IDF troops conduct intelligence operations in pursuit of terrorist, March 31, 2024.(photo credit: IDF SPOKESPERSON'S UNIT)
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“We have known for several months…one could not help but view many of the disclosures as an attempt by the media to reinvent a story.”
At first glance, the big splash from KAN News on Monday night about new revelations of IDF intelligence failures related to October 7 seemed overblown.
For several months already, we have been aware of an extensive, detailed list of those failures, and as a journalist, I could not help but view many of the new disclosures as an attempt by the media to reinvent a story that was mostly written on a day when some editors must have felt they were short on news.
But at a second glance, there were two important points from the list of “revelations” that should influence how the Israeli intelligence community will be reconfigured and rebuilt in the coming months and years.
Previous reports regarding warnings of a Hamas invasion have shown that in September 2023, “V,” a junior-level intelligence officer in Unit 8200, warned her supervisor, Lt. Col. “A,” about the terrorist organization’s plans. The IDF has struggled to explain why it ignored those warnings.
“A” either did not pass on the warnings to the then-IDF intelligence chief, Maj.-Gen. Aharon Haliva, or he passed them on only sometime on October 3, in a vague fashion.
IDF underestimated Hamas’s invasion plans
The bottom line until now was that Unit 8200 neither widely shared nor put any special emphasis on the warnings.
The two new pieces of information were the detailed number of hostages to be kidnapped, as well as the idea that the IDF Southern Command knew about the latest warnings from Unit 8200.
One of the reasons that Unit 8200 and others in IDF intelligence did not take the warnings about a Hamas invasion seriously, they said, was because they were warned of potential danger in April 2023. It turned out to be a false alarm, and the action taken to prevent it was viewed as a waste of resources.
Based on that and on the idea that V did not have any idea when the Hamas invasion would take place – within days, months, or years – most viewed the intelligence as not “actionable” and as something that might only matter if there were more specifics.
One interpretation of the latest report is that Unit 8200 finally got some additional specifics, including the exact number of hostages Hamas would try to take.
Although the exact timing was still far from clear, the level of specificity of how many hostages to take could have led more intelligence officials to believe that Hamas’s planning was in a very advanced state and may be imminent.
This could have given Unit 8200 and other IDF intelligence officials sufficient backing for pushing the rest of the defense establishment harder to invest in preparing to defend against an invasion (which otherwise might be viewed as wasting resources on a non-existent threat).
The second new piece of information is the suggestion that someone in the IDF Southern Command did know about the invasion plans. This contradicts earlier reports, according to which the IDF Southern Command claimed it knew nothing about V and her warnings.
These latest allegations have firmly placed some knowledge of the invasion threat beyond IDF intelligence and into IDF Southern Command.
Ultimately, however, The Jerusalem Post has learned that the latest leaked Hamas invasion warning did not reach the top officials in the Southern Command, including the commander, Maj.-Gen. Yaron Finkleman, Brig.-Gen. Avi Rosenfeld, and IDF Southern Command Intelligence Chief Col. “A.”
This means that this second new fact may be less significant than the new information about the number of hostages.
Alternatively, if Unit 8200 failed to relay numerous warnings to the Southern Command, and if lower officers within the Southern Command failed to share all intelligence with their higher-up supervisors, it raises fundamental questions about the cooperation between the various units, and whether the Southern Command was providing sufficient safe space for lower-tier analysts to present dissonant information.
These are perhaps the most crucial questions for the future:
How can the intelligence establishment’s culture and structure be modified to ensure that dissonant opinions reach all relevant officials in the future and that such warnings, even if a long shot, are taken seriously.
