Insider accounts of what went wrong in IDF intel before Oct. 7 - analysis

No one is waiting for the end of the Israel-Hamas war to lay blame for the failure to anticipate Hamas’s horrific October 7 invasion and slaughter of 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians.

The Jerusalem Post has been provided multiple insider accounts of what went wrong in IDF Intelligence that contributed to the failure.

But before delving into the malaise which has enveloped IDF Intelligence in recent days, it should be noted that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ran the country from 2009 to the present, absent an 18-month hiatus from mid-2021 to the end of 2022, when it was run by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.

They and five IDF chiefs-of-staff, several defense ministers and IDF Intelligence chiefs, four Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) directors and many others, all held the same mistaken concept that Hamas could be contained, deterred, and kept in check by a mix of economic incentives and occasional rounds of airstrikes.

None of the above officials ever imagined in their wildest dreams that Hamas would try to or be capable of pulling off taking over 22 villages in the Israeli South.

Were there new, sufficient warning that were ignored leading to October 7? 

The next question then becomes: Were there new and sufficient warnings that were ignored leading into October 7, and if so, who made the warnings, who ignored them, and why?

A full and comprehensive account may never be attained or may be attained only after a state commission of inquiry, because of how many parties’ future legacies are caught up in the issue.

This is especially true of Netanyahu, who out of all other officials is the only one who has said he has no intention of resigning, in contrast with IDF Chief Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi, IDF Intelligence Chief Maj.-Gen. Aharon Huliya, and Shin Bet director Ronen Bar, who have publicly taken responsibility in a way suggesting they will resign once the current war is over. Unlike Netanyahu, none of the others is an accused felon on trial and facing a probable prison term, with a legacy to protect.

But piecing together the different insider accounts along with leaked information, what emerges is that a non-commissioned officer in IntelligenceUnit 8200 Officer “V” is the female hero who foresaw the full scope of Hamas’s plans and warned about them multiple times before October 7.

There also seems to be little question that her superior officer, a lieutenant-colonel, will be painted as one of the primary people who failed on the issue, dismissing her warnings as “imaginary.”

That said, the Post understands that this same lieutenant-colonel remains in IDF Intelligence, and there are apparently no plans to dismiss either of them. This could be because dismissing them mid-war could lead to calls for higher resignations and could lead them to turn on their even higher-up superiors.

But it could also be because, if the full email string is followed and not just the small pieces leaked, the lieutenent-colonel did not completely block V’s path on the issue.

Rather, the Post has learned that he held a meeting with V and others in September. At the end of the meeting, all parties agreed to a summary in which, despite having debated V’s warnings, there was no concrete timing for the warnings (meaning it could still be months away), and no explanation as to why now the 15-year-concept for understanding Hamas was about to be overturned.

What V had warned of were the results of following drills and chatter among certain Hamas forces talking about killing all of the inhabitants of certain southern Israeli villages and talk about much larger invasion forces than envisioned by Israel in even the worst-case scenarios regarding Hamas.

V had warned about this threat multiple times, buy still had no concrete prediction about when it could occur or apparently lacked a sufficient strategic understanding of what was behind what would become the largest conceptual shift in understanding Hamas in decades.

It also did not help that V was a sergeant, had undertaken her research on her own initiative, and worked in Unit 8200, whose main responsibility is collecting intelligence, as opposed to the Analysis Division, which is considered the real experts in deciphering threats and intelligence.

Of course, taking the initiative should be appreciated and every officer’s view should be taken into account, but the background for the Lt.-Col. not jumping on this new theory does have a context – as insiders would view it – of coming from the wrong person in the wrong place.

Perhaps, that is why V saw what others did not, since she was not part of the higher-level clique and did not feel the need to toe the line.

Additional emails sent after September meeting

In any event, the Post understands that additional emails were sent after the September meeting, and that V did not “jump up and down” about any sudden threat, but rather she and the lieutenant-colonel both agreed to continue to discuss the issue in future forums.

Last, there had been a prior warning of a Hamas attack around this Passover, leading the IDF to raise its alert level. Hamas did not attack in the end and false warnings can lead to negative feedback for “jumping the gun.”

The lieutenant-colonel may have concluded based on the Passover incident that any current warnings should be viewed with a grain of salt. In contrast, it seems that Hamas learned from the Passover incident that it needed to be more careful with information security, which helped it fool the IDF in October.

How does all of this impact the future of Huliya, head of IDF intelligence?

How does all of this impact the future of Huliya, head of IDF Intelligence? There are accusations that either he knew about the email warnings from V, or even if he did not know about V specifically, one of V’s superiors told him about her findings at a meeting at Unit 8200 on October 3.

The flip side to that story, according to sources, is that a 90-minute PowerPoint presentation was shown to Huliya on October 3, which did not mention V’s concerns.

Huliya did not set the agenda, so the content for the PowerPoint was chosen by Unit 8200 officials – who chose to leave V’s warnings out of the presentation.

All of this would seem to clear Huliya of any special responsibility for the October 7 failure, beyond the general failure of 15 years of political and defense officials, of which he would just be one on a long list.

But then something else interesting happened. At the end of the meeting, the floor was open to more informal and wide-ranging discussions and issues. One of those present started to raise V’s concerns, leading Huliya to ask them to accompany him out of the meeting afterward in a smaller and more direct forum.

There is a dispute as to whether Huliya dismissed the officer’s concerns at that point or whether he told the officer to feel free to look into it more.

It is also possible that Huliya and the officer had different understandings of what was said – as one person’s “feel free to look into that,” could seem to someone else like a rejection and not being taken seriously. There is no record of the conversation, but we may eventually learn more about it as there were a small number of Huliya’s aides in earshot.

Either way, Huliya’s defenders say that, at no time did V nor the officer who spoke about V’s views to Huliya, sound a specific strategic formal alarm similar to that of the Mossad spy, “the Angel, Ashraf Marwan,” who told his handlers in 1973 that Egypt’s attack on Israel was imminent.

Shin Bet received a warning the night before October 7

Moreover, the Shin Bet received a warning the night before October 7, and Halevi held a consultation with top IDF officials, not including Huliya, who was on vacation in Eilat, to address the situation.

Both the top IDF officials and the Shin Bet viewed the warnings as low-level and nothing close to a game-changing invasion.

Bar ordered a small additional staff of reinforcements to the border, some of whom were eventually killed, but even that was viewed within the Shin Bet as being extra careful. No formal Shin Bet warning went out and the reinforcements were minuscule and tactically a non-factor.

There have also been reports about officers ignoring low-ranking border lookout’s warnings about increased Hamas activity and about various Unit 8200 units being closed or having their hours shortened, with these moves having negative impacts on the IDF’s defense on October 7.

Doubtlessly, these issues will be addressed by a future inquiry, but those issues alone never had much of a chance of getting Israel more ready for October 7 without broader concrete warnings and without a readiness by top officials to drop their 15-year-long misconceptions of Hamas.

Any future significantly improved defense will also require a new social contract of many more troops permanently on the borders, more young people being drafted into combat units, and longer IDF service. This is not something that one intelligence officer, high or low, anywhere could make happen.

There will also need to be a return to the art of human analysis and considering contrary points of view, with less complete reliance on enormous volumes of technical data so that big potential new trends are not ignored in favor of technology and the trends predicted based on the quantity of data.