The scale and scope of the Israeli intelligence and defense establishment failure on October 7 will likely only become clear several months down the road, when evidence starts being presented before a commission of inquiry.
The Jerusalem Post has garnered some of the pieces of the fiasco from IDF intelligence officials, from what they have said and what they have not said.
One of the primary causes was extremely high confidence that Hamas was deterred from starting a war with Israel in the foreseeable future.
Several pieces of information were used to prove this deterrence, including the fact that Hamas stayed out of multiple rounds of fighting between Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Israel, twice over the last two years.It was costly for its reputation within Gaza that Hamas stayed out of these fights, something that seemed to support deterrence even further.
What happened to the tunnels?
But a fundamental premise in believing that Hamas was deterred was also the exaggerated impact that the IDF thought its May 2021 attacks had on the Gaza-based terrorist group during that 11-day conflict (Operation Guardian of the Walls).
One of the IDF’s victory points back then was its claim to have destroyed most – or at least a very substantial portion – of Hamas’s underground tunnel network (“the metro”), such that it would take years to reconstruct.
Come October of this year, it turned out that the IDF either did not damage it nearly as badly as it thought it did, or the military greatly underestimated Hamas’s capacity to repair it.
Now, the tunnel network was only one of many factors of the October 7 invasion, and likely not even a central one. But the fact that the IDF so greatly misjudged how badly it set back Hamas’s tunnel network points to the heart of the Israeli intelligence community’s misjudgment about how deterred Hamas actually was.
In deterrence terms, Hamas is more likely to fear conflict with Israel if Israel actually did damage its infrastructure, but is much less likely to be as fearful if the “losses” in the previous conflict were minor.
Since the tunnel losses to Hamas were far less significant than the IDF thought, Israel completely misunderstood not only the state of play on October 7, but the aggressor’s entire perspective, going back two years.
This misjudgment has not only historic applications concerning the causes of October 7, but also impacts the war moving forward.
When IDF intelligence officials discuss how confident they are about their ability to thoroughly destroy and flush out the vast majority of Hamas’s forces from their tunnel hiding spots, it could very well be that they are again overestimating their own understanding of the challenge. The IDF feels so omnipresent above-ground, and has improved so much in its ability to identify some tunnel entrances, that it may still be significantly overestimating its capacity to identify, fight, and kill Hamas operatives below ground.
When confronted with this premise, IDF intelligence officials say they have already adjusted to whatever they might have missed in May 2021, but given that so much of IDF intelligence now is based on drones, aircraft, and other above-ground platforms, this renewed confidence on an issue that the IDF has at least once misjudged is questionable.
To be clear, the IDF has radically progressed in its ability to detect and destroy tunnels a few years after the 2014 Gaza war – and does seem to have learned new tricks to handle tunnels even since May 2021. Since this war began, the IDF does seem to have scored dozens of victories in flushing out Hamas forces from tunnels. But Hamas has adjusted as well, and generally appears to have such vast resources for digging new tunnels, that the IDF may still lag behind.
Combine Hamas’s tunnel resourcefulness with how little the IDF knows about which and how many Hamas terrorists have faded into the civilian population in the north or the south (with no intention of fighting until some much later guerrilla warfare stage), and IDF intelligence may make serious future misjudgments about how many Hamas forces remain to fight.
This could impact not only on how large an insurgency the IDF faces after it “defeats” Hamas in the “main” war, but also how effective any third party will be in controlling Gaza in the face of a Hamas-attempted resurgence further down the road.