Ex-IDF intel analysis chief: Replacing people won’t fix Oct. 7 strategic intel failure
Inability to recognize what Hamas was planning showed multi-year failure of culture and approach, says Itai Brun; even after massacre, intel didn’t internalize Iran-led axis believed it could destroy Israel
Brigadier General (res.) Itai Brun, the former head of the IDF’s Military Intelligence research and analysis division, warned Saturday that Israel’s inability to recognize that Hamas was preparing to invade shows a far-reaching systemic failure that cannot be fixed simply by replacing key officers and officials.
Correcting that strategic failure, said Brun in a TV interview, requires a fundamental change in the approach and culture of intelligence gathering, the processing of intelligence by the security establishment, and the interaction with the political leadership.
Brun, who left the IDF in 2015, was asked to return on October 8, 2023, and spoke at length to Channel 12 having now returned to civilian life.
He said the IDF intelligence community he encountered on October 8 understood it had failed — “an entire network of understandings had collapsed in seconds,” he noted.
But while Israel’s military intelligence community recognized that it had refused to even consider that Hamas could and would burst through the border fence, and “they realized that they needed to rethink” as regards Gaza, some fundamentally false conceptions continued to be held even after the invasion and slaughter.
Israeli intelligence still failed to recognize and internalize that the Iran-led axis believed it could destroy Israel, Brun specified. “They didn’t understand this change.”
He said Israeli intelligence had so much data, all indicating that Hamas was deterred and was not seeking a war, that there was a refusal to so much as countenance the possibility that this conception was erroneous — not even when the IDF obtained documentation such as the Jericho Wall material showing Hamas’s attack plans.
According to the erroneous conception, Israel was strong and Hamas was weak, Hamas knew this, and thus there could be no logic for Hamas to attack, Brun noted. The whole military intelligence network “was not listening, because it was convinced it knew… It could not accept the possibility that it was wrong.”
Brun said Hamas came to be dominated by people who believed they should carry out an October 7-style attack from about 2017, and that by 2021 there was a growing belief in the Iran-led axis that they could destroy the Israeli army. Israeli intelligence, however, continued to believe “that [Israel’s Iran-led enemies] thought we were undefeatable.”
The growing confidence among Israel’s enemies was a “historic change” that Israeli intelligence missed. That change was born of several factors, said Brun, including Hezbollah’s much-improved rocket and missile capabilities, a greater unity of purpose within the axis, an assessment that the US was not as strong as previously believed, and a recognition that they could do more harm to Israel than they’d previously thought.
Brun said the internal argument in Israel over the Netanyahu-led government’s judicial overhaul plans was seen in the Iran-led axis as Israeli weakness.
And he decried what he said was “a lack of trust” among the Israeli political and military leadership that prevented leaders from “sitting in a room and clarifying” the intelligence community’s assessments of the enemies’ intentions.
But the “central lesson” of the October 7 tragedy, said Brun, is that it was not a failure of “one night, one front, one group of people…It’s much wider.”
“The even more significant thing is the gulf [between assessment and reality] in the years before,” he elaborated. “We were blind for years before that night.”
Brun said he would not answer questions about political culpability, but stressed: “The entire Israeli apparatus was part of that misconception that Hamas was deterred.”
He distinguished between the immense recent successes against Hezbollah, including locating and eliminating its leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the failures exposed by October 7, citing “two very different [sets of] capabilities.”
October 7 showed a strategic, multi-year failure as regards factors such as “the skill to understand strategies… and recognize changes in the other sides’ views and understandings,” he said.
“Specific people could have functioned better,” he noted, “but I’m describing something deeper… The notion that we’ll replace the people and the problem will be solved is not correct.”
“Some of them are no longer in their positions and have acknowledged their responsibilities, but the idea that switching them fixes it — no… The problem is in the culture and the problem is in the approach.”
Asked whether what happened in 1973, when an unprepared Israel suffered a surprise attack on Yom Kippur by the Egyptian and Syrian armies, and again in 2023 could happen again, Brun said: “The conclusion is yes, it can happen to us again — and that has to be the fundamental assumption… We need to change the culture and the entire approach, in order to ensure that it won’t happen again.”
Asked whether he believed this fundamental change in approach would indeed now take place, he said, “I do, yes.”
