‘I did not fulfill my mission’: Commander of IDF’s 8200 intelligence unit resigns

The commander of the IDF’s Unit 8200, Brig. Gen. Yossi Sariel, notified his superiors and subordinates on Thursday that he intends to resign from his position, close to a year after Israel’s intelligence establishment failed to prevent Hamas’s October 7 onslaught.

The IDF said Sariel is due to be replaced “in the coming period.” Unit 8200 is the IDF’s main signals intelligence unit, and is among the units pointed to as playing a role in the failure to prevent October 7. Sariel entered the position in February 2021 following a long military career in intelligence.

Sariel said Thursday that he was resigning over his role in the failures leading up to the massacre, although the move comes a full 11 months following the assault, in which thousands of Hamas terrorists breached Israel’s borders and killed around 1,200 people, taking 251 captive to Gaza.

A Channel 12 report in July said that Sariel at the time was resisting any efforts to resign, saying that such a move would be tantamount to “cowardice.”

In a letter written to those under his command on Thursday, Sariel wrote that “on October 7 at 6:29 a.m. I did not fulfill my mission as I expected of myself, as my commanders and subordinates expected of me, and as the citizens of the nation I love so much expected of me.”

Sariel added that in light of such failures, “and in accordance with the state of the war,” he is seeking to “carry out my personal responsibility as the commander of 8200 and pass the baton to the next shift,” at a time seen fit by IDF authorities.

Kibbutz Be’eri after the Hamas massacre, pictured on October 14, 2023 (Arik Marmum / Flash 90)

The general wrote that in the initial investigation of 8200’s role in the failures of October 7, it was found that “in the years, months, days and hours that preceded the surprise attack,” the unit put together detailed reports about “Hamas’s operational attack plan.”

Nevertheless, he wrote, “the detailed information that was produced and distributed about Hamas’s plans and its preparations did not succeed in shattering the intelligence and military foundations either within the unit or among our partners. Despite the expectations of us,” he said, his unit had failed to pinpoint the intelligence to prevent such an assault.

A number of reports over the past 11 months have indicated that a large number of warnings of such an attack went unheeded, including those seen by some of the most senior military officials. A Channel 12 report in August said that Unit 8200 obtained a detailed document in April 2022 setting out Hamas’s plans for such an attack but never passed it on to the chief of staff, while in July the network reported that an alert system set up to warn of coming attacks was “neglected” by Sariel during his tenure.

Unit 8200 also put together a dossier on September 19 — less than three weeks before October 7 — that warned Hamas was training for a large-scale invasion of Israel, but the concerns were largely dismissed by senior intelligence officials.

The commander of the 8200 intelligence unit is generally not publicly known, but Sariel’s identity was leaked in a Guardian report in April, which revealed his name after he published a book under an alias with a digital trail that led back to him.

A number of other senior security officials have left their posts in the months following the October 7 attack, although much of the IDF’s senior leadership remains the same.

In July, the head of the Shin Bet security agency’s Southern District stepped down, and in April, Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, chief of the Military Intelligence Directorate, announced his decision to depart. In June, Brig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld, the head of the Gaza Division, announced his resignation, while Brig. Gen. Amit Saar, head of the Directorate’s Research Division, who was also widely expected to quit, stepped down in March after being diagnosed with cancer.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.