Hamas attack is biggest failure of Israeli intelligence over 50 years

Saturday's unexpected attack on Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas could be one of the biggest failures of Israeli intelligence since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Source: Bloomberg

Details: The attack included dozens of infiltration operations on land and sea, as well as rocket attacks. It is a complicated assault that should involve the kind of planning and coordination that intelligence services should have noticed.

Although Israeli officials have been saying for months that Palestinian militants were preparing for an attack, the timing and scale of the attack appear to have taken Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by surprise. Israel and its ally the United States, which allocated US$3.3 billion to Israel for defence spending in 2022, will be examining who bears the most responsibility and how it happened.

"It’s shocking to me that they were able to do it without Israel or the United States picking up on it," said Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "Failure to prepare. Failure to have troops along the border, failure of the fence along the border that they paid millions of shekels for." 

Bloomberg noted that the attack came 50 years after Israel failed to prevent an unexpected attack by Egypt and Syria during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement). Back then, the intelligence failure led to the creation of a commission to find out what went wrong and has been the subject of numerous studies.

Israeli officials said it was too early to say what went wrong and rejected any comparison with 1973.

"The real problem here is likely that the Israelis simply did not believe that Hamas would risk a cross-border infiltration," said Aaron David Miller, senior fellow at the Carnegie endowment for international peace and a former state department Middle East negotiator. "The lack of sufficient Israeli forces in that area was a grievous failure."

A staff member of the US Congress who wished to remain anonymous said that Congress should ask tough questions, given that Israeli and US intelligence agencies should have detected an attack of this scale.

The failure is all the more striking given that Israeli security services devote significant resources to monitoring Palestinian society, including Hamas, through informants and surveillance technology.

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