The Israeli military will present the lion’s share of its probes into the October 7 massacre between February 25 and March 4, with IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi being replaced by incoming chief Maj. Gen. Eyal Zamir on March 5.
The second probe focuses exclusively on intelligence and especially on the estimate of the chances of war by Hamas, studies about Hamas and its capabilities, how intelligence was collected, and how much or little willingness there was within the intelligence establishment to tolerate dissenting views which viewed a Hamas invasion as a real potential threat.
IDF thought Hamas no longer interested in all-out war
The probes are expected to show that there was a pervasive incorrect understanding by the defense and political establishment for many years that Hamas was deterred and after large losses in 2008-9, 2012, 2014, and May 10-21, 2021, was no longer interested in large scale conflict with Israel.
Also, in May 2021, Hamas made a number of smaller scale attempts to invade southern Israel, but the mix of forces and advanced sensors on the border helped easily thwart them. This inflated the IDF's confidence that Hamas had no chance at pulling off even a small scale invasion.
This theory was supported by the fact that in August 2022 and May 2023, Islamic Jihad fought Israel alone, with Hamas staying out of those significant conflicts.
The fact that Hamas stayed out of those conflicts harmed its standing among its fighters and throughout Gaza and gave greater prominence to Islamic Jihad.
However, Israel had no idea that this was part of a long-term and patient strategy by Hamas to lure Israel to sleep and to wait for just the right moment to spring a much larger surprise attack – which turned out to be October 7, 2023.
Former IDF intelligence analysis chief Brig. gen. (res.) Itai Brun has told the Jerusalem Post essentially that from 1991-2006, Israel was in one of its strongest positions ever in terms of deterring its enemies, and its relative military superiority to whatever threats they could present against it.
However, “there was a new period starting in 2006, of more balance. Each side could only win points [smaller battles, but not a decisive war]. Then, there was more weapons development and the Shiite axis grew stronger together than the separate individual groups. There was American weakness” and its presence in the region was being reduced.
The former top IDF intelligence official said, “they changed their view about how much they think they can hurt Israel. Our fundamental deterrence regarding our existence here had been set. But it fell apart starting in 2021. They started to think about ‘winning’.”
“There was also a connection” to the judicial overhaul debate destabilizing the IDF, “but this goes back longer to 2021,” said Brun.
Brun noted four factors which gave them confidence to overwhelm Israel after 2021 and leading into October 7: 1) They have had new capabilities; 2) a phenomena of an axis and “ring of fire” which made them cumulatively stronger than they would be each individually; 3) US weakness; and 4) Israeli weakness.
The hottest debate is about who was responsible for the judicial overhaul causing the perception for Hamas, Iran, and others that Israel was more vulnerable.
Critics of Netanyahu say he was responsible for ignoring warnings from top military officials that the judicial overhaul was so massive and controversial that it was actually impacting combat readiness.
The Post heard this view directly from top IDF officials, including that there were points where top pilots and special forces personnel might become unusable for some period of time because of lost training hours.
Netanyahu supporters blamed reservists and opposition figures for “using” the IDF as a tool for combating his political ideology after the Likud won the 2022 elections.
An apolitical evaluation would probably place some blame on all sides, though the fact is that during the 2022 election season, only Betzalel Smotrich put out a highly specific judicial overhaul plan, whereas Netanyahu’s plan on the issue was much more vague.
Intelligence officer's 'Walls of Jericho' warnings dismissed by chiefs
In fact, in March 2022, IDF intelligence secured a copy of Hamas’s “Walls of Jericho” plan for invading Israel, which largely accurately described the eventual October 7 invasion.
However, only “V”, a non-commission intelligence officer in Unit 8200, raised the alarm about such an invasion.
V’s superior officer in IDF Southern Command Gaza Division Intelligence Lt. Col. “A” was so dismissive of her warnings and so insistent on treating a Hamas major invasion as a fantasy scenario, that he never passed the warnings on to the top echelons of IDF intelligence or the top political decision-makers.
More specifically, V filed an additional warning with A in September 2023, and A did a mix of not passing on the warnings of invasion up to IDF intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, or passed them on only sometime on October 3, not long enough for long-term strategic shifts to take place, in a vague fashion.
What V had was she had followed drills and chatter among certain Hamas forces talking about killing all of the villagers in certain southern Israeli villages and talking about much larger invasion forces than envisioned by Israel in even the worst case scenarios regarding Hamas.
But again, V had warned about this multiple times, and still had no concrete prediction about when or a sufficient strategic understanding of what was behind what would be the largest conceptual shift in understanding Hamas in decades.
It also did not help that V was a non-commissioned officer, had undertaken her research on her own initiative, and worked in Unit 8200, whose main responsibility is collecting intelligence, as opposed to the Analysis Division who are considered the real experts in deciphering threats and intelligence.
Of course, taking the initiative should be appreciated and every officer’s view should be taken into account, but the background for Lt. Col. A not jumping on this new theory does have a context – as insiders would view it - of coming from the wrong person in the wrong place.
Perhaps that is why V saw what others did not, since she was not part of the higher level clique, and did not feel the need to toe the line.
In any event, the Post understands that additional emails were sent after the September meeting, and that V did not “jump up and down” about any sudden threat, but rather she and the Lt. Col. both agreed to continue to discuss the issue in future forums.
One of the reasons that Unit 8200 and others in IDF intelligence defended themselves against taking a Hamas invasion seriously was because they warned of potential danger in April 2023, and it turned out to be a false alarm and was viewed as a waste of resources.
Based on that and on the idea that V did not have any idea when the Hamas invasion would take place, whether within days, months, or years, most viewed the intelligence as not “actionable” and as something that might only matter if there were more specifics.
IDF Southern Command chief Yaron Finkleman
In the early months after the war, the IDF Southern Command, led by Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkleman, had said it knew nothing about V and her warnings.
However, the reports are expected to show that some knowledge of the invasion threat went beyond IDF intelligence and was received by some in the IDF Southern Command.
Ultimately, the Post learned that the top officials in Southern Command from Finkleman and down to Brig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld and IDF Southern Command Intelligence Chief Col. “A,” were not informed about the latest leaked Hamas invasion warning.
This could have gotten Finkleman more off the hook, but it turns out that in a prior role in the Operation Command, Finkleman had encountered the “Walls of Jericho” plan and warned about overlooking it and treating it lightly.
Yet, once Finkleman moved into running the IDF Southern Command, he seemed to forget completely about the Walls of Jericho plan, and no one reminded him, which could free him from some blame.
Alternatively, if there really were many warnings not being passed on from Unit 8200 to Southern Command, and if within Southern Command, lower officers were not sharing all intelligence with their higher-up supervisors, this raises basic questions about the different units’ cooperation and about whether the Southern Command under Finkleman was creating enough safe space for lower down analysts to present dissonant information.
IDF intel chief Aharon Haliva
Regarding Haliva, there are accusations that he either knew about the email warnings from V, or even if he did not know about V specifically, one of V’s superiors told him about her findings at a meeting at Unit 8200 on October 3.
The flip side to that story, according to sources, is that a 90-minute powerpoint presentation was shown to Haliva at the October 3 meeting, which did not mention V’s concerns even for a moment.
Haliva did not set the agenda, so the content for the power-point was chosen by Unit 8200 officials – who chose to leave V’s warnings out of the presentation.
All of this would seem to clear Haliva of any special responsibility for the October 7 failure, beyond the general failure of 15 years of political and defense officials, of which he would just be one on a long list.
But then something else interesting happened.
At the end of the October 3 meeting, the floor was open to more informal and wide-ranging discussions and issues. One of those present started to raise V’s concerns, leading Haliva to ask them to accompany him out of the meeting afterwards in a smaller and more direct forum.
There is a dispute as to whether Haliva dismissed the officer’s concerns at that point or whether he told the officer to feel free to look into it more.
It is also possible that Haliva and the officer had different understandings of what was said – as one person’s “feel free to look into that,” could feel to someone else like a rejection and not being taken seriously. There is no record of the conversation since it was after the formal meeting, but we may eventually learn more about it as there were a small number of Haliva’s aides in earshot.
Either way, Haliva’s defenders say that at no time did V nor the officer who spoke about V’s views to Haliva, sound a specific strategic formal alarm similar to that of the Mossad spy, the Angel, Ashraf Marwan, who told his handlers in 1973 that Egypt’s attack on Israel was imminent.
All of this means that former IDF Brig. Gen. Analysis Chief Amit Saara as well as current IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi, Netanyahu, and the cabinet, did not know of these critical warnings.
Former IDF intelligence officer Col. Assaf Heller has said that there was a massive “cultural problem” both in Israeli society, and which has leaked its way into the IDF and the cabinet, of viewing complex issues in black and white and dismissing minority scenarios and viewpoints.
The largest cause of the Israeli intelligence failure was this hubris that Hamas was for sure deterred and that led top intelligence officials to ignore or bizarrely reinterpret any data which contradicted that conclusion.
There are multiple separate reasons that the IDF also missed other intelligence which might have broken through the general hubris of the “concepcia” (conceptual framework for understanding Hamas).
Loss of human spying tools in the Gaza Strip
One was that since 2012 the IDF ceased to collect human intelligence in Gaza through its special elite Unit 504.
If after the Yom Kippur War intelligence failure, the solution to avoid a repeat which was reached was to empower the Mossad and the Shin Bet to collect and analyze more intelligence so that the IDF would not be the only voice on critical national strategic issues, the process went too far in 2012.
Only the Shin Bet was left to collect human spying intelligence in Gaza, and the IDF was pushed out to handle only some technological intelligence collection.
By 2023, even the Shin Bet had lost much of its human spy rings in Gaza during various Hamas counterintelligence crackdowns on its disloyal members.
This left Israel too reliant on certain Shin Bet and IDF electronic spying tools.
However, by 2023, Hamas had learned about where it was penetrated and deliberately left a misleading trail for Israel of seeming to be deterred in such areas, while it used various more old-fashioned ways to communicate and convey its true secret narrative of preparing for a major surprise invasion.
The IDF probe will show that Hamas simply outplayed Israel with top-notch information security, such that only a few individuals knew the exact timing of the invasion, and even various senior Hamas commanders only learned of its several hours before, with foot soldiers only learning of it a couple hours before.