Why Did Israeli Intelligence Fail So Disastrously on October 7?

It was the worst attack on Israel in fifty years. An assault so unexpected and bloody it has been compared to everything from Pearl Harbor to 9/11. When militants from Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad smashed through the Gaza border on October 7, they were not just conducting a raid.

They were embarking on an invasion that will become as central to Israeli history as the surprise attack by Egypt and Syria that opened the Yom Kippur War. And that comparison is not accidental. The strikes that began the 1973 conflict caught the Jewish State completely off-guard.

While Israel would ultimately prevail over its neighbors, the failure to predict the attack would go down as the country’s greatest intelligence failure — until now. With over 1,200 Israelis confirmed dead, the Hamas assault is thought to be the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. A day that will likely eclipse even the Yom Kippur War’s opening salvos in the Israeli psyche.

A Failure of Imagination: The Scale of October 7

When assessing the assault from Gaza that began around dawn on October 7, 2023, Major Nir Dinar of the Israel Defense Forces did not mince words. “This is our 9/11,” he told journalists. “They got us.”

For Americans, the statement likely brought back memories of that day in 2001 — how a boring, ordinary Tuesday morning in September suddenly shattered, how Americans’ sense of security seemed to crumble alongside the towers, collapsing into a dust cloud of anxiety, pain, and rage. Yet, evocative as it was, Major Nir Dinar’s statement likely underplayed the true impact of Hamas’s attack. War on the Rocks pointed out that Israel’s much-smaller population means the number of confirmed casualties on October 7 alone was the equivalent of 20,000 Americans being killed.

A number that has since risen sharply. And, undoubtedly horrific as 9/11 was, the attacks did not end with masked al-Qaeda operatives going door to door in American towns, dragging people away as hostages or murdering them in their beds. Even the obvious comparison point in Israeli history — the Egyptian and Syrian strikes that began the Yom Kippur War almost exactly fifty years earlier — arguably have nothing on October 7.

Shocking as the twin assaults were, they ultimately killed fewer people. About 320 Israelis died on the first day, and nearly all of them were soldiers. Nor did the Egyptian or Syrian armies ever breach the nation’s defenses to kidnap civilians.

This constitutes the worst intelligence failure in Israeli history. The fallout from Hamas’s attack is still ongoing, and that means no one in Israel is in the mood to comb through the country’s failures. Chief military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters: “First, we fight, then we investigate.”

The information available is necessarily incomplete. The true picture likely will not become clear for many months, following much official soul-searching. Still, as far as anyone can tell, there were some clear factors that fed into Saturday’s disaster.

The Assault: 2,000 Rockets, 30 Breach Points, and a Paper Tiger

October 7 began with over 2,000 rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel — a mixture of long-range missiles, shoulder-launched weapons, mortars, and home-made devices that are wildly inaccurate. While both Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad have repeatedly fired rockets into Israel before, they have usually numbered in the dozens. Just amassing enough firepower to launch this barrage must have taken planning and operational secrecy on an extraordinary scale.

Then came the attack itself. At the fortified Gaza border, an initial force of 400 massed, where they used explosives and bulldozers to break through at 30 points before flooding into southern Israel. As the initial assault force crossed in, up to 1,100 additional fighters followed.

As they did so, observation towers were attacked with drones. Paraglider units flew over the fences. Assault crews in boats tried to land on beaches.

To assemble so much material for such a vast attack should have been impossible. The presence of so many fighters congregating at the border should have been detected. Former US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, told NBC: “I’ve never seen the border breached in this manner.

Usually, even one person from Gaza gets close to the border, they’re intercepted and neutralized long before they can do anything.” Even Hamas claimed they were caught off-guard by the ease of entering Israel. Speaking to reporters, leadership figure Ali Barakeh declared: “We were surprised by this great collapse.

We were planning to make some gains and take prisoners to exchange them. This army (the IDF) was a paper tiger.” Given that Israel’s intelligence service is regarded as the best in the world, it is staggering that plans of this magnitude were not noticed earlier.

Gaza is one of the most-surveilled places on Earth, with electronic and human assets monitoring everything that is happening. Yet, in the end, it all turned out to be for naught. An invasion plan that likely could have been detected went unnoticed until it was too late.

The Technology Trap: How the ‘Iron Wall’ Went Blind

In early assessments, Israeli officials speaking anonymously have repeatedly highlighted one major flaw at the border with Gaza: massive overreliance on technology. Flanking the Gaza Strip on two sides, Israel’s border system was dubbed by former defense minister Benny Gantz the “iron wall” — a nod to the country’s Iron Dome missile defense system. But the phrase is misleading, conjuring images of an impregnable metal barrier soaring into the sky.

Rather than thick, impractical iron, the border instead relied on technology to keep Hamas out. On paper, this hi-tech approach looked formidable. The Gaza border bristles with radar, and sensors that can detect any breach — even if it takes place underground.

Cameras, unmanned robots, and remotely-operated machine guns keep watch for any movement. In the air, aerostats provide a bird’s eye view. Everything is monitored in real time and relayed back to human operators in control rooms.

Built over three years — and costing billions of shekels — the border was a response to Hamas’s 2014 incursions into Israel via a network of tunnels. But it was also part of a wider drive in the Israeli military away from boots on the ground, and towards hi-tech surveillance. With the danger of a Yom Kippur War-style attack from nation states seemingly on the wane, the IDF turned in recent years towards strategies for defeating or containing non-state groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

In practice, that boiled down to heavy investment in intelligence and cyber capabilities, at the expense of traditional forces. The Wall Street Journal detailed how the number of noncommissioned officers, for example, was slashed by 10 percent over the last eight years. The overall theme in Israel in the last several years has been investment in technology and digitization for warfare.

The Gaza border was part of this — a way of harnessing Israel’s world-class tech capabilities to create a wall that could essentially defend itself. Since it really seemed to live up to the “iron wall” nickname, the IDF grew to believe the hype. On October 7, the border was only thinly manned.

Unfortunately, the iron wall had a weak point no one had thought of: the cellular towers that formed the backbone of the surveillance system. Speaking to the New York Times, Israeli officials described how Hamas’s first move was to use drones to attack and destroy the border’s towers. Unable to transmit or receive signals, the smart system was rendered blind.

The sensors failed to report the breaches. Soldiers in control rooms could not monitor the attack via cameras. With the IDF’s technology advantage eliminated, Hamas did not need anything more hi-tech than bulldozers and explosives to smash holes in the fences.

Unprepared for an old-fashioned ground assault, those monitoring the “iron wall” were completely caught off-guard. It was not only at the Gaza border where overreliance on technology made the state slow and complacent. With the Iron Dome missile defense system so good at shooting down dozens of rockets, no one seemed prepared for the idea that a barrage of thousands could completely overwhelm it.

On the intelligence side, the security services were so assured of their ability to monitor electronic networks that they seem to have forgotten that conversations can take place in real life. In the months leading up to the attack, intelligence wiretapped Hamas operatives, whose conversations seemed to indicate they had no appetite for another war with Israel. It is now thought those conversations may have been staged by agents who knew the Israelis were listening.

Meanwhile, the Hamas leadership ditched their phones and computers, and developed their plans through face-to-face conversations in rooms shielded from electronic snooping.

Optimism Bias: Underestimating a Sworn Enemy

While Israel’s security services were over-reliant on fancy gadgets, they had not completely abandoned old-fashioned methods of intelligence gathering. Had the failure been purely one of technology, it is doubtful things could have gotten as bad as they did. The other major mistake was a classic one of human psychology — a mistake that has brought ruin upon nations and armies since the first human tribes fought one another in prehistory: underestimating the enemy.

Just days before the attack, newspaper Haaretz reports that an intelligence assessment concluded the terror group wanted to “avoid a full-fledged war with Israel” and did not want to “jeopardize past achievements that bettered the lives of the Gazan residents.” From a purely material perspective, this made perfect sense. Following the 2021 war in Gaza, the Israeli government made the decision to try and stabilize the strip’s impoverished economy, offering the carrot of improved livelihoods to deter further attacks.

This meant handing out tens of thousands of work permits to Gaza’s two million residents — permits that allowed them to cross the border into Israel to do jobs with salaries ten times those in Gaza. By one count, the money this brought into the strip was improving the lives of 100,000 people. With the economic picture slowly brightening, it was thought Hamas wanted to hold onto their gains.

From 2021 until October 7, 2023, the group refrained from launching attacks, even as Palestine Islamic Jihad continued firing rockets into Israel. So convincing was the group’s new focus on the economy that even some of Hamas’s supporters criticized the group for going soft. As one anonymous Israeli official lamented to the Telegraph: “They caused us to think they wanted money.”

Yet this was still an awfully big leap of faith. Especially given that Hamas’s founding document — the covenant — includes passages saying things like: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” As former national security advisor Yaakov Amidror told the Washington Post: “Israel made a huge mistake believing that a terror organization can change its DNA.”

The blind spots in intelligence went further than just thinking Hamas had mellowed. This desire to believe the best fatally mixed with another dangerous assumption: that Hamas were too weak to pose a threat. Names like the Shin Bet and the Mossad are respected and feared the world over.

In Gaza, the intelligence services seemed almost like ghosts: able to assassinate Hamas leaders as they slept in their beds, able to destroy underground tunnels without warning. As the security services grew more convinced of their own invulnerability, they simultaneously lost any respect for Hamas’s skills — to the point that the terror group could rehearse their October 7 operation openly and have it dismissed as mere posturing. The Telegraph reports that Hamas constructed a fake Israeli settlement in Gaza to train attackers.

Other fighters filmed themselves training on paragliders to swoop down into populated areas and start firing immediately. Others practiced taking hostages and firing rockets. The idea that Israel’s security services were not aware of these exercises is absurd.

Most likely, they saw them, checked the exercises against intelligence saying Hamas would not attack, and decided the training was all for show. Speaking to Breaking Defense, Middle East Institute senior fellow Bilal Saab was blunt: “There was a failure of imagination, first and foremost, and total disrespect of the opponent.” With these words, he was echoing the 9/11 Commission report, which found “a failure of imagination” to be the most important factor in why warning signals of an impending attack were not taken more seriously.

The Human Factor: Missed Warnings and Individual Decisions

A catastrophe of this magnitude cannot just be blamed on overconfidence and a damaging reliance on technology. There were multiple other factors at play: from individual incompetence to sheer bad luck. Time and again, history has shown that world events can hinge on small, personal decisions.

Had Archduke Franz Ferdinand not ordered his driver to return past the scene of an earlier assassination attempt in Sarajevo, World War One would not have happened. It seems this was at least partly true on October 7. In ways both big and small, individuals made decisions that, alone, were innocuous but — taken together — added up to catastrophe.

Of these, perhaps the greatest “what if?” will forever float around the alert the New York Times revealed had been sent just before the attack began. Noticing a surge in activity in Gaza, Israeli intelligence sent a warning to soldiers at the border, one that arrived before Hamas’s operation had yet begun.

But, as the paper of record notes: “The warning wasn’t acted upon, either because the soldiers didn’t get it, or the soldiers didn’t read it.” Other seemingly minor decisions would turn out to be equally consequential. The same article also reports the stunningly bad decision to have all senior officers from the IDF’s Gaza division grouped together on one base.

When the militants stormed that base, they effectively decapitated the division’s leadership. Almost every senior officer in the area was killed or kidnapped in the raid’s opening hours. As a result, no one was able to coordinate a coherent response.

These incidents illustrate the cascading failures that needed to take place for something like this to happen. It required a perfect storm of wishful thinking, intelligence failures, and bad luck. Learning to read the portents of such a storm can stop another from ever breaking out again.

And the portents may not have even been that hard to discern. An anonymous Egyptian official briefed that Cairo had told the Israelis “something big is coming,” only for their warning to be ignored. Within Israel itself, some believe that this litany of bad decisions extended to the very top of government.

Specifically, left-leaning newspaper Haaretz has accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of allowing Hamas to remain in power in Gaza to act as a counter to the more-moderate Fatah ruling party in the West Bank. According to the paper’s source, Netanyahu openly claimed in 2019 at a meeting of his Likud Party that: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

These claims have not been confirmed by other outlets. Still, they speak to the potential naivety with which Israel’s longest-serving leader may have viewed Hamas: as useful idiots who kept the Palestinians bickering internally, rather than uniting against the Israelis.

Political Distraction: A Divided Nation Looks Away from Gaza

The basis of any good magic trick is to divert your audience’s attention, to get them focused on something innocuous, away from where the real action is happening. In a diabolical way, you could almost say this is what Hamas achieved prior to October 7. Even as they were preparing for an assault into Israel, the government and intelligence services were focused elsewhere: on the West Bank, and the northern border with Lebanon.

But it was not Hamas that succeeded in diverting everyone’s attention — it was the Israeli state itself. Israel’s current government came to power with heavy support among settler communities in the West Bank. In many ways, it was a government of and for the settlers.

Far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich is a vocal proponent of annexing the West Bank, and a strong supporter of Jewish settlement. With some coalition members rooted in these communities, it was only natural the government would take more interest in the region. Particularly as violence began to flare between extremist settlers emboldened by the new government, and Palestinian groups hoping to destroy the settlements.

The result was a recent upsurge in West Bank violence that the government was determined to get to grips with. So, they sent in the army. Eighteen months prior, there were 13 battalions stationed in the West Bank to keep the peace.

By June, that number had grown to 25 — meaning thousands of IDF troops were reassigned to the region, troops who could have possibly been otherwise manning the border with Gaza. Israeli military spokesman Richard Hecht has claimed there was no trade-off. On the other hand, former IDF Military Intelligence Chief Aharon Zeevi Farkash has been pretty explicit, telling the Washington Post: “There was a need for more soldiers, so where did they take them from?

From the Gaza border, where they thought it was calm.” The intelligence services were also briefing that Israel’s biggest threat came from Lebanon in the north, where Iran-allied Hezbollah hold large swathes of territory. Beyond the troop redeployments, there was also the little matter of Israel’s recent descent into full-blown chaos over the major judicial overhaul Netanyahu’s government had been pursuing — one that would strip away the independence of the courts and effectively remove checks and balances on the ruling coalition’s power.

These proposed changes shattered Israeli society. Since spring, the Jewish State had been roiled by the largest mass protests in its history. Many reservists declared they would not report for duty if the changes went through.

Others found their defense work getting sucked into a politicized gladiator arena, where they were forced to pick a side. That this unrest was potentially blunting the country’s military effectiveness did not go unnoticed. Defense chiefs, former intelligence officers, and more all came out to publicly say the crisis was weakening Israel.

The IDF issued statements saying it was damaging deterrence. In Lebanon, the chief of Hezbollah even felt comfortable declaring that “Israel, once a formidable regional power, has gradually eroded in faith, consciousness, self-assurance and humility.” While the judicial overhaul was an internal matter, it would be naive to think the disorder was not noticed by Hamas.

War on the Rocks noted: “Terrorists are always studying their enemies and probing for opportunities to strike precisely when their opponents are distracted or preoccupied with other matters.” And Israeli society has perhaps never been so distracted, preoccupied, and divided as it was in those months — a distraction that may have, ultimately, had terrible consequences for everyone. At the end of that analysis, the picture remains one of frustrating fragments — fragments that are nonetheless big enough to see what a spectacular failure this was.

In the histories of nations, there are moments that bind people together and drive them apart, moments that show a culture at its best or expose the vulnerabilities and dangerous assumptions of a society grown complacent. The war with Hamas is still ongoing. There is talk that things could get even worse — that Hezbollah might attack from the north, or Syria from the east, that Israel may even wind up going to war with Iran.

No matter what the future holds, there is no doubt that October 7 will remain the date everyone remembers. The day when Israel’s self-assurance crumbled as suddenly — and as tragically — as America’s did on September 11, 2001.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Hamas destroy Israel’s ‘iron wall’ border surveillance system?

Hamas’s first move was to use drones to attack and destroy the cellular towers that formed the backbone of the border’s surveillance infrastructure. With no signal to transmit, sensors failed to report breaches and soldiers in control rooms could not monitor the attack via cameras. The billion-shekel system, which bristled with radar, automated machine guns, and aerostats, was rendered effectively blind before a single fighter crossed the fence, allowing bulldozers and explosives to smash through at 30 points unopposed.

Why did Israeli intelligence fail to detect Hamas’s preparations?

Israeli intelligence had wiretapped Hamas operatives whose conversations appeared to show no appetite for war — conversations now believed to have been deliberately staged for Israeli ears. Meanwhile, Hamas leadership ditched phones and computers, planning the attack through face-to-face meetings in rooms shielded from electronic surveillance. Israel’s overconfidence in its technical capabilities caused it to dismiss observable warning signs, including Hamas openly rehearsing the assault at a fake Israeli settlement in Gaza and fighters training on paragliders and hostage-taking.

What was the significance of ‘optimism bias’ in the October 7 failure?

Israeli analysts concluded just days before the attack that Hamas wanted to “avoid a full-fledged war with Israel” and was focused on preserving the economic gains brought by tens of thousands of work permits issued since 2021. That assessment was materially plausible but fatally underestimated Hamas’s founding commitment, encoded in its covenant, to Israel’s destruction. As former national security advisor Yaakov Amidror told the Washington Post: “Israel made a huge mistake believing that a terror organization can change its DNA.”

How did political distractions weaken Israel’s defensive posture before October 7?

The government’s focus on settler violence in the West Bank led it to redeploy forces from 13 battalions to 25 in that region, stripping troops from the Gaza border. Simultaneously, Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul had shattered Israeli society and prompted reservists to declare they would not report for duty, with the IDF itself issuing statements that the crisis was damaging deterrence. Hezbollah’s leader even publicly declared that Israel had “gradually eroded in faith, consciousness, self-assurance and humility,” signaling that adversaries had noticed the distraction.

What individual failures compounded the intelligence and political errors?

An intelligence warning noting a surge in Gaza activity was sent to border soldiers before the attack began but was never acted upon, either because it was not received or not read. More catastrophically, all senior officers from the IDF’s Gaza division had been grouped together on one base; when militants stormed it, they killed or kidnapped nearly every senior officer in the area, leaving no one able to coordinate a coherent response in the opening hours of the assault.

Sources

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