More than 48 hours on from the launch of an unprecedented offensive into Israel from Gaza by Palestinian Islamist militant organisation Hamas on 7 October 2023, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were still fighting militants on Israeli territory. The barrage of Hamas-launched rockets fired from Gaza, which for many heralded the start of the offensive, was still continuing.
While preparations for a ground assault into Gaza were also underway by that time, with 300,000 reservists called up, and a total blockade of Gaza declared, military and civilian Israelis alike were still struggling to comprehend the grave intelligence failure that allowed such a major Hamas offensive to come seemingly out of nowhere.
Jonathan Conricus, a former lieutenant colonel who previously served as the IDF’s international spokesperson, told the BBC of the attacks, “This could be a 9/11 and a Pearl Harbor wrapped into one.” He added, “It is, by far, the worst day in Israeli history. Never before have so many Israelis been killed by one single thing, let alone enemy activity, on one day.”
The current IDF spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, addressed the international media on 8 October with a statement that said, “This weekend Hamas started a war against Israel with the worst massacre of innocent civilians in Israel’s history,” adding that Hamas “was more barbaric and more brutal than ISIS” in the perpetration of its raid.
He went on to say, “This horrific terror act demands a forceful, determined, and sustained response — which is exactly what we are doing and continue to do.”
By the morning of 9 October more than 700 people had been killed in Israel by the Hamas assault, while more than 500 Palestinians had already been killed in densely populated Gaza by retaliatory Israeli airstrikes on known Hamas and Islamic Jihad locations and rocket launch sites.
The Hamas attacks came 50 years and a day after the last time Israel suffered a comparable failure of intelligence, when a coalition of Arab states launched a surprise attack on Israel on 6 October 1973 that began what became known as the Yom Kippur War.
A Failed Tripwire
Israel’s borders are renowned for their multitude of sensors designed to detect potential hostile infiltration, but while these measures might be effective in highlighting small-scale activities, they proved to be of little use in the face of such a rapid and large-scale Hamas assault.
The Hamas planners chose the Jewish Sabbath, which was also a holy festival day, to mount their offensive and at 06.30 local time unleashed thousands of rockets directed at Israeli territory. Although the IDF’s Iron Dome air-defence system is designed to only intercept rockets on trajectories that would hit designated zones, the massive Hamas barrage, which would have taken a considerable time to stockpile, was clearly intended to overwhelm the capacity of the Iron Dome launchers.
Meanwhile, just as daylight broke hundreds of Hamas fighters were swarming into Israel from Gaza. While some chose to circumvent the border by using motorised paragliders and boats, most came through breaches made in the border fence, either cut through or in at least one case simply bulldozed open. According to the IDF an estimated 1,000 Hamas fighters took part in the incursion. They assaulted more than two dozen locations, apparently with instructions to shoot on sight, and reached as far as the town of Ofakim, which is 22.5 km east of the border with Gaza. A Hamas attack on a music festival near Re’im killed more than 260 people.
Knowing that an IDF land offensive into Gaza was virtually inevitable as a result of its attacks, Hamas chose to abduct around 100 Israelis (Hamas claims more than 130) and take them back to Gaza. This will no doubt complicate any IDF land operation in Gaza once it gets underway.
While the IDF plan their next moves in military terms, however, the overriding question on Israeli minds is how such a devastating intelligence failure could have occurred despite the reputation and resources of Israeli agencies such as Mossad, Shin Bet and Aman (the Military Intelligence Directorate).
One possible explanation is the divergent degrees to which the IDF, on the one hand, and Hamas and its allies, on the other, now rely on technology.
When the IDF withdrew from Gaza in 2005 they lost a vital aspect of human intelligence by no longer being on the ground and patrolling there. Technology, in the form of measures such as border sensors and roaming unmanned aerial vehicles, was supposed to compensate for this.
Hamas and allied Islamic militants, on the other hand, may have ultimately learnt to go the other way. Realising the use of phones and computers left them open to being surveilled by a sophisticated Israeli intelligence operation, they may have conducted their planning face to face, in environments immune to surveillance.
Other analysts have pointed to the disarray in Israeli politics and a preoccupation with unrest in the West Bank as contributing to Israeli intelligence taking its eye off Gaza.
Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on 8 October, columnist Amos Harel noted that Israeli military intelligence and the IDF General Staff “often claimed that Hamas is deterred by Israel following the results of earlier campaigns and is not looking for another war. In fact, hundreds if not thousands of Hamas fighters were preparing for a surprise attack for months, with none of this being leaked.”
Beyond Hamas having apparently put Israeli military intelligence to sleep, Harel confronted another stark reality: that the Hamas attack had “completely demolished the operational defensive conception on the Gaza Strip border”.
Harel noted that retired IDF colonel Yossi Langotsky, a veteran of military intelligence and an IDF paratrooper unit, warned in an article in Haaretz in 2018 that the IDF was “building a wasteful Maginot Line in the Gaza Strip, which would be breached when it came to a crunch”, adding that “Yesterday, he was proven right.”
