Israel had slam dunk intelligence on the Oct. 7 attack; what went wrong?

Editor's note: This Commentary was orignaly published on Demcember 4th, 2023. 

When he assumed office as commander of Unit 8200, Brigadier General Y., decided that the unit's new motto should be "Responsibility has no limits." Well-chosen and important words intended to state the obvious: that the unit's responsibility, just as its capabilities, is infinite.

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After two and a half years it has emerged that Unit 8200's responsibility might well be without limits, but its commanding officer's responsibility is simply non-existent. Almost two months after the most major disaster in the history of the State of Israel, the commander of the IDF's prestigious central intelligence collection unit, and indeed that of the State of Israel, still refuses to say, "I am responsible", or even utter the collective version of this statement – "we are responsible".

Last week, here at Israel Hayom, we exposed the resounding intelligence failure of Unit 8200, as part of the overall collapse of the entire intelligence establishment. Since that publication, numerous additional details have come to light that have uncovered a considerably much more worrying picture of the events than we had known to date. To a large extent, this is the story of a foreseeable tragedy born out of the sin of arrogance: of the state's political leadership, the heads of the security establishment, of the intelligence agencies, and the commanders of the IDF units in the field.

It is important to clarify from the outset that even today we can only tell a small part of the story. What is being published here has been approved by the military censor after the requisite issues of critical importance to national security were edited out. The decision to publish this now, in the midst of the war, is not intended to apportion blame but to ensure that these issues are adequately addressed – even retroactively, and mainly looking ahead – to make sure that Israel is not taken by surprise again in a complex campaign that it has been forced to wage now.

There is; however, an additional reason for publishing this now. The Chief of Staff, Herzi Halevi, determined that the IDF would not spend time now investigating what happened in the lead-up to the current war so that it would be able to focus on the war itself. "First of all, we will win and only afterward we will investigate," he said, in what was to be translated into a firm directive issued to all IDF units. But, it has become clear that Unit 8200 is apparently a law unto itself. Brigadier General Y. appointed two former senior unit commanders to look into what had happened and provided them with regular intelligence staff from the unit to help out with this task.

This activity is problematic from two points of view. Firstly, that the Chief of Staff had explicitly prohibited this. Secondly, this entails a genuine option of drafting a version of the events. As these issues will be examined as part of a future commission of inquiry, there is concern that Brigadier General Y. is seeking to shape the unit's narrative for any such future eventuality. Although the investigative proceeding is entirely separate from that of any inquiry, under the current situation, it should at least have obtained the authorization from the IDF Military Advocate General, which would then have been able to accompany the process. Moreover: a potential claim of Brigadier General Y. that the investigation is being conducted for internal lesson-learning purposes is problematic, as he has failed to assume any responsibility for the fiasco.

Stones were indeed left unturned

Yahya Sinwar changed his approach after IDF Operation Guardian of the Walls back in May 2021. He came out of that operation with very limited achievements and with a whole lot of damage to Gaza. The result was a decision to progress on two parallel tracks: one, a course of indirect dialogue with Israel in order to improve the living conditions in the Gaza Strip by the influx of funds (from Qatar) and the 'export' of manual laborers to work (in Israel), while the second one involved accelerating its military readiness for war.

In 2022, Israel received an absolute gem of an intelligence report, a document written by Hamas entitled "The Plan for Defeating the IDF Gaza Division." This intelligence reporting, brought by Unit 8200, was a genuine gold mine, it contained everything: the IDF's deployment (with a chilling level of detail) and the methods of contending with it, how to breach the border obstacle and to carry out the attack, as well as the targets and objectives during the attack and thereafter. This item of intelligence reporting was disseminated to everybody. Nobody in the IDF or elsewhere, including the political policymakers, can claim that they were not familiar with it. And if they were not aware of it, then that too bears witness to negligence, as this was no ordinary gem but a real game-changer, which should have led to one of the following two courses of action: a profound change of thought to cancel the underlying approach that Hamas is deterred and seeks peace and quiet, or a series of steps to refute the golden item of intelligence reporting so that it would be possible to continue to adhere to the existing conception.

Of course, none of these options materialized.

Unit 8200 did not do this off its own bat, as it should have done. Its commander, Brigadier General Y., made do with the fact that he had brought the golden intelligence report, but failed in the effort to leave no stone unturned, both at home and externally, in order to ensure that the intelligence reporting was put to good use. He did not build a full intelligence collection model to monitor the Hamas plan, to disrupt it, or to provide sufficient warning that would enable the IDF to prepare for it. Neither did he push for any such preparations within his unit, he did not change the prioritization for collecting sensitive information, did not engage in discussions with the senior IDF command on this issue, and above all failed to restore a number of sub-units that had been closed down during his tenure. These are sections within 8200 that could have provided an important input in the effort to provide what the intelligence community refers to as I&W (indications and warnings), such as the tactical communications (hand-held radios) section and the open source intelligence (OSINT) section.

Brigadier General Y. also failed to ensure that the senior officers in the IDF should directly hear the opinions in his unit, which had been vociferously voiced in the days and weeks leading up to the Black Sabbath, stating that Hamas' plan was being put into practice. Even during the hours immediately preceding the incident, when frenetic consultations were held by phone to address the extremely worrying signs originating from the Gaza Strip, he neither assessed nor stated that these signs might be related to the Hamas plan and the very concerns that had been voiced by his own staff at 8200.

The Unit 8200 commander is not alone. The Head of the Operational Division in the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate, Brigadier General G., did not bother to initiate any essential action to try and understand just what was going on in Gaza. The Operational Division was established as one of the key lessons from the Second Lebanon War, with the aim of synchronizing all the intelligence activity to focus on the key objective of the Military Intelligence Directorate – providing early warning of a war. G. and his staff were familiar with the intelligence 'gold dust' on Hamas but failed to turn it into a working plan: just as occurred with 8200, they failed to make any attempt to either confirm or refute it, and thus were derelict in their duty. Just like Brigadier General Y., Brigadier General G. is also convinced that his conduct was flawless. Ironically, those who work closely with him are even convinced that at the end of the war, he will be appointed the next commander of Unit 8200.

The Head of the Research Division in the Military Intelligence Directorate, Brigadier General Amit Sa'ar, who himself is a seasoned intelligence officer with considerable expertise on Gaza and the Palestinians, was also at fault, as he did not demand that all the available intelligence collection means should be put into action to ensure that Gaza would not surprise us. If we then delve down to the next level in the intelligence chain, the intelligence officers of the IDF Southern Command and the Gaza Division – those selfsame officers who ought to get up every morning staring coldly in the face of the threat of war – were also captivated by the same conception and refused to address any attempt made to challenge their thinking.

"Fiction" that became fact

On October 3, the IDF's Director of Military Intelligence, Aharon Haliva, came for a visit to Unit 8200's central collection base in southern Israel. This occurred in the middle of the Sukkot holiday, and Haliva was in the midst of a jam-packed working day. He began with a meeting at the IDF 91st Division, responsible for the Galilee area, in order to check the division's intelligence readiness in relation to Hezbollah, he then went on to the IDF 210 Division in the Golan Heights in order to see that all was in order along the Syrian front, and from there he flew down to the Negev to check the pulse along the Gaza sector.

The base he visited is where the now 'famous' veteran warrant officer serves, who for a long period of time had been constantly warning that something was afoot in Gaza, something strange and different to what everybody was thinking, that all the exercises and deceptions along the border fence are part of a large-scale plan that would culminate in an attack. The warrant officer, V., compared the plan with what was actually taking place in the field, and she tried to make herself heard.  She sent three detailed emails on this matter, but she was brushed off with the claim that the scenario she was portraying was unreal.

The only people who were prepared to listen to her, who supported her point of view, were those soldiers who worked closely together with her. Her direct commander, P., even cut short his vacation in order to attend the meeting held on that day with the Director of Military Intelligence. He tried to warn the general, but Haliva simply dismissed what he had to say. In the Director of Military Intelligence's bureau, they claim that none of this occurred: that such a warning, at that specific time, was not given. As this was a meeting attended by a large number of people, we can safely assume that there are sufficient participants who can provide first-hand testimony as to what really went on there.

The intelligence failure is not confined to the Military Intelligence Directorate. The responsibility for Gaza is shared with Israel's Security Agency, better known as Shin Bet. This is a rather odd setup which now clearly requires reexamination and perhaps even to be restructured. The clear advantage of Military Intelligence lies in its cyber capabilities and its IMINT (imagery intelligence) (from satellites to UAVs, balloons, and lookouts), while Shin Bet's distinct advantage ought to be in its HUMINT (human intelligence), which is able to provide the intelligence gold dust in real time. Of course, none of these options materialized.

Sinwar shared his precise intentions with only a handful of his most trusted men, and the field-level operatives knew about them only in real time, on the morning of that fateful Shabbat. It is thus not clear that even the best HUMINT sources in Hamas would have been able to provide the necessary intelligence in time; though, they might have succeeded in providing a minimal warning that could have enabled the forces to adopt a number of rapid actions – mobilizing forces together with the rapid response squads in each local community and available aircraft – that would have been able to limit the damage.

On the morning of October 7, the Shin Bet received a number of I&W, which led to frantic consultations at the organization's leadership level, and between Shin Bet and the IDF too. The conclusion reached by all the participants was that this was a mere drill, just as Hamas had carried out on a number of occasions over the past year. The Shin Bet was however concerned that something might have been about to happen, possibly a kidnapping, and they decided to dispatch a 'Tequila' team to the south (which comprises the Shin Bet's own elite operators and troops from the Israel Police's crack 'Yamam' or National Counter-Terrorism Unit). Here too, the thinking was flawed: a kidnapping incident in the Gaza Strip is no mere tactical matter, but rather an incident of strategic dimensions. Had there been an imminent danger then there was a clear obligation to adopt much more significant steps than those taken at the time.

Some of the senior figures mentioned here have assumed responsibility for the intelligence failure in preventing the attack. The most prominent amongst them being the Head of Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, the Director of Military Intelligence, Haliva, and the Head of the Research Division, Sa'ar. Brigadier General Y. from 8200 and Brigadier General G. from the Operational Division are acting as though this incident has nothing to do with them at all. In contrast, in the Shin Bet, the Head of the Southern District, A., and the Head of the Gaza Division in the District, M., have already made it clear that the buck stops with them. M. was due to complete his term of office only one week after the attack; he has obviously remained there for the time being and will leave once the war is over.

Each individual mentioned in this article should pack his bags and go home as part of the process to repair the damage after the war. And they are not the only ones: the current Head of the IDF Southern Command, Major General Yaron Finkelman and his predecessor, Major General Eliezer Toledano, who was a partner-proponent-founder of the conception and of the defensive failure accompanying it during his tenure as commander of the IDF Gaza Division and subsequently during his term as Head of the Southern Command, as well as the commander of the Gaza Division, Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld along with the brigade commanders under his command – as the entire security and defensive CONOPS (concept of operations) was shattered into pieces on the Black Sabbath.

Having said that, none of this removes one iota of responsibility from the political decision making level, and above all the prime minister. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the founding father of the failure in Gaza, the man who built, reinforced, and above all handled Hamas with kid gloves, blocking any proposal or attempt to target the Hamas leadership (and there were a number of these, detailed ones, that were placed on his table in recent years by the heads of Shin Bet). It was Netanyahu's duty to know, to ask, to hound, and to demand. He did none of these, on the contrary: he worked to develop and maintain the conception. The man who sent the Mossad chief to conclude the deal with Qatar to provide Hamas with 'suitcases full of cash', who preferred Hamas to the Palestinian Authority, who exchanged notes with Sinwar, whose focus was squarely fixed on Saudi Arabia and who convinced himself that the Palestinian issue had been solved, and who ignored all the strategic warnings given to him over the course of the last year concerning the fact that the IDF had been severely weakened and that Israel's enemies regard this as a golden opportunity to strike.

It is not wholly clear what Sinwar would have done had Israel been stronger. He might have attacked, but perhaps he might have decided not to. Nevertheless, the fact that Netanyahu elected not to listen is no less chilling than the fact that the IDF did not listen to the field-level experts in the intelligence units or the lookouts.  Had there been slightly less self-confidence throughout this entire chain of command, and slightly more willingness to listen to others, then we might have been able to stave off the grave disaster that hit us on October 7.

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