Intelligence experts discuss bitter aftermath of Israel’s October 7 inquiry

Failure to spot signs of attack has been blamed on poor co-ordination between intelligence agencies

Israeli soldiers carry the coffins of deceased hostages after their bodies were handed over as part of the ceasefire deal. Reuters

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said on Sunday that a report warning of Hamas’s October 7 attack was not passed from the PM’s intelligence officer to Mr Netanyahu, hours before the attack.

The admission was defended on the basis that the report was not presented as urgent, but it has rekindled debate among experts on the reasons for the failure. Last week Israel released its final public inquiry into the October 7 Hamas attacks, in which around 1,200 Israelis were killed, most of them civilians. The attacks triggered retaliation that has killed at least 48,000 Gazans – also mostly civilians.

Over the weekend, the outgoing Israeli army chief Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi told Israel’s Channel 12: “If the Prime Minister’s intelligence officer was a person of integrity, he should already have told Netanyahu that he knew about Hamas preparations just before the attack and did not update Netanyahu.” Mr Netanyahu’s office released a statement defending the officer as “moral and trustworthy".

A historic intelligence failure?

Failure to act on the warning signs has, for many observers, added October 7 to the long list of historic “intelligence failures” in which critical information about an attack or crisis has been misinterpreted. Other examples include the Soviet Union’s failure to act on warnings of a Nazi invasion and the Pentagon assessment that Iraq was too “war weary” to attack Kuwait in 1990.

In these cases, the Soviets and the US had intelligence – aerial photographs in 1941 and satellite pictures in 1990 – of vast numbers of troops massing for an attack days before catastrophe. In Israel’s case, the October 7 intelligence alert was discussed by senior Israeli security officials in the hours before Hamas launched their offensive at 6.29am. The discussions resulted in a rise in drone flights over Gaza and the dispatching of a small elite team of commandos to the border.

But there was no mobilisation of the Gaza Division, which staffed the high-tech security wall around the enclave. The October 7 inquiry said the unit was briefly “defeated” in the chaos that followed as around 5,000 Hamas fighters and their allies stormed through the border fence.

An Israeli tank by the border fence with Gaza on December 29, 2023. Getty Images

The light Israeli force presence – just 767 troops – gave indications that an attack was in the making, a drumbeat of intelligence about suspicious Hamas activity that wasn’t passed up the chain of command for months. Other indications were lost in poor co-ordination within the Intelligence Directorate and between intelligence agencies and the Gaza Division, amid a wider assessment that Hamas could not mount such an operation.

An indication of the lack of co-ordination came about a year before the attack, when members of Unit 8200, the Israeli army’s intelligence corps, said they had detailed information of Hamas’s plan to launch a major ground offensive. The plan was dismissed by most officials as aspirational rather than an imminent threat.

More intelligence followed, from observation technology on the border including aerostat balloons with high-magnification cameras that could peer deep into the enclave and observe Hamas’s elite Nukhba special forces carrying out training exercises.

Israeli troops cross into Gaza during clashes with Hamas in November 2023. AFP

One warning, which was unclassified in the report, flagged up the activation of dozens of Israeli SIM cards within Gaza before the attack, suggesting an attempt to cross into Israel might have been imminent. Several other warning signs mentioned in the report remain classified, but Lt Gen Halevi said the SIM card activation had happened before, though not on the same scale.

There was also an increase in Hamas operatives dressed as civilians near the border fence. This was identified by the tatzpitaniyot, or lookouts – all-women intelligence staff at border posts – as an indication of something being planned.

Intelligence failure or political blunder?

“The Hamas October 7 surprise attack on Israel from an intelligence standpoint evokes significant parallels with Egypt and Syria’s surprise attack on October 6, 1973, launching the Yom Kippur War. Indicators of strategic and tactical deception were available to provide necessary warning but were either ignored or misinterpreted,” says Larry Regens, head of the Audax Concepts technology firm, and regents professor emeritus at the University of Oklahoma.

“It appears senior commanders in the military and security services and, probably most importantly, Israel’s political leadership, stuck to the preconceived paradigm that an attack wouldn’t happen. This mistake was reinforced by over-confidence in the assumption that Israeli deterrence was working,” Mr Regens, an expert in intelligence work, told The National.

Lt Gen Halevi, who described the belief that the Gaza border was not a major threat to Israel on October 7, has wondered whether analysts and commanders “could have understood what was received that night differently, and obviously then made different decisions?”

“Interestingly enough, Israel has historically had the problem of collecting excellent intelligence but failing to ignore the fog of preconceptions and find the necessary warnings,” Mr Regens says.

Charles Duelfer, former special adviser to the head of the CIA for the Iraq Survey Group – which was tasked with searching for weapons of mass destruction after the Iraq invasion – says that if intelligence agencies and commanders can’t join dots, advanced technology doesn’t matter. “The collection of data is only half – if that – of the intelligence problem. You have to assess what it means with respect to the other actors. To get into the head of another actor is usually where things go wrong,” he told The National.

“Especially if you're trying to understand an opponent whose value structure you don't really understand. If you don't know what's most important to an opponent how do you know what will deter them? The intelligence reports evidently were not screaming, ‘these guys are going to do something that appears insane to us because they cannot "win"’. Of course, who knows what Hamas would consider a win?”

Danny Citrinowicz, who served for over two decades in senior positions in Israeli military intelligence, says the failures were the result of a lack of what experts call “fusion” of intelligence sources.

“For the Israeli side, there’s the issue of perhaps over-reliance on technology and less on human capital. This was likely an issue in Unit 8200 and perhaps elsewhere, the fact that they were highly based on the technological side of intelligence collection, less on investing in human capital. Neglecting other methods of collecting intelligence, like open source information and relying on clandestine methods,” says Mr Citrinowicz, a Research Fellow in the Iran Program at the Institute for National Security Studies.

Such open source intelligence included public statements by Hamas. In August 2023, Hamas's deputy chairman Saleh Arouri said the group was preparing for “total war,” with Israel that would not only shut the country down but result in “victory”.

“You need the fusion of sensors. Those watching the screens near the Gaza border knew something was happening," says Mr Citrinowicz. "But there was a lack of fusion of all the material that arrived from Gaza. Nobody really sat down and saw everything in a centralised way.”