Was October 7 – the day Hamas invaded southern Israel and killed over 600 Israelis, wounded over 2,000, and kidnapped an unknown number at least in the dozens – the worst Israeli intelligence failure in history?
Probably looking back historians will still flag the 1973 Yom Kippur War as much worse because there were more deaths and because the state’s very existence was far more in danger.
But the IDF of 2023 is far more powerful than the IDF of 1973 and Hamas today is far weaker than Egypt and Syria were 50 years ago, so the issue is debatable.
How did Israel fall so far to such an inferior enemy?
How could this happen?
First, obviously, imagination and the conceit that being superior militarily generally can always prevent an inferior adversary from victory anywhere.
There are many examples in war, going back to the battle of Thermopylae around 2500 years ago when a small group of Greeks held off a massive army of Persians for an extraordinary amount of time when an inferior group made issues for a superior overconfident, or complacent group.
Then there was a lack of understanding: IDF intelligence has many debates about many security issues, but every official who briefed the Jerusalem Post made it clear that Hamas was broadly deterred from a big conflict with Israel.
And the data seemed to support this. In numerous recent conflicts with Gaza, Hamas did not even take part. They seemed too afraid to join the fray with Islamic Jihad. They seemed to have learned the lesson of the 2014 and 2021 Gaza wars that if they jumped into the ring with Israel, they would always come out much worse.
This thinking was far too black and white as the fact is that Hamas did go to war with Israel in 2014 and 2021 despite many earlier experiences in which the IDF slammed it to the ground.
The lesson should have been that sometimes Hamas is deterred, but if it hits a low point where it feels it is getting nowhere and has nothing to lose, it is willing to fight a losing battle just to get back into the conversation.
Then there is Hamas’ tactical genius in the operation.
Part of why the IDF was not ready for many of its tactics was because Hamas had not revealed them, or certainly not in huge volumes and with the complex synchronized orchestration that it pulled off.
The IDF was used to rocket fire without border riots or border riots without rocket fire.
It was used for one small group of sea commandos trying to invade Zikim beach or one or two drones or other flying contraptions being sent over the border which could be easily isolated and handled.
Instead, Hamas launched 2,000 rockets as a cover.
At the same time that it launched rockets diverting IDF attention, it also launched an entire fleet of motorized hang-gliders (something which has barely ever been discussed by the IDF) which manually dropped bombs on Israeli lookout positions. These motorized hang gliders were a brilliant tactical use of homemade retro technology with a tiny “footprint” (in terms of being able to detect them in advance) customized to pinpoint holes in the IDF’s highly advanced technological apparatus.
With the lookout positions taken out, immediately after Hamas sent its forces into different crossing locations.
As the IDF started to notice that its crossing locations were under attack along with the rocket fire, its attention was diverted from the 20 or so entry points, which already lacked lookout positions, where Hamas was ready with additional large volumes of soldiers.
At the same time, Hamas did not come into Israel on land with dozens, but with hundreds of soldiers, a volume the IDF never expected.
Also, at the same time, Hamas did not penetrate Israel by sea with one group of Hamas naval commandos, but with many groups, something the navy was not ready for.
Let’s also not forget that despite Israel declaring complete victory over all Hamas attack tunnels, it turns out that the terror group figured out a way to dig around a dozen new attack tunnels which the IDF’s fancy billion-dollar technologies failed to detect.
All of this happened virtually simultaneously, but in a specific order to allow each next step to move forward smoothly and further confuse and overwhelm Israeli decision-makers about where and what was going on.
Part of what stunned the US on 9/11 was not just that one of the Twin Towers was attacked, but that both were separately attacked that the Pentagon was attacked around the same time and that yet another plane was hijacked at the same time.
Systems overload
The system was simply overloaded.
If Israel had its airpower and advanced land vehicles and tanks assembled for a fight, it would have mowed down Hamas. But by the time its superior forces were ready, Hamas had only needed a few short minutes to get into urban areas with Israeli civilians, neutralizing many of the IDF’s technological advantages.
The IDF only started to be effective in countering the invasion when it summarily threw tons of old-fashioned ground troops at all of the Gaza border villages in a less than coordinated fashion, such that it was able to at least accidentally catch Hamas forces wherever they might happen to be.
Only once the IDF had engaged in old-fashioned house-to-house in-your-face gun battles and lost many of its forces, was it able to start using its airpower effectively again against Hamas forces which were not mostly on the Gaza side of the border.
Add in that one to two dozen IDF battalions that should have been in Gaza were stuck in the West Bank dealing with an 18-month terror wave there which should have ended long ago, that the IDF reserves’ readiness has taken a hit in recent months during debates over the judicial overhaul, and that the country had its guard down for the Jewish holiday of “Simchat Torah” and there was a perfect storm.
However, the IDF handles Hamas in the upcoming ground invasion, it must toss its old border security concept out the window, and imagine a new security concept with more ground forces and more old-school redundancies that can prevent Hezbollah or any future adversary from taking advantage of a hi-tech, low-manpower border security strategy.
The writing was on the wall when one Egyptian rogue border policeman turned terrorist killed multiple IDF forces and spent hours inside Israel before being neutralized, or when Hamas and Hezbollah each broke into Israeli territory just to plant flags, with no IDF soldiers on site, or when a Hezbollah agent got all the way to Meggido to carry out a terror bombing.
If the IDF undertakes such a major strategic shift, then it may be able to relegate the debate of when its worst intelligence failure was to an academic one, instead of having to face another October 7 invasion from the North or elsewhere in the future.
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