A New York Times report published on Sunday evening summarized a series of intelligence and policy failures going back decades that led to the brutal Hamas attack on October 7.

The report began: It was 3 a.m. on Oct. 7, and Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s domestic security service, still could not determine if what he was seeing was just another Hamas military exercise.

At the headquarters of his service, Shin Bet, officials had spent hours monitoring Hamas activity in the Gaza Strip, which was unusually active for the middle of the night. Israeli intelligence and national security officials, who had convinced themselves that Hamas had no interest in going to war, initially assumed it was just a nighttime exercise.

Their judgment that night might have been different had they been listening to traffic on the hand-held radios of Hamas militants. But Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, had stopped eavesdropping on those networks a year earlier because they saw it as a waste of effort.

As time passed that night, Mr. Bar thought that Hamas might attempt a small-scale assault. He discussed his concerns with Israel’s top generals and ordered the “Tequila” team — a group of elite counterterrorism forces — to deploy to Israel’s southern border.

Until nearly the start of the attack, nobody believed the situation was serious enough to wake up Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to three Israeli defense officials.

Unfortunately, the end of the “Hamas activity” is now well-known and does not have to be repeated.

How did such an intelligence failure occur? According to an “examination” by the NYT, based on “dozens of interviews with Israeli, Arab, European and American officials,” Israeli intelligence officials had mistaken assumptions about Hamas for years and made flawed decisions regarding its surveillance of the terror group, especially in the year before the attack – mainly due to their assumption that Hamas was a “contained threat.”

Senior Israeli security officials and Netanyahu believed that Iran and its strongest proxy, Hezbollah, was the greatest threat to Israel. Therefore, “far less attention was paid to the threats from Gaza.” US intelligence agencies, under the belief that “Hamas was a regional threat that Israel was managing” also invested little resources in collecting intelligence on Hamas.

Since May 2021, the official assessment of Israel’s National Security Council and the IDF’s Intelligence Directorate was that Hamas was not interested in directly attacking Israel and instead was trying to spur violence against Israel in Yehudah and Shomron.

Despite Israel’s sophisticated espionage tools, intelligence officials had failed to discover that Hamas terrorists were undergoing extensive training in the Strip for the October 7th assault for at least a year and that the terrorists had detailed information about IDF bases near the border and the kibbutzim – including their layouts, the number of families, and even which families had dogs.

Meanwhile, in order to bypass Israel’s surveillance tools, Hamas leaders and terrorists in training for the attack were strictly forbidden from discussing the plans on their cell phones. The terrorists were divided into small cells, with each cell training for specific goals without being aware of the complete operation.

Israeli intelligence officials decided about a year ago that monitoring handheld radios used by Hamas terrorists was a “waste of effort.” These radios were later found on some of the dead bodies of the terrorists.

Israeli officials also put too much trust in its billion-dollar security wall on the Gazan border and its technological surveillance capabilities. Hamas bypassed the “invincible wall” on October 7 by using explosive drones that blew out the sensors and remote firing systems.

IDF soldiers stationed near the border who survived the assault said that the attack was so well-planned that the damage to their cameras and communication systems caused “all our screens to be turned off in almost the exact same second.”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)