Former IDF intelligence chief Amos Malka on Tuesday said that the October 7 failure was caused by a mix of the defense and political establishment’s obsession with the tunnel threat, the “traffic jam” blocking intelligence points from reaching top officials, and the harm of the legal overhaul to the IDF’s strength.
Malka said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu essentially presented in 2017 to the Knesset Comptroller Committee the threat of a Hamas invasion along the lines of Hamas’s “Walls of Jericho” battle plan, which Israel later intercepted.
However, when Netanyahu presented a Hamas invasion, it was based on the idea of carrying out the invasion using tunnel warfare.
The framework of this discussion was that Hamas had blindsided Israel using tunnel warfare in 2014 and that Israel needed to alter its perspective to take the tunnel threat seriously, including pouring in huge new technological and human resources.
According to Malka, one large missing piece was that Israel replaced fully assessing the diverse threats presented by Hamas with an obsession to prevent the cross-border attack tunnel threat.
IDF blinded to the potential threats
In fact, he implied that the focus on Hamas’s tunnel threat, however important that it was, blinded Israel and the IDF to the possibility of a classic land invasion.
The IDF and the political echelon became convinced that one of the reasons that Hamas invested so much in cross-border attack tunnels was because they had given up entirely on the idea of a classic above-ground invasion, he implied.
He implied that this meant that once the IDF felt it had neutralized several attack tunnels, the IDF let its guard down even more than it might have if the entire attack tunnel phenomenon had not taken place.
Next, Malka said that much of the critical intelligence collected by lower-ranked lookouts and intelligence officers like “V,” who issued warnings to her superior officer in IDF Southern Command Intelligence Lt. Col. “A,” was never passed on to the top echelons of IDF intelligence or the top political decision-makers.
If true, this would mean that IDF Brig. Gen. Analysis Chief Amit Saar, IDF intelligence Chief Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi, Netanyahu, and the cabinet did not know about these critical warnings.
Former IDF intelligence officer Col. Assaf Heller said that there was a massive “cultural problem” in Israeli society, which has leaked its way into the IDF and the cabinet, of viewing complex issues in black and white and dismissing minority scenarios and viewpoints.
Tel Aviv University Blavatnik Center and former Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Ben Israel noted that humanity throughout history, and certainly Israelis in 2024, are uncomfortable with uncertainty and jump toward whatever is “the most likely” scenario to obtain certainty, even if that scenario turns out to be catastrophically wrong.
Malka said that simply replacing some top-level IDF and political personnel would be insufficient to avoid future October 7 disasters. He said this was true because until the intelligence structure and processes actually make sure that unlikely scenarios and data collected by lower-ranked officials are taken seriously by the highest levels of the IDF and the cabinet, the same mistake could be made repeatedly.
Further, Malka mentioned that Gideon Sa’ar had warned Netanyahu twice in official letters during 2023 that Israel’s enemies, from Iran to Hezbollah to Hamas, were all viewing the IDF as weaker as part of the impact of the judicial overhaul fights and the threats of IDF reservists to quit.
Malka referenced Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s warnings to Netanyahu, which the prime minister ignored as he ignored Saar’s warnings, that the IDF was in danger of collapsing and that Israel’s enemies knew and perceived this.
In fact, Netanyahu fired Gallant for making his warnings public and only withdrew the firing when he saw that keeping Gallant fired would hurt him more politically than retracting the firing.
Although Netanyahu did freeze the judicial overhaul for a few months, he eventually returned to it and, in July 2023, passed a repeal of aspects of the High Court’s judicial review powers.
Passing that law led to a spike of thousands of IDF reservists publicly quitting, which continued to rise leading into October 7 and, absent the war, was expected to worsen in November once the Jewish holidays ended.
Based on Netanyahu’s repeatedly ignoring these warnings, even if the prime minister believed that they were colored by politics, Malka said that Netanyahu, along with key IDF and other defense officials, held significant responsibility for the October 7 failures.
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