How Israel’s security failed to stop Hamas
Feared services were caught unawares
TEL AVIV, Israel — Shortly before attackers from Gaza poured into Israel at dawn on Saturday, Israeli intelligence detected a surge in activity on some of the Gazan militant networks it monitors. Realizing something unusual was happening, they sent an alert to the Israeli soldiers guarding the Gazan border, according to two senior Israeli security officials.
But the warning wasn’t acted upon, either because the soldiers didn’t get it or the soldiers didn’t read it.
Shortly afterward, Hamas, the group that controls Gaza, sent drones to disable some of the Israeli military’s cellular communications stations and surveillance towers along the border, preventing the duty officers from monitoring the area remotely with video cameras. The drones also destroyed remote-controlled machine guns that Israel had installed on its border fortifications, removing a key means of combating a ground attack.
That made it easier for Hamas assailants to approach and blow up parts of the border fence and bulldoze it in several places with surprising ease, allowing thousands of Palestinians to walk through the gaps.
These operational failures and weaknesses were among a wide array of logistical and intelligence lapses by the Israeli security services that paved the way for the Gazan incursion into southern Israel, according to four senior Israeli security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss a sensitive matter and their early assessment of what went wrong.
The brazen infiltration of more than 20 Israeli towns and army bases in that raid was the worst breach of Israel’s defenses in 50 years and shattered the nation’s sense of security. For hours, the strongest military in the Middle East was rendered powerless to fight back against a far weaker enemy, leaving villages defenseless for most of the day against squads of attackers who killed more than 1,000 Israelis, including soldiers in their underwear; abducted at least 150 people; overran at least four military camps; and spread out across more than 30 square miles of Israeli territory.
The four officials said the success of the attack, based on their early assessment, was rooted in a slew of security failures by Israel’s intelligence community and military, including:
— Failure by intelligence officers to monitor key communication channels used by Palestinian attackers;
— Overreliance on border surveillance equipment that was easily shut down by attackers, allowing them to raid military bases and slay soldiers in their beds;
— Clustering of commanders in a single border base that was overrun in the opening phase of the incursion, preventing communication with the rest of the armed forces;
— And a willingness to accept at face value assertions by Gazan military leaders, made on private channels that the Palestinians knew were being monitored by Israel, that they were not preparing for battle.
“We spend billions and billions on gathering intelligence on Hamas,” said Yoel Guzansky, a former senior official at Israel’s National Security Council. “Then, in a second,” he added, “everything collapsed like dominoes.”
The first failure took root months before the attack, as Israeli security chiefs made incorrect assumptions about the extent of the threat that Hamas posed to Israel from Gaza.
Hamas stayed out of two fights in the past year, allowing Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller armed group in Gaza, to take on Israel alone. Last month, Hamas leadership also ended a period of rioting along the border, in an agreement brokered by Qatar, giving the impression that it was not looking for an escalation.
In calls, Hamas operatives, who talked to one another when tapped by Israeli intelligence agents, also gave the sense that they sought to avoid another war with Israel so soon after a damaging two-week conflict in May 2021, according to two of the Israeli officials. Israeli intelligence, they said, is now looking into whether those calls were real or staged.
The next failure was operational.
Two of the officials said that the Israeli border surveillance system was almost entirely reliant on cameras, sensors, and machine guns that are operated remotely.
Israeli commanders had grown overly confident in the system’s impregnability. They thought that the combination of remote surveillance and arms, barriers above ground and a subterranean wall to block Hamas from digging tunnels into Israel made mass infiltration unlikely, reducing the need for significant numbers of soldiers to be physically stationed along the border line itself.