IDF intelligence failed to notice or detect three near mass invasions by Hamas before October 7, 2023, according to the military’s probes issued on Thursday.
These three instances were in April 2022, October 2022, and April 2023, but IDF intelligence only learned of them during the current war by a combination of capturing Hamas documents and interrogating Hamas prisoners.
IDF intelligence sources raised this fact to show that – while there were many failures leading into Hamas’s October 7 invasion – the primary one was Israel’s failure as a whole, including at all military, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), and political echelon levels, to consider the idea that Hamas might try to stage a mass invasion.
So entrenched was the conceptual framework that Hamas was too intimidated or deterred to launch a large-scale invasion that any and all contrary data was summarily dismissed or reinterpreted to stay within the “accepted” framework.
Also, IDF intelligence said many of its more recent and current officers are highly trained in technology, but too few of them are trained in understanding the mentality of committed religious Islamists like Hamas.
Moreover, IDF intelligence stated that many of its analysts and collection officers have been trained to dig deep into tiny pixels of an intelligence picture while having lost the capacity to see the “forest from the trees” – especially for tracking a long-term plan designed with patience.
The second of four major IDF October 7 probes 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.
The probes show that there was a pervasive incorrect understanding by the defense and political establishment for a decade or more that Hamas was deterred and, after large losses in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, and 2021, was no longer interested in large-scale conflict with Israel.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot, and Aviv Kohavi?
One of a series of key moments where top IDF or government officials moved Israel clearly toward living with a contained and hopefully deterred Hamas was when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-IDF chief Benny Gantz decided to limit the 2014 Gaza invasion to being mostly superficial, along with heavy airstrikes.
At the time, the IDF warned Netanyahu that the army could lose between 500 and 1,000 soldiers during an invasion.
At the same time, the IDF did have a real plan for a deep invasion and was ready to suffer the losses, according to some military sources.
In contrast, these military sources say that Netanyahu leaked the potential IDF losses to the media to scare the public and sabotage a potential larger invasion, which he viewed as too risky.
Another key moment was when then-IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot and Netanyahu celebrated the shift toward completing the billion-dollar hi-tech Gaza border wall.
Although the wall was only completed in 2021 – after Eisenkot’s tenure ended in 2019 – Eisenkot had aggressively presented the wall as making Israel much safer.
The May 2021 conflict also inspired Hamas to believe it could possibly even destroy Israel, given its success at igniting violent riots among some Arab Israelis within the Green Line, in east Jerusalem, in the West Bank, and with Hezbollah.
Then-Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar later held an extended dialogue with then-Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and believed he would see Nasrallah join a major war with Israel if he started one.
Israel completely missed Hamas’s understanding of the conflict and concluded the opposite.
Then-IDF chief Aviv Kohavi and Netanyahu concluded that the May 2021 conflict had shown Hamas how badly and quickly it could be harmed by the new artificial intelligence-based war.
For example, the IDF thought it had destroyed 100 km. of Hamas’s tunnels, which it thought represented a massive amount of the total tunnel system.
It turned out that the intelligence the IDF gleaned during the war proved that Hamas at the time already had a much larger system of 500 km. of tunnels and that the IDF had only destroyed 25 km. of tunnels, or a measly 5% of the total.
Despite this gap, The Jerusalem Post understands that Kohavi never believed that Hamas would be deterred for an indefinite period, given that his basic understanding of deterrence is that it is a relative and time-limited concept that is constantly changing.
In fact, the Post understands that in his internal IDF chief summary of the 2021 conflict, he wrote that Sinwar must be understood as a highly unpredictable X-factor going forward, and he even said publicly that the IDF’s work with Hamas has “ended for now, but not complete.”
Also, in May 2021, Hamas made some smaller-scale attempts to invade southern Israel, but the mix of forces and advanced sensors on the border helped easily thwart them.
IDF intelligence sources also credited Hamas and their leaders, Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, for an extended and sophisticated disinformation campaign to mislead them.
The theory held by IDF intelligence of Hamas being deterred was supported by the fact that in August 2022 and May 2023, Palestinian 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.
A counterargument that Kohavi could make to the conclusion that Hamas stayed out of the August 2022 and May 2023 conflicts merely to fool Israel is that it stayed out of conflicts with Israel in 2019 but then went back to fighting Israel in May 2021.
If every time Hamas stayed out of a conflict was to fool Israel, then why would it have undermined that narrative in May 2021?
IN ANY event, all of this inflated much of the IDF’s confidence that Hamas had no chance of pulling off even a small-scale invasion, especially since the IDF did not know about the three almost mass invasions in 2022-2023.
However, Israel had no idea that this was part of a long-term and patient strategy 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 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 Shi’ite axis grew stronger together than the separate individual groups. There was American weakness” and its presence in the region was being reduced.
This change for Hamas became more prominent when Sinwar became its new leader in 2017.
By 2019, Sinwar was already ready in principle to start pursuing the mass invasion option, IDF intelligence learned belatedly during the war, but was possibly slowed by the coronavirus wave in early 2020.
Hamas took the coronavirus very seriously and kept many of its forces compartmentalized to avoid infection, making it difficult to plan or train for a large-scale operation.
However, IDF intelligence said that not long after the May 2021 Israel-Gaza conflict, Sinwar and Deif started to push harder for converting their ambitions into concrete military plans and drills.
It was in this context that 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-commissioned intelligence officer in Unit 8200, raised the alarm about such an invasion.
Not only that, but according to IDF intelligence, V. never came close to giving the timing for such an invasion.
Given that V. started warning about the invasion in 2022, and no such invasion took place, and the IDF did not realize how close Hamas came to carrying out such an invasion, V.’s warnings were viewed by most as being overly dramatic.
V.’s superior officer in 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 bothered to pass the warnings on to the top echelons of IDF intelligence or the top political decision-makers.
More specifically, V. even filed an additional warning with A. in September 2023, and A. did a mix of not passing on the warnings of invasion up to then-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.
V. 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.
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 lieutenant colonel 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 that they did warn of potential danger in April 2023, which was then viewed as a false alarm and a waste of resources when Hamas did not attack.
However, given additional intelligence acquired during the war, IDF intelligence now looks back on the incident differently as all of the IDF jumping to conclusions to quickly that the prediction was entirely wrong because the invasion did not take place them, when in fact the invasion almost did take place then and the idea was kept very much alive and relevant.
ONE FASCINATING aspect of the probe into IDF intelligence failures is that although the report harshly criticizes the intelligence establishment for groupthink and recommends empowering the “Ipcha Mistabra” (On The Contrary) or “Red Team” department, it does not necessarily see that as a major solution.
Rather, the probe recommends massive short-term and long-term change in the kind of people and positions IDF intelligence aims for and hires for.
For example, the probe says that IDF intelligence must hire more persons with longer and more diverse academic training.
Current intelligence chief Maj.-Gen. Shlomi Binder has moved in that direction to some degree since August 2024, when he replaced Haliva, who ran IDF intelligence on October 7.
But the probe believes the entire long-term planning and budgeting process must shift to reflect new priorities in terms of hiring.
Further, the probe recommends keeping more non-commissioned officers or even civilians working for IDF intelligence for much longer periods so that their institutional expertise and memory for a topic will not be lost.
For example, regarding “the Walls of Jericho,” when the IDF and V. first saw the plan, they did not connect it to earlier versions of the plan, which longer-term experts might have a better chance of doing.
Had they made this connection, they also may have taken the threat more seriously.
In the meantime, Binder has approved the appointment of Brig.-Gen. (res.) Moshe Schneid to broaden the size and power of the Red Team department.
Until now, that department has been small and almost powerless.
Now, the department under Schneid is expected to grow to the size of a full brigade, while it will second guess not just select items, but essentially all of the work of the IDF Intelligence Analysis Brigade and of the Unit 8200 Brigade.
Another recommendation is to create a position specifically dedicated to analyzing only intelligence that could lead to predicting a general war and having a clear authority figure for whom that is their official responsibility.
IDF, Mossad and Shin Bet's fight over fiefdoms
Another failure was the decision to close out collecting human intelligence in Gaza through IDF special elite Unit 504.
If after the Yom Kippur War intelligence failure, the solution to avoid a repeat that 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.
The Post has learned that most of the IDF, including then-intelligence chief Kohavi (who became IDF chief in 2019), was opposed to closing down Unit 504 in Gaza.
However, the Post has learned that then Mossad chief Meir Dagan was opposed to too much activity by other intelligence agencies outside of Israel, even though the Mossad was not competing for Gaza.
But as part of an extended process to more decisively clarify lines of intelligence responsibility and avoid conflict and overlap, Netanyahu ruled in favor of Dagan and the Shin Bet regarding Gaza.
There is a hot debate about what happened to the Shin Bet’s spy rings in 2023.
Some intelligence sources claim that the Shin Bet had lost most of its sources in Gaza during various Hamas counterintelligence crackdowns on its disloyal members.
Others have told the Post that leading into the war in 2023, the Shin Bet still had extensive sources in Gaza and that it was unclear why none of them warned of the mass invasion.
Either way, leading into October 7, Israel’s defense establishment was more reliant on certain Shin Bet and IDF electronic spying tools.
However, Hamas 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 showed 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 it several hours before, with foot soldiers only learning of it a couple hours before.
This left Israel blind conceptually, limited in its diversity of intelligence sources, and cut off in terms of those sources having the capability to deliver a clear, dramatic warning of war in time.