2023-10-09 08:42:02
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — For Palestinians in Gaza, Israel’s gaze is never far away. Surveillance drones constantly fly over the area. The fortified border is full of security cameras and soldiers on guard. Intelligence agencies have cyber sources and tools to gather a lot of information.
But Israel’s eyes appeared to have been closed ahead of an unprecedented assault by the armed group Hamas, which breached Israeli border barriers and sent hundreds of militants into Israel to carry out an audacious attack that left hundreds dead and engulfed the region in violence.
Israeli intelligence agencies have acquired an image of invincibility for decades due to a series of successes. Israel has thwarted plots originating in the West Bank, allegedly tracked down Hamas operatives in Dubai and was accused of killing Iranian nuclear scientists in the heart of Iran. Even when their efforts have suffered setbacks, agencies such as the Mossad, the Shin Bet, and military intelligence have maintained their mystical aura.
But the weekend attack, which caught Israel by surprise on a major Jewish holiday, called into question that reputation and raised questions about the country’s preparedness in the face of a weaker but determined enemy. Some 48 hours later, Hamas militants were still fighting Israeli forces inside Israeli territory and Hamas held dozens of Israelis captive in Gaza.
“This is a huge failure,” said Yaakov Amidror, former national security adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “In reality, this operation shows that the (intelligence) capacity in Gaza was not good.”
Amidror declined to offer an explanation for the ruling and said that once the crisis passed, lessons should be learned from what happened.
Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, chief military spokesman, acknowledged that the army owed the population an explanation. But he said it wasn’t time yet. “First we fight, then we investigate,” he said.
Some said it was too early to place blame solely on the intelligence services. They pointed to a wave of low-level violence in the West Bank that diverted some military resources to that area, and to the political chaos in Israel unleashed by the far-right Netanyahu government’s efforts to reform justice. The controversial plan has threatened the cohesion of the country’s powerful military.
However, previous apparent ignorance of Hamas’s plans would likely be seen as a key factor in the chain of events that led to the deadliest attack on Israelis in several decades.
Israel withdrew troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, depriving it of first-hand information about the situation in the territory. But even after Hamas took Gaza in 2007, Israel seemed to maintain the initiative thanks to human and technological espionage.
Israel claimed to know the precise whereabouts of Hamas leaders and appeared to demonstrate this by killing militant commanders in precision strikes, sometimes while they were sleeping in their beds. The country has known where to attack the underground tunnels used by Hamas to transport fighters from one place to another, and destroyed kilometers (miles) of those hidden passages.
Despite that ability, Hamas was able to keep its plan secret. The ferocious attack, which likely required months of planning and careful training and required coordinating several armed groups, appeared to have remained under the radar of Israeli intelligence.
Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli general, said that without a presence in Gaza, Israeli security services had had to rely increasingly on technological means to obtain information. Militants in Gaza, he noted, have found ways to circumvent those technological tools, giving Israel an incomplete picture about their intentions.
“The other side learned to deal with our technological dominance and stopped using technology that could expose them,” said Avivi, who served as an intelligence broker under a former chief of staff. Avivi is the president and founder of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, a warmongering group of former army commanders.
“They have returned to the Stone Age,” he said, explaining that the militants did not use cell phones or computers and managed sensitive matters in rooms specially protected against technological espionage or underground.
But Avivi said the failure went beyond information gathering, and that Israeli security services had failed to get a full picture of the information they did receive, due to what he described as preconceived ideas about Hamas’s intentions.
In recent years, security officials in Israel have increasingly viewed Hamas as a group interested in governing, trying to develop Gaza’s economy and improve the living standards of its 2.3 million people. Avivi and others said the reality is that Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel, still sees that goal as its priority.
In recent years, Israel has allowed up to 18,000 Palestinians from Gaza to work in Israel, where they can earn wages about 10 times higher than in the impoverished coastal enclave. The security authorities saw it as a carrot that served to maintain relative calm.
“In practice, hundreds if not thousands of Hamas men prepared for a surprise attack for months, without it leaking,” defense expert Amos Harel wrote in the Haaretz newspaper. “The results are catastrophic.”
Allies who share intelligence with Israel said security agencies misinterpreted the situation.
An Egyptian official said Egypt, which often serves as a mediator between Israel and Hamas, had spoken several times with the Israelis about “something big,” without going into details.
The Israelis, he noted, were focused on the West Bank and downplayed the threat from Gaza. Netanyahu’s government is made up of supporters of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, who have demanded a security operation amid a wave of violence in the area over the past 18 months.
“We have warned them that an explosion of the situation was coming, and very soon, and it would be big. But they underestimated those warnings,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the content of sensitive intelligence conversations with the media.
Israel has also been troubled and divided by Netanyahu’s judicial reform plan. The president had received several warnings from his defense chief, as well as several former directors of the country’s intelligence agencies, that the divisive plan was eroding the cohesion of the country’s security services.
Martin Indyk, who was special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during the Obama administration, said internal divisions over the legal changes had contributed to Israelis’ surprise.
“That affected the Israel Defense Forces in a way that I think we have found was a huge distraction,” he said.
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Associated Press writers Samy Magdy in Cairo and Aamer Madhani in Washington contributed to this report.
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