The IDF issues its report on how and why Israel failed to prepare for 10/7
Here’s a summary. An excerpt:
The investigations found that the State of Israel, including both political and defense echelons, believed or carried out the following, due to their perception of Gaza:
Over the past decades, Israel considered the threats from Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon to be the priority, while the Gaza Strip was secondary. …
Israel chose to “manage the conflict” with Hamas, to create long periods of quiet, under the false presumption that the terror group was uninterested in a large-scale war. There were no plans to conquer the Gaza Strip in a war, and there were no plans to reach a full diplomatic agreement with the terror group either, but rather return to normalcy after periodic escalation. Israel believed that leveraging improved civil conditions in Gaza would make Hamas less likely to launch a war. …
The threat of a surprise and wide-scale attack from Gaza was not perceived as realistic by the IDF, due to a major gap in Israel’s understanding of Hamas. The IDF believed Hamas to be a limited threat, in the event of it responding to incidents, rather than taking initiative. …
The most significant threat from the Gaza Strip, as seen by the IDF at the time, was rocket fire. At the same time, Hamas’s invasion capability was seen by the military as very limited, due to Israel’s advanced border fence and the false belief that the IDF had successfully destroyed significant elements of the terror group’s tunnel networks in the 2021 Gaza War. …
Israel’s fence on the border with the Gaza Strip was not intended to prevent a large-scale invasion, but to handle rioting on the border, and delay or disrupt limited infiltration attacks. …
Israel’s perceptions of Gaza were “rooted and deep.” Over the years there were no meaningful attempts to question the perceptions, and no proper investigation was held to think “Where are we [doing] wrong?”
I think a big part of the problem was also that Hamas was dissembling, and Israel was taken in due to wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking reinforced by resource issues is a very powerful process.
That’s an extraordinary admission of responsibility. Not for starting the conflict, but for a naive expectation of good faith action. Israel has learned a valuable lesson, albeit at a great cost to both Israelis and residents of Gaza.
n.n
I don’t get the impression the IDF was thinking Hamas might act in good faith. They misinterpreted the data they had, and, wishful thinking, did not conclude Hamas had the capacity or the strategy for such an attack. Other rotten stuff, yes.
Hmm
https://x.com/tabletmag/status/1895494544944418823
More details need to be volunteered who did the assessmenf and what info did they include or dismiss was it eisenkot or halevi or gallant and why did they think that
The outlier minister liebermann had warned of just such an operation some 6 years earlier why wasnt he listened to
Richard Aubrey:
You’re right. They underestimated Hamas’s audacity and capacity. My comment about good faith reflects my own, perhaps naive, optimism.
Now we’re going to see another application of the Law of The Last Ten Percent.
From almost There to There, all they way There, is the Last Ten Percent. The easier stuff has been done.
The last ten percent is grossly disproportionate in resources to build and to maintain. Hence, it is easiest to abandon when…nothing’s happened, right?
So if you call up the QRF when you see “indications”, there are two possibilities. One is that it’s a false alarm but which looks like the real thing, pretty much. The other is that it’s the Bad Guys getting set up. So the QRF’s choppers come over the horizon and the Bad Guys drop weapons under some ragged burlap or something and start kicking a soccer ball. Or hoeing a garden.
Eventuially, the QRF guy starts talking about maintenance time and his budget and…higher’s asking about his budget….
So you need a lot harder indication to call out the QRF. And maybe the next atrocity can come from….a pretty smoothly hidden set of preps.
Numerous variations of the above.
They were led down the garden path by “Biden”.
This does NOT absolve them of responsibility for the disaster.
Note that I’m inclined to come down much harder on the military and intelligence echelons than on the political…
I think part of the issue was that the IDF was thinking in MILITARY terms. 10/7 took no terrain, it affected little production, Its main military effect was to take out several lookout posts. The IDF planners seem to have expected Hamas to behave as a rational military force. But HAMAS was not and is not a military force. It is a group of terrorists willing to act as potential Shaheed (martyrs) and generally just killing, pillaging, and r*ping without constraint. Having misidentified the nature of Hamas they misidentified its intents.
1) The IDF General Staff are like the Pentagon Leadership – 100% Woke
The IDF leaders in 2023 spent their time in collusion with other Leftist leaders of Israel’s institutions going after Netanyahu, especially trying to sabotage Bibi’s government’s attempted reform of Israel’s corrupt judicial system. That is NOT in their job description.
2) The “Taztzpitanyot” – Israeli IDF women tasked with surveillance of Gaza were ignored completely with their endless accurate and daily reports of Hamas doing dry runs of the invasion month after month right up to the morning of the invasion and then were left to be murdered and/or kidnapped.
The IDF leadership were/are traitors and no one is being shot no less cashiered.
Pathetic bunch of liars.
Only 7% of Israel’s Jews not in law enforcement or the IDF are allowed to have guns and ammo and ammo amounts are tightly restricted. The Left does not remotely trust the other Jews in Israel to have weapons and that goes all the way back to ben Gurion in 1947.