Report: Shin Bet dismissed Gaza source’s tip on plans, timing of major Hamas attack
Source said to have told Israeli agency in the summer that terror group was planning ‘big move’ soon after Yom Kippur but info didn’t reach top brass, was only noticed after Oct. 7
Michael Bachner is a news editor at The Times of Israel
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” shortly after the Jewish High Holy Days — but the information was cast as insignificant, a report said Wednesday evening.
The Shin Bet got the tip during the summer 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 reported, citing sources in the security agency.
Yom Kippur was marked this year on September 25, a Monday. Twelve days later, thousands of Hamas terrorists carried out an unprecedented assault on southern Israel, in which they massacred some 1,200 people and kidnapped over 240 hostages.
The report said 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 said.
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 missed the highly planned attack, which had apparently been in the works for years.
The network cited unnamed Shin Bet sources saying that the lack of corroborating intelligence, and the fact that the source had only started speaking to the Shin Bet a relatively short while before — had contributed to the tip not being taken seriously, though they have since admitted that the source is highly reliable.
Even though Bar, the agency’s chief, hadn’t heard about the information, Channel 12 cited 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 said it was currently focusing on the ongoing war against Hamas, and was 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,” it said.
Many details have previously been unveiled of detailed intelligence the Israel Defense Forces had obtained of Hamas attack plans during the weeks, months and years before the October 7 massacres — and which officials largely ignored, usually believing it to be empty boasting — as well as of senior military officers having ignored or dismissed alarms sounded by lower-ranking soldiers, of the military diverting its attention away from Gaza, and of last-minute indications of an impending attack not being urgently acted upon.
