The Israeli response to the Hamas attack wasn’t just an intelligence failure in terms of acting on information, although it certainly was that. But I think that, more importantly, it was a failure to think outside the box and even imagine the sort of attack that occurred. Much like our intelligence prior to 9/11 – an event that showed a sort of evil creativity on the part of the terrorists to come up with a new approach, one that intelligence in the US simply didn’t anticipate. Whether it was because US intelligence agents underestimated the terrorists or had just became complacent in their thinking, they simply did not even imagine what happened – and in order to prevent something, you have to imagine it first.
I believe the same was true of Israeli intelligence. There were things about this attack that should have easily been imagined, such as the anniversary element, which is often part of terrorist plans. I am not altogether certain why the Israelis were caught flat-footed on that. Many people have postulated they were too distracted by their own internal problems, or even that anti-Netanyahu forces knew something was brewing and let it happen in order to embarrass him, thinking it would be far smaller and more limited than it actually was. Israel has been much safer in recent years than during the Second Intifada, and that probably was part of the reason their guard was let down.
But for decades Hamas seemed to mostly have the same approaches over and over: a limited number of rockets, and small-scale suicide bombers and the taking of a few hostages here and there. There was never anything remotely approaching this scale. And although there was plenty of brutality, there was nothing like this extreme level and scope of sadism, torture, rape, killings of children in front of parents, and glorying in it in ISIS-like fashion.
There was also apparently an over-reliance on the idea that terrorists would communicate online. But did no one ever think that Hamas or the Iranians might figure out that made them vulnerable, and that they would use the old tried-and-true non-internet methods to communicate?
When I got the news of the Hamas massacres, it occurred to me that the hand of Iran was visible not just in the financing but in the concept and the planning. And indeed, this seems to have been the case, although of course Iran denies it:
Iranian officers — as well as reps from Iran-backed militant groups including Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah — refined tactical and strategic plans for the assault during several meetings in Beirut, according to the [Wall Street] Journal, which cited senior members of both terrorist groups. …
“An attack of such scope could only have happened after months of planning and would not have happened without coordination with Iran,” Lina Khatib, director of the SOAS Middle East Institute at the University of London, told the outlet. …
The overall plan is to eventually wage active war with Israel on all fronts to finally close in on it with the help of Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the north and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members and an Iranian official told the Journal.
Why now? That seems obvious, doesn’t it? Not only was it the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, but both the US and Israel are currently torn by internal political factional strife. In addition, Biden is president, and appears visibly weak and feeble. Weakness leads to enemies’ boldness.
Another element in the intelligence failure was a years-long campaign of taqiyyah by Hamas in order to conjure up a false sense in the Israelis of lessening Hamas truculence:
Hamas conducted a years-long campaign to fool Israel into thinking the group did not desire armed conflict and could be placated with economic incentives to maintain relative calm, a source close to the terror organization told the Reuters news agency Monday.
“Hamas gave Israel the impression that it was not ready for a fight,” the source told the agency. …
The source said that Hamas convinced Israel that it was more interested in ensuring Gazans had work permits that allowed them to enter Israel, where they earned higher salaries than they would in the enclave.
Sounds as though Hamas relied on a common Western impression that extremists will become less extreme once they are doing better economically. I suppose it sometimes works for non-fanatics. But not for fanatics – or psychopaths. It was an elaborate con on the part of Hamas.
Another tactic that thwarted Israeli security:
The source said that many leaders of the terror group were not told of the planned attack in order to prevent it leaking to Israel. In addition, the approximately 1,000 terrorists involved in the devastating assault were not told exactly what they were training for. …
Former national security adviser Yaakov Amidror told Reuters that some countries allied with the Jewish state had bought into the lie, telling Jerusalem that Hamas was showing “more responsibility.”
Let’s guess which ones those countries might have been.
If you’re interested in some of the details of how security was breached, this is what has been reported (although it’s possible that Israel isn’t telling all it knows – at least, I hope they’re not):
First, a barrage of some 3,000 rockets was fired at Israel.
At the same time, a cell flew hang gliders across the border and secured the area, allowing an elite terror unit to breach Israel’s fortified security barrier.
The source said explosives were used to breach the barrier and the first terrorists went through on motorbikes. Then bulldozers were brought in to widen the gap, allowing jeeps to drive through.
The source said a “commando unit” of terrorists then attacked the headquarters of the IDF’s southern Gaza division “and jammed its communications, preventing personnel from calling commanders or each other.”
Perhaps that last IDF headquarters attack was primarily a cyberattack.
There was a smaller-than-usual IDF presence there because troops had been moved to the West Bank, where there had been recent violence. Apparently the thin IDF presence at the border where they invaded surprised even the terrorists.
The source added that “The operation exceeded all expectations.” I have little doubt that it did, and that they expected to be met with much more IDF resistance.
I believe we are vulnerable to similar actions, due to the porosity of our borders. The same is true of Western European countries such as Sweden and Germany, and many more. Is the era of relatively small scale terrorist attacks over?
[NOTE: This is a good, if highly depressing, article on the intelligence failures and the entire attack in general. From it, I learned of one more atrocity that I think is emblematic of the Hamas interface between the barbarism of old and the modern world: the terrorists killed a grandmother and uploaded a photo of her dead body onto her Facebook page, where her family saw it and learned that she’d been murdered. I was wondering whether they made her give them her Facebook password before they killed her, and then I realized that they probably just used her cellphone, in which she was almost certainly signed into Facebook.]
[NOTE II: See this article about how there was too much reliance on technological intelligence and defense and not enough on human intelligence and defense. Also this quote from it:
Islamists live in an economy of honor and shame, and they used smartphone cameras and social media to humiliate Israelis. Social-media platforms are full of grotesque images of Israeli hostages suffering mental torment and physical abuse, and haunting video clips showing disgraceful violations of dead bodies. As the Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur has written, these images did not show Hamas supporters getting “carried away”; they were instead “the essence of the whole enterprise.” The humiliation of Jews is the point. Those images attune us to the reality of evil, and the reality of evil obliges us to confront it.]
