Israeli Military Commission Uncovers Intelligence Failures Leading to October 7 Hamas Attack

Israeli Military Commission Uncovers Intelligence Failures Leading to October 7 Hamas Attack

Edited by: Fern Sidman

In a sobering revelation, the first Israeli military commission investigating the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led assault has concluded that Israeli military officials were caught off guard due to a severe misjudgment of Hamas’s intentions and operational capabilities. According to a report that appeared on Thursday in The Wall Street Journal, the report details how Israeli intelligence failed to interpret a series of warning signs, allowing the deadliest attack in Israel’s history to unfold without an effective response.

Despite an array of indicators that a large-scale assault was imminent, Israeli officials dismissed Hamas’s movements as either routine military drills or small-scale cross-border raids. The Wall Street Journal reported that among the overlooked warnings was the activation of Israeli SIM cards by Hamas operatives and the militant group’s visible repositioning of forces at designated staging areas on the night of October 6. However, rather than treating these developments as signs of an impending attack, Israeli military and intelligence personnel misread them as defensive maneuvers or exercises, reinforcing an already flawed assessment that Hamas was not seeking open war.

This high-level investigation—the most comprehensive probe yet into the systemic failures that led to the massacre—has unveiled the extent of Israeli intelligence’s miscalculations. The Wall Street Journal report noted that intelligence officials disregarded existing documentation pointing to Hamas’s aggressive intentions and failed to recognize critical patterns in the group’s preparations. As a result, Israel was caught entirely unprepared for an attack that would not only claim the lives of 1,200 people but also plunge the country into a prolonged military conflict.

The findings are likely to intensify scrutiny within Israel, where political accountability has been limited and resignations among high-ranking officials have been rare. While the report in The Wall Street Journal emphasized that the commission’s report refrains from directly assigning blame, the revelations raise significant questions about both military leadership and the government’s ability to address national security vulnerabilities.

In the hours leading up to the assault, senior Israeli military officials engaged in discussions about Hamas’s unusual behavior but ultimately failed to grasp the urgency of the situation. The Wall Street Journal reported that Israeli military chief of staff Herzi Halevi instructed his deputies to gather further intelligence for a briefing the next day, believing that there was still time to assess the situation. Meanwhile, Israel’s military command was largely focused on the north, where tensions with Hezbollah in Lebanon had been escalating, diverting crucial resources and attention away from Gaza.

This strategic miscalculation provided Hamas with a perfect opportunity. The attack occurred on Simchat Torah, a Jewish holiday, when troop levels along the Gaza border were lower than usual. Hamas exploited this vulnerability, executing a meticulously planned assault that overwhelmed Israeli defenses in ways the military had never anticipated.

Israel’s worst-case scenario planning for a potential Gaza-based attack assumed that Hamas might attempt to breach the border at four to eight points. Hamas terrorists successfully infiltrated nearly 60 locations along the border.

In a highly coordinated operation, Hamas’s first strike targeted the Israeli military base responsible for defending the Gaza perimeter. According to the information provided in The Wall Street Journal report, the group’s fighters executed high-ranking commanders, dismantled Israeli intelligence capabilities in the area, and paralyzed communications, leaving Israeli forces blind to the unfolding crisis for three critical hours. This initial offensive allowed Hamas to send wave after wave of fighters across the border, attacking military installations, slaughtering civilians at a music festival, and devastating entire agricultural communities.

It took Israel five and a half hours to mobilize reinforcements and three full days to reclaim control of the overrun areas.  By then, the damage was catastrophic: 1,200 people were dead, 251 had been taken hostage, and Israel had suffered its most significant security failure since its founding in 1948, as was indicated in The Wall Street Journal report.

While Israeli intelligence had field observers and analysts warning of Hamas’s intentions, their alerts were either dismissed or deprioritized. The Wall Street Journal reported that although lower-level intelligence personnel raised concerns about Hamas’s military build-up, senior officials maintained a deeply flawed assessment: that Hamas had no interest in launching a war against Israel.

One of the most striking admissions in the report, as cited by The Wall Street Journal, is that as late as 6:29 a.m. on October 7—just before Hamas launched a massive rocket barrage to cover its ground assault—there was no official within Israel’s military structure who was able to say with certainty that Hamas was preparing for a large-scale attack. This staggering intelligence failure speaks volumes about the depth of Israel’s miscalculations and the severe breakdown in its ability to detect and respond to existential threats.

According to the information contained in The Wall Street Journal report, the plan had originally been approved by Hamas leadership in 2019 and given operational clearance in August 2021. By April 2022, Hamas was actively selecting potential attack dates, with thousands of militants undergoing specialized training. Yet, despite these clear signs of an impending threat, Israeli intelligence officials maintained the belief that Hamas was primarily focused on consolidating its rule in Gaza and extending its influence into the West Bank, rather than preparing for a direct confrontation with Israel.

In a briefing to reporters ahead of the report’s public release, a senior Israeli military official acknowledged the catastrophic intelligence failure: “We ended up with a strategy that collapsed on Oct. 7.” The Wall Street Journal report noted that while an official summary of the investigation has been published, the full report has yet to be released to the public.

The origins of Hamas’s October 7 attack date back to 2016, when Yahya Sinwar, a hardline leader who prioritized direct military confrontation with Israel, rose through Hamas’s leadership ranks. The Wall Street Journal report detailed how Israeli intelligence failed to detect this strategic shift within Hamas, continuing to operate under the assumption that the terrorist group sought economic stability rather than war.

This was not Hamas’s first attempt at launching a surprise attack. According to The Wall Street Journal, in 2014, some Hamas leaders proposed a similar large-scale assault on Israel but were overruled. After the war that summer, Hamas’s leadership concluded that their next confrontation with Israel would need to start with a shock offensive to gain a tactical advantage. The 2023 attack was the realization of that long-term strategy.

Adding to Israel’s intelligence blind spot was Hamas’s perception that internal turmoil within Israel—particularly over the country’s controversial judicial overhaul—created an ideal moment to strike. The Wall Street Journal reported that Hamas leaders viewed Israeli political divisions as a sign of weakness, emboldening their decision to proceed with the attack.

The military report, as cited by The Wall Street Journal, outlines how Hamas’s attack unfolded in a devastatingly efficient manner. At 6:29 a.m. on October 7, Hamas began firing a barrage of rockets into Israel to create chaos and divert attention from the ground invasion. At 6:45 a.m., Israeli Brigade Commander Asaf Hamami radioed a chilling acknowledgment: “We are at war.”

By the time Israeli forces fully grasped the scale of the attack, Hamas had already sent 1,500 trained fighters across the border. The Wall Street Journal report noted that Hamas’s top military commander, Mohammed Deif, issued a rallying cry urging all Gazans to take up arms and storm Israel. By noon, an estimated 5,600 terrorists and civilians from Gaza were inside Israeli territory, engaging in massacres, abductions, and large-scale destruction.

Israeli forces were caught in complete disarray. According to The Wall Street Journal report, Israel’s chain of command was severely disrupted, leaving the military effectively blind for crucial hours. Many officers and soldiers, upon seeing reports of the attack on social media, drove themselves to the front lines, while large-scale reinforcements took hours to mobilize. At the time of the invasion, Israel had only a few hundred troops defending the border, an insufficient force given the scale of the attack.

A key revelation from the military investigation, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, is how Hamas successfully misled Israel into believing it had been deterred from war. Following its last major conflict with Israel in 2021, Hamas refrained from engaging in battles with Israeli forces, even as smaller militant groups in Gaza launched attacks. This restraint led Israeli intelligence officials to conclude that Hamas was prioritizing economic concessions over military action.

In reality, Hamas was simply waiting for the right moment. The Wall Street Journal report highlighted that Israeli intelligence overestimated Hamas’s dependence on outside actors, believing the group would not strike without the backing of Iran, Hezbollah, or other Palestinian factions. However, while Hezbollah did fire rockets into Israel, triggering a two-front conflict, Hamas ultimately acted alone in launching the October 7 assault. This miscalculation contributed to Israel’s failure to anticipate the attack.

According to The Wall Street Journal, an Israeli official acknowledged that intelligence officers simply did not question their long-standing assessment that Hamas was not interested in launching a war. “The specific intelligence details that popped up during that night [of Oct. 6, 2023] weren’t strong enough to break a yearslong conception,” the official stated. This rigid mindset prevented Israeli intelligence from recognizing the severity of the threat, even as clear warning signals emerged.

The findings from the military report, as detailed by The Wall Street Journal, highlight a dangerous complacency within Israel’s intelligence community. Over the years, intelligence priorities shifted away from identifying strategic threats in favor of providing real-time battlefield intelligence for ongoing military operations. This transition meant that the very function Israel depended on to detect and prevent major attacks had been severely weakened.

The central conclusion of the military investigation is that Israel cannot allow threats to fester on its borders, as it did with both Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The October 7 attack was a stark reminder that terrorist organizations can grow stronger under conditions of strategic neglect, eventually reaching a point where they pose an existential danger.

To address these failures, the military report recommends several sweeping reforms, as cited by The Wall Street Journal: Establishing a dedicated intelligence unit whose sole mission is to assess and respond to warning signals, preventing intelligence officers from becoming too preoccupied with day-to-day military operations. Expanding the size of the Israeli military to ensure that border defenses are not stretched too thin, as they were on October 7.  Strengthening border fortifications to prevent future large-scale breaches, particularly in vulnerable areas such as Gaza and Lebanon.

The findings of the report have fueled public outcry in Israel, particularly among survivors of the October 7 attack, many of whom have been advocating for the establishment of a formal state commission of inquiry to hold officials accountable. Unlike military probes, such a commission would have the legal authority to subpoena individuals and demand resignations where necessary.

However, The Wall Street Journal reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected these calls, insisting that Israel must focus on winning the war against Hamas before launching any formal investigations. This position has sparked criticism from survivors and opposition figures, who argue that accountability and military operations should not be mutually exclusive.

The findings of this investigation lay bare fundamental weaknesses in Israel’s intelligence and military strategy. The inability to question long-standing assumptions, the shift away from early-warning intelligence, and the failure to contain threats at the border all contributed to the devastating attack.

While the proposed reforms could help prevent future disasters, the refusal to launch an official state inquiry raises concerns about whether the necessary accountability measures will ever be implemented. For Israel, the October 7 attack remains both a national tragedy and a stark warning about the dangers of underestimating one’s enemies.