Iain Hunter, in his thought-provoking article ‘Unacceptable Opinions’ raised the possibility that the Israeli government colluded in Hamas’ barbaric attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, by allowing it to happen despite knowing about it in advance, with the aim of starting a war to occupy the land now controlled by ‘Palestinians’. To my surprise many posters agreed, pointing out that Israel’s intelligence services are so sophisticated and efficient that they must have known of the attack in advance.
But while I fully agree that the failure of Israeli intelligence is real, my own reading, mostly of non-governmental Israeli sources, has provided a plausible set of reasons that indicate that, on this occasion, the conspiracy theorists are wrong. So, I’ve hastily put this piece together to put what I consider the more rational argument to our readers.
The Israel – Gaza border comes under the direct control of the IDF’s Southern Command and its Gaza Division. They are masters at their job and know the area inside out, and work closely with Shin Bet, Israel’s formidable counterespionage, subversion, and sabotage agency. So why did they fail so catastrophically in their intelligence assessment in the days and hours leading to Hamas’s attack.
The answer it seems, was over-reliance on AI intelligence analysis, past experience, and the way that the Nukhba – Hamas’s elite terrorists who lead the attack - used their mobile phones before the attack.
In the early hours of October 7, Southern Command were advised that ‘the Nukhba forces have not disappeared’. That is, they were known not to have moved, were still where the Israelis expected them to be and had not, therefore, disappeared into the tunnels from where the Israelis expected any attack to be launched from.
A few hours earlier, the Shin Bet's southern command noticed that dozens of SIM cards, linked to Nukhba terrorists but issued by Israeli mobile phone companies, had simultaneously been activated across the Gaza Strip. Hamas did not know that the activation of these cards in Gaza could be seen by Israeli intelligence, who regarded such an activation as a sign of a limited raid inside Israel, launched from tunnels. No one in Israeli intelligence had imagined a raid involving thousands of terrorists.
This wasn't the first time the Nukhba had activated their Israeli SIM cards, but this time the number of cards activated was larger and across a wider area. Past SIM card activations had turned out to be training exercises, which is what the Israeli’s assumed this activation was.
Both the Shin Bet and Southern Command were, however, on high alert during those hours. When they had seen the activation of the SIM cards in Gaza they had consulted their AI ‘indicators and warnings model,’ which is a collection of anomalies or activities that, when appearing together, suggest the enemy's intentions’, and was developed as indicators of a Nukhba raid into Israeli territory. Unfortunately, the key element of this model related not to their SIM cards but instead to the Nukhba terrorists themselves, who Israeli intelligence was able to closely monitor. The assumption was that, if Hamas was preparing for an infiltration, they would descend into "approach tunnels" enabling them to move close to the border fence undetected by IDF spotters - which would lead to their phone signals disappearing.
So, when Southern Command’s Unit 8200 (an IDF Intelligence unit) and Shin Bet, the two parties in charge of intelligence coverage of the Nukhba, were told that their cell phones were still within range, they concluded that the Nukhba forces had not vanished into their attack tunnels and so, the warning model did not indicate an attack.
Also, the Nukhba lower ranks followed their usual routine, not knowing that within a few hours they would be launching a war. The order to do so only reached them around 04.00, during prayers and, of course, the Nukhba did not enter the tunnels. Instead, they stormed Israel en masse, above ground, taking with them their mobile phones with Israeli SIM cards.
It is legitimate to ask how highly competent intelligence officers, armed with advanced intelligence capabilities, missed signs of Hamas' surprise attack and failed so catastrophically. Israeli sources have reported that to answer this question, we have to go back to the intelligence failure of the Yom Kippur War, fifty years ago, and a decision to rebuild the country's intelligence directorate and to rely more on intelligence gathered from the field itself, rather than relying on strategic analyses of various kinds and giving more authority to regional commands and regular divisions stationed along the borders.
The principle that the commands and divisions would investigate their own areas at the tactical level and, when something unusual happened, to disregard preconceptions and say “you're talking nonsense. We're seeing something completely different on the ground.'"
Lt. Col. Avi Shalev, a former researcher on the Palestinian arena and author of the book "The only Jew in the room" says "that's precisely the role of the intelligence officers in the division and the command – to question the research division's assumptions." The rational was, reasonably, based on the idea that the closer you are to the field, the more alarmist you become because you're the one who will be attacked in the event of war or an incursion."
But various Israeli magazines and papers discuss what they see as Military Intelligence's dangerous addiction to technology-based intelligence which, in their view, has resulted in the technological solutions becoming an end in itself and that Military Intelligence has changed from an intelligence agency with technological capabilities into a technology organisation that handles intelligence.
It also seems that past experience and mistakes lead to a more cautious approach by senior offices. Sometime in 2023, officers in the Gaza Division issued an important intelligence alert of a group of terrorists preparing to carry out an imminent attack. The entire sector was placed on high alert, ambushes were set up and Air Force drones were sent on patrol. The attack did not happen, and the thought is that commanders were reprimanded, thus making them reluctant to go active unless the AI model supported it. On the night of October 6-7, the local command did not raise an alert even when Nukhba forces were in Israel, preferring to wait for further information from Shin Bet. Unfortunately, that night the sophisticated technological intelligence on which the command and division relied simply didn't see what was happening on the ground in Gaza.
Ongoing IDF investigations into the event has revealed that several pieces of intelligence were collected that night that could have changed the intelligence picture and possibly prevented the attack had they been acted upon. But for some reason, they weren't analysed in time or got stuck in the pipeline. There wasn't even a debate," says one source. "There are three levels of alert in the IDF," he says, "alert, readiness, and advance warning. That night, they didn't even discuss advance warning." Needless to say, all involved are trying to shift the blame onto other agencies. Jewish human nature is no different to the rest of us.
In summary of this hastily put together piece, it seems that rather than a conspiracy, the intelligence failure that allowed the Hamas attack, was just the usual sort, human failure, and reliance on computer models.
However, I have to note that all the above information could be misinformation put out by Israeli intelligence sources to hide their crime. What do you think?