The intel on Hamas attack plan was there, but IDF simply refused to believe it, probe finds
Investigation into failures by Military Intelligence Directorate shows IDF received plans detailing possible attack in 2022, but considered it unlikely, viewed Sinwar as pragmatist
Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian is The Times of Israel's military correspondent
The Israel Defense Forces’ Military Intelligence Directorate received information and plans outlining Hamas’s intent to launch a wide-scale attack against Israel over a period of several years, but dismissed the plan as unrealistic and unfeasible, according to a probe of the intelligence failures leading up to the October 7 attack.
Instead, the Military Intelligence Directorate falsely assumed that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was a pragmatist who was not seeking a major escalation with Israel, and that the terror group viewed its 2021 war with Israel as a failure and was focusing its capabilities on rocket fire, and not a ground invasion.
As part of its investigations into its failures during the lead-up to the Hamas terror group’s October 7, 2023, onslaught, the IDF has now determined that Hamas had decided in April 2022 to launch such an attack. By September 2022, the terror group was at 85 percent readiness, and in May 2023, decided to launch the assault on October 7, 2023.
While the Intelligence Directorate received information in 2022 describing a large-scale ground invasion of Israeli border communities and IDF posts, it was dismissed as something that Hamas viewed as aspirational, and not practical.
The probe blames some of the failures of the Intelligence Directorate on the body’s flawed culture, in which officials believed they had intelligence superiority over Hamas and failed to wonder whether they could be surprised by the enemy, believing that the large troves of data to which they had access made them aware of all of the terror group’s plans.
The IDF investigations, which explored as far back as the 2014 Gaza War, found that the Military Intelligence Directorate failed — including with its research and surveillance — to correctly identify and understand Hamas’s strategy, aspirations, capabilities, and operational plans.
The investigations attributed the colossal intelligence failure to deep systemic problems at the core of the IDF’s intelligence methods and culture that evolved over the years.
The Intelligence Directorate’s investigations, carried out by each unit in the directorate, were presented to The Times of Israel and other reporters.
The investigations found three major failures in the Intelligence Directorate that led to Hamas’s October 7 attack, which claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians, with another 251 kidnapped to Gaza.
- An ongoing and large gap between the Intelligence Directorate’s understandings of Hamas and the reality, a gap that widened over the years, especially following the 2021 Gaza War. This included wrong understandings and assessments by the Intelligence Directorate of Hamas’s strategy, aspirations, plans, and military capabilities.
- A failure to warn against Hamas’s surprise October 7 attack in the days leading up to it. The Intelligence Directorate failed to identify Hamas’s decision to carry out the attack, as well as the preparations by the terror group. No warning was given for the possibility that Hamas could launch any kind of attack on Israel.
- The Intelligence Directorate’s limited use of surveillance to obtain critical information on Hamas. Over the years, despite the relevant information existing, the Intelligence Directorate had not collected enough intelligence on Hamas’s aspirations to carry out the October 7 attack, as well as the terror group’s overall strategy and decision-making.
The investigations found that the Intelligence Directorate made the following assessments before the war, many of which were later found to be entirely wrong:
- Hamas and its leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, were “pragmatic,” despite their stated goal of destroying Israel. The terror group saw its civil control in Gaza as a strategic asset and was interested in reaching understandings with Israel.
- Hamas’s leading strategy was periods of quiet with Israel. The terror group was also gaining power in the West Bank.
- Hamas identified that a war with Israel carried too high of a cost, and it was deterred from it. Hamas avoided wars with Israel over a long period, including staying out of rounds of fighting between the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Israel. A war with Hamas would likely occur out of a miscalculation from either side, or a trigger causing the terror group to respond.
- The 2021 Gaza War was a failure for Hamas, following a mistake made by its leader Sinwar to open fire on Israel. Hamas’s military wing was severely harmed in the fighting, and it would understand this later. Hamas was deterred from wars because of the result of the conflict.
- Hamas was focusing on building up its rocket launching capabilities. It was also carrying out minimal efforts to prepare for infiltrations and drone attacks, but such preparations were at a limited level of readiness, and mainly for propaganda purposes. Hamas was also focused on its attack tunnels, which either crossed the border or reached close to them. Hamas was interested in carrying out an attack or multiple attacks, but not a full-fledged war.
- The most severe Hamas infiltration scenario included up to 70 terror operatives breaching the Gaza fence at two, or at most, up to eight, locations.
- The year 2023 had the potential for an uncoordinated multi-front escalation, as Israel’s deterrence was harmed, due its perceived weakness in light of internal political conflicts. Hamas, meanwhile, was maintaining quiet in Gaza, while trying to focus on heating up the West Bank.
The investigations traced Hamas’s route to the October 7 attack, using both existing intelligence and many new findings, including from interrogating Hamas terrorists captured in Israel in the onslaught or during the ground offensive in Gaza. It found the following:
- Yahya Sinwar, even before his election in 2017 as Hamas leader in Gaza, saw “liberating Palestine” as a leading, real, and attainable goal. Advancing a large-scale military offensive against Israel had become Hamas’s leading strategy over the years. Reaching understandings with Israel was seen by Hamas as a temporary measure to bring relief to the civilian population in the Strip.
- Following the 2014 Gaza War, Hamas worked to strengthen its military power, including by establishing a quasi-general staff.
- In 2016, while Israel was building its upgraded Gaza border fence, Hamas operations chief Raad Saad started to put together a plan to “break the defenses of the Gaza Division” — the IDF’s regional division on the Gaza border.
- The Intelligence Directorate obtained one of the first versions of the plan in 2018, which stated that “forces from five Nukhba companies should attack and destroy the posts belonging to the Gaza Division… everything will be done above ground… with [rocket] fire… attack the kibbutzim in order to take hostages… focus on critical sites… livestream from the posts and kibbutzim.”
- The idea of a large-scale attack on Israel slowly became a formal plan in Hamas, and it was given official approval in 2019.
- On the eve of the 2021 Gaza War, Hamas decided that its plan was not ready enough yet.
- After the 2021 Gaza War, Hamas believed that it had achieved a strategic victory against Israel. The 2021 war strengthened Hamas’s perception of its own military capability, and its great plan to liberate Palestine and destroy Israel, in a coordinated effort with the Iran-led axis, was now something feasible.
- In May of 2022, the Intelligence Directorate obtained another version of Hamas’s attack plan, from August 2021, and it was put together in a document known as “Jericho’s Walls.” The plan similarly described a large number of Nukhba Force operatives breaking through the Gaza Division’s defenses, and reaching Israeli cities in southern Israel. The document was shown to the then-chief of the Intelligence Directorate, Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, the Gaza Division intelligence officer, the then-chief of the Southern Command, Maj. Gen. Eliezer Toledano, and the then-head of the Operations Division and current Southern Command chief Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman. The officials concluded that the plan appeared to be unrealistic. In a November 2022 learning session at the Southern Command, Jericho’s Wall plan was presented at the very end of a list of assessments for the next conflict in Gaza.
- Starting in April 2022, Hamas decided it would launch its attack on Israel in the near future. By September 2022, Hamas was at 85% readiness with the plan.
- Hamas at least twice considered activating its grand plan before the October 7 attack, first in September 2022, during the Sukkot holiday — almost exactly a year before the onslaught according to the Hebrew calendar — and a second time in May 2023, during Passover. It is still unknown why the terror group decided against launching its attacks then. Hamas avoided escalation during that year, mainly to accumulate power and trick Israel into thinking it wanted to reach agreements.
- In May 2023, Hamas decided to “use it or lose it,” and selected October 7, the end of the Sukkot holiday, as the date for the attack.
- There was no evidence suggesting that the internal rift in Israel over the judicial overhaul contributed to Hamas’s plans to carry out the attack, as it was initially planned a year prior.
- Weeks before the October 7 attack, Hamas staged protests on the Gaza border. The protests ended the week before the onslaught, apparently as part of an attempt to con Israel into thinking all had resumed to normalcy again.
- Hamas maintained a high level of compartmentalization regarding the exact hour of the attack, to ensure it would not leak to Israel.
The investigations also found that there were around 10 opportunities over the years where the Intelligence Directorate obtained information or observed incidents occurring, that if they had been looked at more critically, potentially could have contradicted the leading assessments on Hamas. In reality, these moments were incorrectly interpreted as part of Israel’s “conception,” the investigations found.
Some of the moments include: Sinwar’s rise to power in 2017, and the Gaza Strip becoming Hamas’s center of gravity; the initial information received on Hamas’s attack plans in 2018; the 2021 Gaza war, which left Hamas feeling powerful; the 2022 “Jericho’s Walls” report; Hamas’s avoidance of joining Islamic Jihad’s rounds of fighting with Israel; intelligence information in mid-2022 on Hamas’s aspiration for a multi-front war; and the night of October 6.
Jericho’s Walls
The investigation found that the Intelligence Directorate had indeed collected, since 2018, information on Hamas that revealed its plans to carry out a wide-scale ground invasion into Israel, to defeat the Gaza Division. The intelligence suggested that the plans had been prepared since 2016, but it was interpreted, over the years, as an infeasible and unrealistic plan by Hamas, representing their future aspirations.
In 2022, the Intelligence Directorate obtained information from Hamas dated August 2021 which described a large-scale ground invasion of Israeli border communities and IDF posts. It was put into a report known as Jericho’s Walls.
The information was analyzed and identified by the intelligence unit at the Gaza Division as something significant, and as such was presented to a group of officers. It was presented to the officers as a plan representing Hamas’s force build-up aspirations, and not something the terror group was currently capable of doing.
Intelligence officials did not connect the document received in 2022, Jericho’s Walls, to the previous intelligence dated 2016 with the same Hamas plans. Therefore, the latest version of the plan that Israel obtained was not seen as a continuation of the previous document, and as such was not considered to be anything more than an unready plan.
Jericho’s Walls was not translated into a scenario that the IDF could have prepared for and did not become the focus of intelligence surveillance.
In the months before October 7, the Intelligence Directorate obtained information on Hamas invasion training, which led some members of Unit 8200, the directorate’s signals intelligence unit, to believe that Hamas’s wide-scale invasion plans were no longer just aspirations, but a solid plan.
The Unit 8200 members did not point to any specific date or indicate that the threat was imminent but did suggest it could happen by surprise. This assessment was presented, both via emails and meetings, to intelligence officers at the Southern Command and regional officers of 8200 in southern Israel. However, the information did not reach any senior officials, including top intelligence officers.
The Gaza Division’s intelligence unit did begin to look into the different assessments by the Unit 8200 members in the months and weeks before the war and reassess their viewpoint on Hamas’s plans, however, they did not finish this process by the time the war started.
Why did the intelligence fail?
The Intelligence Directorate’s investigations found a number of reasons why it failed, including:
- A flawed culture in the Intelligence Directorate, where officials felt that they knew everything about the enemy and had intelligence superiority. There was a lack of skepticism, and many failed to believe that they could be surprised. There was almost no focus on looking for gaps in one’s own conceptions. The access to large amounts of data made intelligence officers falsely feel like their enemy was transparent.
- The intelligence work process was not critical enough. The process did not put focus on looking for warning signs or contradictions, and it was not active or curious enough.
- Subpar surveillance capabilities in the Gaza Strip. Despite many efforts to improve surveillance capabilities, the Intelligence Directorate before October 7 had very limited intelligence sources in Gaza. Unit 504, which specialized in HUMINT, or human intelligence, stopped activating agents in the Strip in 2010. The IDF also shut down its OSINT unit, or open-source intelligence, several years ago. The military also stopped live listening to Hamas handheld radios several years ago and only reviewed the recordings at later times.
- Professional gaps in the Intelligence Directorate’s day-to-day basic work, including correctly handling assessments, putting together potential scenarios, surveillance programs, and more.
- Gaps with data management made building a correct intelligence picture more difficult.
- An imbalance in the Intelligence Directorate priorities. The directorate was first established as the “institution to clarify reality,” but over the years, it turned into an offensive wing of the military.
- An imbalance between the position of technology and basic intelligence functions in the Intelligence Directorate. Over the years, technology became the main focus in the directorate, resulting in neglect for the research department.
- Imbalanced responsibility distribution between the various units in the directorate, with an emphasis on the research on the Gaza Strip. There was no overlay between units investigating Gaza, which could have resulted in several opinions and a more nuanced assessment.
- The structure of the directorate prioritized efficiency and synchronization.
As a result of the investigation and a look at the Intelligence Directorate’s activity during the war, its chief, Maj. Gen. Shlomi Binder is formulating a new strategic vision for the unit, which will lead its operations and force build-up in the coming years.
In the short term, Binder decided the following:
- Implement lessons learned from the October 7 investigations
- Change the directorate’s designation text, which will read: “The Military Intelligence Directorate will warn of war, hostile activity, threat or development that may endanger the State of Israel, and its citizens.” A similar line used to be lower down in the text.
- Begin to handle the flawed intelligence culture
- Increase the use of additional intelligence sources
- Strengthen professionalism
- Improve the methods of storing and sharing data
- A major overhaul to the IDF’s operational security, including reducing the military’s transparency toward its enemies
Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, the chief of the Intelligence Directorate on October 7, resigned in August. Southern Command chief Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman, announced his resignation last month.
The Times of Israel Community.