How Israel’s feared security services failed to stop Hamas’s attack Analysis by NYT

The invasion of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas into Israel was rooted in a slew of security failures by Israel’s intelligence community and military, four unnamed senior Israeli security officials said.

According to the New York Times, the four officials said that based on their early assessment, failures included:

• Failure by intelligence officers to monitor key communication channels used by Palestinian attackers;

• Overreliance on border surveillance equipment that was easily shut down by attackers, allowing them to raid military bases and slay soldiers in their beds;

• Clustering of commanders in a single border base that was overrun in the opening phase of the incursion, preventing communication with the rest of the armed forces;

• And a willingness to accept at face value assertions by Gazan military leaders, made on private channels that the Palestinians knew were being monitored by Israel, that they were not preparing for battle.

But the warning wasn’t acted upon, either because the soldiers didn’t get it or the soldiers didn’t read it.

Shortly afterwards, Hamas, the group that controls Gaza, sent drones to disable some of the Israeli military’s cellular communications stations and surveillance towers along the border, preventing the duty officers from monitoring the area remotely with video cameras.

The drones also destroyed remote-controlled machine guns that Israel had installed on its border fortifications, removing a key means of combating a ground attack. When Israeli intelligence officials briefed senior security chiefs last week about the most urgent threats to the country’s defences, they focused on the dangers posed by Lebanese militants along Israel’s northern border.

The challenge posed by Hamas was barely mentioned.