One of the biggest challenges confronting Israel is to assess honestly how many soldiers, intelligence officials and established security procedures failed before October 7, New York Post analyst writes.
Answering that question properly could well change radically how Jerusalem deals with Gaza and the West Bank. It could easily superannuate a significant slice of Israel’s military, security and intelligence elite.
The easy parts to answer will surely be technical - the most salient may be: How did Hamas maintain sufficient communication and training discipline to outsmart Israel’s eavesdropping and photographic surveillance of Gaza?
The more difficult: Why didn’t Israel’s security and intelligence services - and those of the Palestinian Authority, Jordan and Egypt - provide some warning about the coming onslaught?
Technical intelligence - especially the decryption of encrypted sensitive communications - is usually the most valuable information one can access against one’s enemy.
Yet it doesn’t appear the Israeli military and security services picked up that much “chatter” - at least not enough for senior officers to challenge the then-conventional wisdom that Hamas wasn’t a significant ground threat.
Israeli fortunes shouldn’t have been dependent on signal-intelligence analysts putting the dots together - not given the proximity of the target and the amount of time and effort Israeli security services, especially the internal service, Shin Bet, which has authority over running spies in the West Bank and Gaza, have spent to develop networks among the Palestinians.
Almost as worrisome is the apparent lack of information about Hamas’ plans coming from Jordan’s and Egypt’s security and intelligence services. Did they, too, underestimate Hamas’ capabilities?
The measure for Israel is whether it has the determination to punish the errant and build a better intelligence ground game since it’s now clear no one else is likely to offer help that really matters.
