, under the cover of a massive missile barrage, more than 1,500 Hamas militants knocked out Israel’s border communications with explosive-laden drones, breached the security barriers with bulldozers, and raided Israeli territory on motorbikes and paragliders.
The synchronised attack shattered Israel’s faith in its military and intelligence services. Not only had they had failed to track what one of its main enemies was planning, they had ignored multiple warnings that Hamas was preparing a major offensive, often in plain sight.
Israel suffered from “overconfidence, which led to arrogance, which led to complacency,” said former prime minister Ehud Olmert. “Hamas did to us what we normally do: surprise, cleverness, outside the box thinking.”
Many factors contributed to the failure. The conclusions of a full inquiry into the intelligence debacle may be years away. But the lessons from it are already shaping Israel’s unforgiving military campaign to “destroy” Hamas, an enemy Israel has concluded it can no longer contain. Since Israel launched its retaliatory campaign, more than 10,500 people have been killed in Gaza, according to officials in the Hamas-controlled territory.
“Even on the night of the attack, we smelled that something was happening but the interpretation was that it was just a regular [Hamas] military exercise,” a senior Israeli official said. “Our intelligence suffered from a fundamental flaw.”
That was in part because Israel’s security services underestimated Hamas’s ability to mount such a large-scale operation with all the tight operational security, disciplined planning and detailed knowledge of Israeli terrain that it required.
“Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it seems the big failure [in Israel] was a failure of imagination, as was the case with 9/11,” said Sir Alex Younger, former head of Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence service. “There is always a danger of conflating what you want with what actually is . . . and Israel felt that Hamas had been de-risked.”
Israel made a similar mistake exactly 50 years ago, before the Yom Kippur war against Egypt and Syria, when it falsely believed that the Arab nations would never attack due to its military strength. But there is an extra historical twist to this year’s assault, which Israel has frequently compared to the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on America.
The 9/11 report, the US government’s official account of what happened, rued that no security official foresaw that terrorists might fly planes into big US buildings — even though many of them said they had read a 1994 Tom Clancy novel which climaxes with that scene.
In a similar vein, before Hamas launched its October 7 attack, Avi Issacharoff, co-creator of Israel’s hit television thriller Fauda, rejected a possible plotline for one episode in which Hamas fighters stormed the border fence and attacked Israel, deeming it too implausible. Israel’s security services apparently thought the same.
“What are the chances that dozens, let alone thousands, would be able to do this without military intelligence or Shin Bet [the internal security service] . . . knowing about it?” Issacharoff recalled, telling his script writers at the time. “Let’s move on and find something more realistic.”
A second reason for Israel’s failure was what one western official called “technological arrogance” — a hubristic faith that advanced technologies, such as the aerial drones that eavesdrop on Gaza and the sensor-equipped fence that surrounds the strip, would outmatch Hamas’s more limited technological abilities.
For many years, this had helped the Israel Defense Forces thwart all but a handful of border breaches. But it generated a false sense of security, said another western security official, comparing it to an iPhone. “Great when it works, but if it doesn’t — suddenly you can’t do anything,” the official said.
The Israeli military’s 8200 signals intelligence unit had also recently stopped listening in on the handheld radios used by Hamas militants after they judged it a waste of effort, according to The New York Times.
“We had become addicted to tech, cyber, big data and the rest of it,” Millstein said. “But the cheapest and simplest intelligence — such as open source, tracking Hamas’s walkie-talkie communications, even listening to our female observation soldiers on the border — was completely under-appreciated.”
Another problem is that while Israel’s high-tech surveillance methods can produce masses of high-quality tactical intelligence — such as identifying the precise location of a rocket launcher — it is less good at revealing strategy or a leadership’s intentions, which is the main focus of human intelligence.
“If you are iterating from the status quo, technology is very good,” Younger said. “It is far less so when it comes to making a strategic leap or revealing intentions.”
A third reason for Israel’s failure to anticipate Hamas’s attack was that political turmoil caused by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial domestic policies had weakened national security and distracted its intelligence services.
“Shin Bet understandably was focused on the increase of violence in the West Bank, which had become increasingly challenging,” said David Petraeus, a former CIA director and US general who led Iraq’s allied forces and Nato and US troops in Afghanistan.
Hamas, which has governed Gaza since 2007, took advantage of these distractions. It also played along with a Netanyahu policy which sought to nurture Hamas rule in Gaza as a way of diminishing the standing of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
Even as Hamas prepared for war, it remained in daily touch with the Israeli government on mundane issues such as export quotas and workers’ permits. Several Israeli and international officials maintain that these workers helped gather intelligence, including precise maps of the kibbutzim that Hamas would later attack.
In addition, Hamas filtered misinformation through channels that they knew Israeli intelligence was monitoring, while actual plans for the attack were held by a small group of Hamas leaders.
The lessons that Israeli security officials have drawn from their failure to anticipate the assault have deadly implications. Their conclusion is that Israel can no longer depend on intelligence to provide an early warning of attacks from Gaza, or on the country’s military might to deter them. Instead, it must pre-empt potential threats by directly eliminating them.
“The only solution is: no more relying on intelligence,” the senior Israeli official said. “Deterrence is no longer enough . . . It is a new paradigm.”