Israel’s stunning intelligence successes in Lebanon highlight its grave failures in Gaza
Jerusalem has knocked Hezbollah back on its heels with strikes against senior leaders and, ostensibly, the attacks on communications devices. So why did it get October 7 so wrong?
Lazar Berman is The Times of Israel's diplomatic reporter
Israel’s string of recent successes against Hezbollah — alongside operations widely attributed to the Jewish state — are the products of precise intelligence on the inner workings of the Lebanese terror group.
The IDF and Mossad, along with other agencies, have shown that they are consistently able to locate senior Hezbollah leaders and identify where they store key weapons stockpiles and when attacks are being planned.
If Israel was indeed behind last week’s two days of exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, then it has also infiltrated Hezbollah’s supply chains and knows what kind of security checks are performed on new equipment.
As for attacks Israel has taken responsibility for, it’s not only the recent strikes against commanders of the elite Radwan Force, loaded rocket launchers, and other top Hezbollah leaders that show the quality of Israeli intelligence vis-a-vis the Shi’ite terror group. Since Hezbollah started firing across the border on October 8, Israel has been picking off Hezbollah fighters and commanders. It has also killed top Hamas and Iranian officials in Lebanon.
These are the results Israelis — and the world — have come to expect from their vaunted intelligence services.
But such successes also make the intelligence failure leading up to Hamas’s October 7 attacks even more galling.
It wasn’t only the catastrophic failure to adequately pick up on, and take seriously, the terror group’s far-from-hidden plans to invade Israel. Lackluster Israeli intelligence on Gaza has been evident in a range of other aspects, too, including in the months since the Hamas invasion and massacres.
Israel took the better part of a year to find and eliminate most of Hamas’s senior leadership, and has yet to kill its chief Yahya Sinwar. Though Israel was aware of Hamas’s vast underground tunnel network, it still was caught by surprise at the tunnel’s scope as troops slowly uncovered the array of shafts during the war. And Israel still struggles to locate the remaining hostages held in Gaza, and has managed to rescue only eight of them alive.
The source of the disparity is straightforward: Israeli policy-makers, both in government and the military, heavily prioritized the Hezbollah threat in the years leading up to the war. And not for nothing. Their assessment that the Lebanese terror group represented a far greater danger than Hamas in Gaza was principally correct.
But Israel went too far with that idea. Since Hamas was the weaker enemy, and Israel had no desire to reassert control over 2 million Gazans, it shifted nearly all its focus to the threats it thought its forces would actually have to contend with.
Israel believed that Hamas had already revealed most of its own potential threats, and that these were largely under control. After it was surprised by Hamas’s offensive tunnels in 2014, Israel located and destroyed those that led into its territory, and built a massive underground barrier to prevent further subterranean incursions. It kept a close eye on Hamas rockets — which the terror group had been firing since 2001 — and destroyed stockpiles of them during flare-ups.
But the sort of intelligence that would be needed to defeat Hamas on the ground in Gaza was nonexistent: Israeli leaders simply didn’t imagine the need to prepare for such a scenario.
The IDF hadn’t had an approved operational plan to conquer Gaza since 2015, which had clear implications for intelligence priorities. After all, a tunnel leading from one part of Khan Younis to another had little relevance for Israel if its troops weren’t expected to ever operate there.
Now, over the course of 11 months of war, Israel’s intelligence on Gaza has improved markedly. As troops capture documents and hard drives, and Shin Bet agents interrogate terrorists, a clearer picture has emerged.
The improved intel has had a noticeable effect on IDF operations. While the massive operation in Gaza City at the start of the war involved three divisions operating very aggressively, the subsequent conquests of Khan Younis and Rafah were far more targeted, demanded fewer troops, and were consequently less destructive.
With time, Israel was able to locate and eliminate many of Hamas’s commanders, including Marwan Issa and the elusive Muhammad Deif. It was also able to save some living hostages, and locate bodies of those who were killed.
These achievements are all certainly important, but the damage already done cannot be overstated. More than 1,600 civilians and soldiers have been lost, and dozens of hostages remain in Hamas tunnels.
Without a way to end the war in Gaza, Israel might be on the brink of an even more destructive war against Hezbollah. Tens of thousands of Israelis are out of their homes, the economy has stagnated, and Israel’s standing in the world has taken a serious hit.
The horrors of October 7, and the difficult aftermath, could have been prevented had Israel’s intelligence been more imaginative and less firmly wed to the ostensibly reasonable notion that Hezbollah represented a greater threat. It was emphatically less reasonable not to ensure there were measures in place in case that assessment was wrong.
For now, Israel seems to have learned its lesson, but there is no guarantee that will stick. After all, only the day before Hamas flooded over the border to carry out its heinous plans, Israel marked 50 years since its previous most significant intelligence failure — that of the Egyptian-Syrian invasion that marked the beginning of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
With a military built to defeat its enemies and an aggressive doctrine that aimed to do so quickly, Israel was able all those decades ago to bounce back quickly from the debacle and defeat multiple Arab armies on the battlefield in less than three weeks. The victory led to peace with its main enemy, Egypt, and to the effective end of the existential threat Arab states posed to Israel.
The intelligence failure 50 years later has resulted in a far, far longer conflict that doesn’t seem to be headed toward resolution anytime soon. Quite the opposite — it could well expand into a more difficult war with Hezbollah and perhaps other regional forces that Israel doesn’t want.
That is because excellent intelligence work and stunning tactical successes do not by themselves add up to victories. In the hands of level-headed leadership focused on winning the war above all else, they represent key components of that victory.
Almost a year into the war, it remains to be seen whether Israel has such leaders.
