GOLIATH is raging in rage after the costly slingshot of David. Four Ds (deaths, destruction, displacement and doom) are the writing on the wall for the Gaza Strip. Nonetheless, the flashpoint of the saga reveals a chink in the Goliath’s armour. The much-touted Israel’s intelligence service, a troika of Shin Bet, Mossad and Israeli Military Intelligence, has miserably failed to assess the threat, let alone counter the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya aka Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. This intelligence failure is a mockery considering the fact that the Gaza Strip, a 360 square kilometres coastal belt, is the most heavily surveilled place on earth. The initial death toll of around 1,400 Israelis is higher than the combined casualties that occurred in the second Intifada (2000-2005) or Six-Day War. 220 Israelis are still in the custody of Hamas. The damage has been done!
At the onset of the Yom Kippur War, the Director of Israel’s military intelligence had dubbed border activities as a hoax before then Prime Minister Golda Meir. This time, the Egyptian warning of ‘something big is coming’ was thrown into the air. The second intelligence collapse occurred only a day before the golden jubilee of the Yom Kippur War. The intelligence apparatus of Israel never estimated the all-out infiltration by Hamas. In any figment of thought, the Israel armed forces could not anticipate that Hamas would be emboldened to this extent to ratchet up its sporadic missile and rocket salvos. The Kite War of 2018 was a farce, revealing the limited capabilities of Hamas. The unawareness can be gauged from the recent IDF troops’ relocation from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank. Nevertheless, Hamas took the IDF off guard by launching a simultaneous land, sea and air assault.
Israel takes pride in its two high-tech defence mechanisms: Smart Fence and Iron Dome. The high-tech Smart Fence aka Iron Wall that separates Israel from the Gaza Strip cost Israel US$1.1 billion back in 2021. Iron Wall contains sensors, cameras, automated machine guns and a 20-foot-tall fence. Similarly, the air defence system touted as Iron Dome chipped away US$1.5 billion from the US and Israeli coffers. Before the Hamas attack, the success rate of this defence system hovered around 90%-97%.
The so-called impregnable defence was miserably compromised on Oct 7. For Iron Dome, Hamas applied a little rocket science, the barrage of 3,000 rockets within 20 minutes stupefied the air defence system. The ragtag Hamas squadron, containing explosive-laden cars, motorbikes, hand gliders and bulldozers, breached the Iron Wall at more than two dozen points. Snipers silenced sensors and cyber security tricks befuddled the communications. The low-tech arrangements overpowered the high-tech military. The intelligence process involves three phases; collection, analysis and action by policymakers. Israel failed in the collection phase and its domino effects resonated with the other two aspects. The intelligence failure is attributed to three accounts.
The first lacuna is Israel’s heavy reliance on technology while ignoring human intelligence altogether. The focus was being shifted from human intelligence to overhead imagery and signal intelligence. Israel is notoriously known for penetrating the systems sneakily. The country is one of the largest exporters of cyberarms too. Israeli company NSO Group provided its spyware Pegasus to several states for high-end spy work. The same might have been applied to the Hamas communications and networks, only to be left short-changed. Hamas countered the threat by minimizing or encoding the network communication as well as compartmentalization of information. The long-held spyware might have been kicked out of Hamas networks before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood deployed on networks.
Secondly, Previously, Israel issued 15,000 work permits for Gazans. The strategy was two-pronged; prima facie, it was meant for cheap labour for ongoing development projects. Underhand, it was a recruitment-cum-plantation exercise for moles among Hamas. Nevertheless, the insiders fear reprisal from Hamas which is also a de-facto governing entity of the Gaza Strip. The penalty of treason is no less than death. It seemed that moles double-crossed Israel’s intelligence apparatus. Financial well-being is in no way a substitute for political rights for the majority of Gazans.
Thirdly, another flaw with Israel’s intelligence approach is its overambitious counterintelligence approach. The Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Projects or Mossad, an external spy agency, set targets as far as Iran and Lebanon. The energies were overstretched and the festering wound at home was adequately ignored. The domestic political conflict of the Netanyahu government might have affected the preparedness of the internal spy agency, Shin Bet, as well.
Israel is making up for its intelligence folly by turning the Gaza Strip into rubble. The 6,000 bombs used in the first week of conflict outnumbered the US-led coalition used against ISIS in the whole month during the peak of the fighting. 5,000 Palestinians have been massacred so far. Sadly, these are Palestinians who are paying the price of Israel’s intelligence miscalculations. For Americans, it was the economy. But, for Israel, it is the intelligence, stupid!
—The writer is a security professional and contributing columnist.
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