Intelligence failures and the war in Gaza

Blaming this on Netanyahu’s divisive politics doesn’t tell the whole story, but there are still more questions than answers.

At the time of writing the full scale and impact of Hamas’s attack on Israel is still only partly clear - nearly 1,000 Israelis may have been killed, a large number of them youngsters attending a rave close to the border with the Gaza Strip. There may be hundreds of Israeli hostages now dispersed through Gaza, the world’s most densely populated area, which makes any sort of plan to rescue them incredibly difficult. The Israeli defence ministry has regained control of its own territories - three days after the start of the assault - but there are still Hamas gunmen at large.

Now in response, a major Israeli military operation is gearing up; again, we don’t know the scale and extent of this. But there are some clear indications: 300,000 reservists have been called up, the largest mobilisation in Israel’s history. And the IDF spokesman has declared: “Our objective is that at the end of this war, Hamas will no longer have any military capability to threaten Israeli civilians with,” [the IDF spokesman added]. Another goal is “to make sure that Hamas is not able to govern the Gaza Strip”. A complete siege has been announced - with all supplies cut off from two million people, including water. “We are fighting human animals and are acting accordingly”, declared the defence minister. Around 500 have been killed in Gaza so far, including four Israeli hostages.

While this unfolds, the big question remains, how did Israel miss this, a hugely ambitious Hamas operation involving paramotors (not hangliders as others have called them, these were powered flying machines with a long range), marine assaults, specialist breaching vehicles and hundreds of trained fighters? This is arguably the worst intelligence failure in Israel’s history (you can make a claim for Yom Kippur in 1973, but Israel’s technical advantage was far lower in those days so its failure was more excusable). It is particularly inexplicable given that Israel has some of the most capable intelligence and security forces in the world. Whether signals intelligence (SIGINT), networks of informers or special operations units, Israel is widely seen as being better at this than everyone else. Their bold operations against Iranian nuclear scientists are the stuff of admiring media coverage and TV adaptations. Historically we know that very senior Hamas officials have been informants for Israel. The more you know about Israel’s intelligence capabilities, the less it makes any sense that they could have been so completely blindsided.

Blaming politics

I have heard lots of people blame this on the cynical and divisive politics of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who currently governs with an extreme right-wing coalition as he attempts to reduce the independence of Israel’s judiciary, which is investigating him for corruption. There is, undoubtedly, a tendency for right-wing populists in Israel, as in other settings, to set themselves in apparent opposition to the ‘establishment’, including the intelligence and security agencies. Members of Netanyahu’s party have accused Israel’s security agencies of being infested with ‘leftist ideas’ and talked about a ‘deep state’, language which is familiar from Donald Trump and even Boris Johnson. It is known that junior Mossad officers have participated in demonstrations against Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms, possibly with the encouragement of their seniors.

There was also an odd sort of mutual self-interest between the Israeli right and Hamas: in recent years Israel has felt that it had Gaza contained and that Hamas were ‘people we can do business with’ (which is not to suggest any liking on their part - but since 2018 there has been an accommodation of sorts). This was in contrast with the sclerotic Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, the ‘official’ government which Israel (not incorrectly) has derided as incapable and useless, and which is on territory that many of Netanyahu’s allies would like to annex to the Israeli state.

Israeli intelligence officers might dislike being described as the ‘deep state’, but they are motivated to protect their country, above all, not the government of the day

So it easy to believe that there is no love lost between the many of the professionals in Israel’s security institutions and the hardline right-wingers currently running Israel, but this doesn’t explain why Hamas’s plans would have been missed. Ultimately, running informants and signals intelligence operations is a long-term business: sources and networks might be in place for years, sometimes decades. A Hamas informant reporting to Israel’s Shin Bet would be run and managed by a team of mid-level professionals who are not directly involved in these political debates, even as they are likely to have political opinions of their own. These officers might dislike being described as the ‘deep state’, but they are motivated to protect their country, above all, not the government of the day. Similarly, the SIGINT capabilities, as well as aerial surveillance, will have continued uninterrupted: indeed, there is no imaginable circumstance in which the highly professional Israeli intelligence system will have stopped working on one of its key tasks - monitoring Hamas - just because of (undoubtedly very serious) disagreements with the current political leadership.

Cock-up not conspiracy

It also doesn’t appear credible that clear intelligence about this raid would have been ignored by Israel’s current political leaders for some sinister political reason. These people are capable of being highly cynical, but if they believed there was any chance of something on this scale happening, they would have acted. Netanyahu might get a brief political boost as a wartime leader, but it is hard to see him benefitting in the long or even medium run. There is already severe criticism directed at him (see below). So did the prime minister not understand warnings that he was receiving, or were there none? Is there something more seriously wrong with the intelligence system as a result of the chaos of the Netanyahu era, perhaps that intelligence cannot be reported up the chain to the appropriate level?

According to Reuters reporting, among other detailed and extensive preparations, Hamas built a mock-up of an Israeli settlement for its fighters to train on. It is likely that most of those fighters doing the training will not have known about the plan to storm southern Israel (in the grim logic of the Arab-Israeli conflict, training to overrun an Israeli settlement is of value to any Hamas fighter), but this activity cannot have passed unobserved by the Israelis. Aside from whether Israel had any informant in Hamas that had an inkling of the plot (if it didn’t, it means its coverage has declined substantially) there were all kinds of other ways Israel might have found out. According to reports in the Wall Street Journal, Iran worked with Hamas over several weeks to help prepare the plot and gave the green light at a meeting in Beirut last Monday. If this is correct, the failure to catch this by either Israel or the USA, and the failure to identify the significance of the Beirut meeting, is all the more damning.

This goes further: within the Arab region, Jordan and Egypt are known for having highly capable intelligence services with excellent coverage of the Palestinians. Is it really possible that neither of them knew anything? Further afield, in addition to the Americans, France and the UK see themselves as globally capable intelligence players. The fact that none of these entities appears to have had advanced warning suggest that there was extremely tight security within Hamas. Israeli’s intelligence failure was not unique.

Perhaps intelligence analysts no longer believed Hamas fighters were capable of such a major operation?

Intelligence work is notoriously difficult - think of an incomplete set of jigsaw pieces - some from the wrong set - that analysts have to interpret to a clear image. Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan referred to the event as “Israel’s 9/11” - another historic intelligence failure. But 9/11 involved a comparatively small number of people who required little in the way of equipment or resources - just enough to hijack civilian airliners in a time of minimal security measures. This attack, involving hundreds, maybe thousands, with small arms, rockets, boats, paramotors and much more, is on a totally different scale.

So there was a failure of analysis to think big, to connect the dots. Perhaps after years of defeat and setback, intelligence analysts, whether Israeli, American or Egyptian, no longer believed Hamas fighters were capable of such a major operation?

The only very partial explanation I can add to this puzzle is one of motivation. In a coruscating editorial, Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote that the attack was “the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu”. It continued that the prime minister “completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession”.

This nihilistic policy may have had an impact on Israeli intelligence on an operational level: Hamas informants that were willing to share information with Israel may have decided not to on this occasion. The motivation of someone spying for Israel from within Hamas will always be hard to understand from the outside. In many cases it is a simple case of blackmail, but such intelligence sources are always motivated to escape the relationship, either by betraying their blackmailers or by providing false information. This is why, contrary to popular belief, intelligence professionals don’t like to run sources on the basis of blackmail if they can avoid it.

A preference is for some degree of instrumentalisation and reciprocity. A commonly used tactic, highly effective in Gaza where medical resources are limited, is to offer to arrange or fund medical treatment. A parent with a sick child will be particularly willing to trade lifesaving treatment for intelligence. Such is the dark pragmatism of the spy’s world. But perhaps these calculations feel different in a world where Israel’s government contains figures such as Itamar Ben-Gvir.

A similar case may pertain where Israel’s Arab allies are concerned. If Jordan or Egypt knew of the scale of the plans they would surely have helped to scotch them. But if they knew only a few bits of the picture, the instability and chaos of the Netanyahu government may have been a disincentive to sharing intelligence. These things should not be politicised. Indeed, the existence of intelligence relationships between Jordan and Israel are a good example of a pragmatic cooperation that operates separate from the world of politics. But it is equally possible that the extreme nature of Netanyahu’s current government pushed them into a position where the snippets of intelligence they were getting were no longer shared with the same alacrity as before.

POST SCRIPT: Israeli media is reporting that Egyptian officials did warn that “something big” was happening in Gaza. If there’s one country that should be able to find out what Hamas is up to, it’s Egypt. Getting to the bottom of this reporting will be crucial.