Shin Bet received intel on timing of major Hamas attack but cast it as unimportant — TV

Months before Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, the Shin Bet security service received intelligence that the Palestinian terror group was planning to carry out “a big move,” giving the specific time in which the massive invasion was indeed carried out — but the information was cast as insignificant, according to a television report this evening.

The Shin Bet got the tip from a human source in the Gaza Strip who warned Hamas was planning to attack during the week after the Jewish fast day of Yom Kippur, Channel 12 news reports.

Yom Kippur was marked this year on September 25, a Monday. The October 7 invasion, in which thousands of Hamas terrorists massacred some 1,200 people in southern Israel and kidnapped over 240 hostages, occurred 12 days later — on the Saturday of the week after Yom Kippur.

The report says the Shin Bet source in Gaza had reported the information to the agency after hearing it from another person who had told him the details.

The source’s operator conveyed the raw information to Shin Bet colleagues, but they marked it as insignificant, concluding that “if this really nears implementation, we’ll receive additional intelligence” corroborating it, the report says.

The information was reportedly not brought to the attention of senior Shin Bet officials, and the agency chief Ronen Bar never heard about it.

It was eventually noticed after October 7, as part of efforts to understand how the service had known nothing about the planned attack.

The network cites unnamed Shin Bet sources saying that at the time, no other pieces of intelligence were found to support the information, and the reliability of the human source — who had started giving intel to the Shin Bet a relatively short while before that — had been deemed unclear, though they have since admitted that he is highly reliable.

Even though Bar, the agency’s chief, hadn’t heard about the information, Channel 12 cites multiple sources as saying the Shin Bet won’t blame lower-ranking officers, and admitting the service failed to prevent the assault.

In its official response to the report, the Shin Bet says it’s currently focusing on the ongoing war against Hamas, and is preparing to thoroughly investigate after the war how the intelligence failure had happened, including checking what information had been available.

“In any case, focusing on a specific piece of intelligence cannot reflect the full intelligence picture of that time.”