The Paradox of Israeli Intelligence Failure: Expert Analysis on Hamas Attack

The October 7, 2023 attack launched by Hamas on twenty towns in Israel and several of its military bases has raised piercing questions on the effectiveness of Israeli intelligence. Despite Israel being world-renowned for highly sophisticated intelligence services, many are left curious about how it failed to acquaint itself in advance with the full severity of Hamas' complex plot.

Javed Ali, an intelligence and counterterrorism scholar who spent years working within US intelligence, comments, “Intelligence analysis is like putting together a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle every day from individual pieces of intelligence." Ali likens the failure to the situation preceding the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, where clues detected about potential threats were not adequately acted upon.

Ali gives insights into how Israeli intelligence works. They rely on varying intelligence sources, including human intelligence, signals intelligence, imagery intelligence, and open-source intelligence. However, unlike the US, Israel lacks central intelligence coordination. This lack of a representative to oversee intelligence components could have contributed to failed detection and action on this surprising widespread attack.

The attack on Israeli towns suggests careful planning by Hamas concealed from Israeli intelligence. The question on many lips is: How did Israel miss something this advanced playing out in the neighbouring Gaza and the West Bank? Israeli officials argue they presupposed Hamas, due to recent Israeli counterterrorism operations, lacked the capability to launch an attack of that scale.

The US-Israel intel partnership is strong, should the US have detected the plot, it would have likely gotten passed on to Israel. However, emerging global threats such as Russia, China, and Ukraine may have shifted US intelligence priorities away from the Palestinian-Israel conflict.