Israel’s security services failed to put together an accurate picture from the limited intelligence they were receiving, based on what was a misconception surrounding Hamas’ intentions.
LONDON
The Israeli intelligence services have always been admired for their professionalism. Shin Bet, the internal intelligence service; Mossad, responsible for operations overseas; and Aman, the military arm, all attract high-quality personnel endeavouring to keep the country safe. After all, if you are a small country surrounded by enemies, you need top-notch eyes and ears to detect any danger as early as possible. As a result, over the decades Israel’s intelligence agencies have gained an aura of invincibility, listing a string of achievements, from foiling numerous plots in the occupied West Bank to hunting down Hamas operatives in Dubai, even killing Iranian nuclear scientists in the centre of Iran.
This aura was destroyed in the blink of an eye a week ago when the militant group Hamas broke down Israeli border barriers around Gaza, sending hundreds of armed militants into Israel to carry out a brazen attack that has slaughtered over a thousand innocent Israeli civilians—including many children—taken more than a hundred hostages and pushed the region towards conflict.
“This is a major failure”, said Yaakov Amidor, a former national security advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “This operation proves that the intelligence abilities in Gaza were no good”. He’s probably right.
When Israel withdrew its troops and evicted Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, allowing Hamas to take over the 360 square kilometre region two years later, the intelligence services lost their handle on what was happening there. As a replacement, Israel installed a wide array of cutting-edge electronic surveillance methods. Border points bristled with cameras, drones and communication monitoring systems that collected every single exchange. This led to a high degree of confidence in Jerusalem that Israeli intelligence would know long beforehand of any Hamas plans which might cause problems for its defence forces. Only a week or so ago, President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, told The Atlantic that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades” adding, “just a few days ago, the Gaza border seems to have stabilised after some unrest, and nearly 20,000 workers are able to travel across it again”.
So what happened? “First we fight, then we investigate”, said Rear Admiral Hagari, the chief military spokesman last week, acknowledging that the public is owed an explanation. We will have to wait before anything official comes out of Jerusalem. But already there are some clues.
Since the beginning of the year, Netanyahu’s far-right government has been embroiled in efforts to overhaul the judiciary, claiming the current system is undemocratic.
Reservists, who make up a critical pool of soldiers who fill an important role in reinforcing the regular army and many in the intelligence services, said that they did not want to serve a country that they considered was moving towards dictatorship if the overhaul went ahead. Netanyahu received repeated warnings from his defence chiefs, as well as several former leaders of the country’s intelligence agencies that his divisive plan, which caused so much unrest, was chipping away at the cohesion of the country’s security services. Warnings he ignored.
During this period of political chaos, a wave of low-level violence in the West Bank shifted some military resources there. Attention was taken away from Gaza when the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) conducted a assault on the refugee camp in the Palestinian city of Jenin three months ago, the biggest West Bank incursion in 20 years, to conduct searches, arrests, and home demolitions of suspected Palestinian terrorists. At least eight were killed and 50 injured, 10 seriously.
All the while, Hamas was meticulously planning its attack on Israeli settlements close to Gaza, coordinated among multiple agencies from within the Strip, while maintaining an exceptional level of secrecy. All under the IDF’s intelligence radar—a failure unprecedented in Israel.
Part of the reason why Hamas was able to keep its plans under wraps was that it found ways to evade the technological intelligence gathering of the Israelis. Hamas didn’t use any technology in developing their plans. “They’ve gone back to the Stone Age”, claimed Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli General. “The other side learned how to deal with our technological dominance and they stopped using technology that could expose it”, he told AP. “The militants weren’t using phones or computers and were conducting their sensitive business in rooms specially guarded from technological espionage, or going underground”. Put simply, the intelligence agencies didn’t know what was going on.
Avivi also claimed that Israel’s security services failed to put together an accurate picture from the limited intelligence they were receiving, based on what he said was a misconception surrounding Hamas’ intentions. Israel’s security establishment has in recent years increasingly seen Hamas as an actor interested in governing, seeking to develop Gaza’s economy, and improving the standard of living of Gaza’ 2.3 million people. Also, in allowing up to 18,000 Palestinian labourers from Gaza to work in Israel, where they can earn up to 10 times more than in impoverished Gaza, the security establishment believed they were offering a carrot as a way of maintaining relative calm. But they were fooled. “In practice, hundreds if not thousands of Hamas men were preparing a surprise attack for months, without having them leaked”, wrote Amos Harel, a defence commentator, in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “The results are catastrophic”.
Indeed they are. This was a total system failure on Israel’s part. Accustomed to knowing what the Palestinians were doing, and having built a very expensive fence between Gaza and the communities on their side of the border, the Israelis were confident that Hamas was deterred from launching a major attack. They wouldn’t dare, because they would be crushed and the Palestinians would turn against Hamas for causing another war. But it turns out that it was all a massive deception and the Israeli nation is in shock. Like 9/11, there is a sense of “how is it possible that a ragtag band of terrorists could pull this off? How is it possible they could beat the mighty Israeli intelligence community and the mighty IDF?”
“All gloves are off”, said Israel’s Ambassador to Berlin, Ron Prosor, last week. “The world must stand with Israel as it fights the ‘bloodthirsty animals’ of Hamas”, he claimed. “Militants from the armed Palestinian group will pay the price for their recent terror attack against Israel which killed more than 1,200 innocent civilians, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust”. Prosor was doubling down on language by Israel’s Defence Minister Yoan Gallant, who sparked controversy by saying Israel was fighting “human animals”. The ambassador insisted that containing Islamic terrorists “does not and will never work”. Israel must “move from containment to eradication”.
Prosor didn’t mince his words when challenged. “The people that you saw raping, killing and shooting families, little children and burning people alive in their own homes—those are the people in Gaza”, he said. “So in essence, trying to differentiate, that is the real problem. Israel will keep trying to spare civilians”, Prosor continued, adding that “this time round we have to really destroy this terror infrastructure.” As he was talking, Israel expanded its mobilisation of reservists to 360,000 and threatened to strike any trucks that attempted to enter Gaza through the Rafah crossing with Egypt carrying aid to the besieged Palestinians.
Israel’s problem, however, is that “the eradication of Hamas” and the hoped-for rescue of the 150 or so innocent Israelis held hostage in Gaza will be long and bloody. Hamas is believed to have built a maze of about 1,000 tunnels under Gaza which are highly defended and booby-trapped. Far from being a “ragtag band of terrorists”, its 30,000 troops are well-armed with automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and anti-tank missiles. The biggest challenge for Israel’s troops will be close-quarter fighting in densely populated areas. To reduce the number of civilian casualties, Israel on Friday instructed more than a million Palestinians living in northern Gaza to move south, which for many will be impossible, especially the sick and hospitalised. The United Nations complained that such a movement is impossible to occur without devastating humanitarian consequences.
Israel’s attack on Gaza will therefore almost certainly lead to the death of tens of thousands of blameless Palestinians and will play straight into the hands of Hamas and its backer, Iran. Nothing would please the Mullahs in Teheran more than pictures flashing around the Muslim world of Israeli soldiers slaughtering innocent Palestinian children, images that would consolidate their hatred of Israel. Already Israel’s siege of Gaza, depriving it of water, power, energy and food, has caused some backlash from Israel’s Western allies. The European Union foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, warned during the week that Israel’s blockade of Gaza may have breached international law.
Then there’s the danger of Muslim countries intervening in one way or another to try to limit the slaughter or even seek vengeance on Israel. The greatest fear is of Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, firing some or all of its 150,000 rockets into Israel from Lebanon on its northern border. This would escalate the war into a regional conflict with devastating consequences.
All the result of the catastrophic failure of Israeli intelligence.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Plymouth.