Israel Underestimated Hamas Before Oct. 7 Attack, Military Probe Finds

The Washington Post

14:00 JST, March 1, 2025

TEL AVIV – Hours before Hamas launched its attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, senior Israeli military officials huddled at 3 a.m. to evaluate troubling but contradictory signals. Intelligence agencies had picked up a flurry of Israeli SIM cards being activated overnight inside Gaza. Young Israeli spotters posted at the border had warned about Gazan men recently conducting suspicious training activity.

Ultimately, Israeli military leaders concluded there was no immediate danger and failed to foresee the massive assault that was launched just three hours later, when Hamas fired thousands of rockets and sent men pouring over the border into southern Israel in an unprecedented operation that killed 1,200 people.

But the Israeli military’s catastrophic failure long predated Oct. 7, according to a new, months-long inquiry by the Israel Defense Forces into the worst attack Israel has suffered in decades. The series of failures was rooted in the IDF’s lack of intelligence, planning and understanding of the now-deceased Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, said IDF officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their internal inquiry.

As early as 2018 and again in 2022, Israeli intelligence had obtained documents that suggested Hamas was planning a massive military operation. Sinwar began to conceive of a major attack launched from Gaza as early as November 2016. The plan to attack Israel was approved in July 2019 and Sinwar drew up an operational plan in August 2021. Even during 2023, Sinwar nearly green-lit the operation on three occasions before finally launching the fateful attack on Oct. 7.

None of this was known to Israeli officials, who for years failed to grasp Sinwar’s intentions, downplayed the scale of his military ambitions and dismissed the likelihood of a major Hamas assault as unrealistic, IDF officials said. In fact, by late 2023, IDF leaders believed that Sinwar was angling to extract more financial concessions from Israel to govern Gaza rather than wage war, officials said.

Not a single Israeli government official “was able to even imagine a scenario like what happened,” an Israeli military official said. “Our assessment [was] that Hamas didn’t want full-scale war. It lacked the capacity and capability to do an attack of this scale.”

Military officials familiar with the inquiry said it has not assigned culpability to specific field commanders or intelligence leaders, but that it does contain recommendations for the IDF, including that it should strengthen its intelligence division’s analysis capabilities and change the division’s culture of making assumptions, one official said. Another told reporters that field commanders had become overly “addicted” to intelligence reports, which could be misleading.

Unlike the IDF, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has not launched a comprehensive commission to review the failures of Oct. 7, which has been a source of criticism of Netanyahu and a hot-button political issue. More than 90 percent of Israelis support the formation of such a state commission, polls show.

IDF officials say that their internal review, which is ongoing, could eventually assign blame to individual officers. Several senior military officials, including IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi, have already publicly apologized for their failures and resigned.

The Hamas attack executed by Sinwar dwarfed Israel’s own contingency plans. While Israel envisioned attacks at as many as eight points along the Gaza border, Sinwar attacked nearly 60 locations, the IDF found. The assault, led by a first wave of 1,200 Hamas commandos, ultimately consisted of more than 5,000 attackers, including Gazan civilians who had been exhorted on the radio by Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, better known as Mohammed Deif, to pick up weapons and raid Israel.

IDF bases near Gaza were quickly overrun and their commanders killed, the IDF officials said. It took more than five hours to summon reinforcements from the north, and until midnight on Oct. 8 to drive most fighters back to Gaza.

Although reports emerged that the IDF may have killed some of the nearly 800 civilians who died on Oct. 7, IDF officials said they only found a handful of instances of friendly fire in their inquiry and denied there was any intentional firing at hostages. They did not disclose how many people were killed in such incidents.

The officials said their main takeaway was that Israel cannot allow its enemies to build up forces near the border, whether in Gaza, Lebanon or elsewhere. In recent days, Israel has been criticized for carrying out airstrikes and maintaining troops in southern Lebanon and southern Syria, which Israeli officials have defended as necessary to maintain a “security zone.”

“We let Hamas and Hezbollah mount up and build infrastructure and force on our border; that is unacceptable,” said an official involved in the inquiry. “We’re going to be tested on that in the future in Gaza and in Lebanon.”