"TEL AVIV -- Well before Hamas launched its Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, Israel's military had plenty of evidence that something was brewing.
Israel had been in possession of a secret Hamas plan for a mass invasion for more than a year. Soldiers on the border of Gaza had observed Hamas practicing raids on Israeli military bases and civilian communities for weeks. And the country's security chiefs had been warning that months of contentious internal debate and protests over political issues had left Israel vulnerable.
The night before the attack, the Shin Bet, Israel's domestic intelligence agency, learned that dozens to hundreds of Hamas members had activated mobile-phone service on Israel's networks, a strong signal they planned to be in Israel soon. Israel's spies picked up signals that some of Hamas's leadership had gone underground and that groups of Hamas commandos had begun gathering in spots around the Gaza Strip.
Israel's vaunted intelligence services debated what it all meant until deep in the night and decided to reassess in the morning. Around dawn, Hamas attacked essentially as outlined in the plan captured a year earlier, leaving roughly 1,200 dead and 250 taken as hostages to Gaza.
Israel detailed its failings in a report past this week. Along with the discrete mistakes was a big-picture intelligence blunder of a type that has repeated itself regularly throughout history. Scholars call them "strategic intelligence failures" -- an inability to see the forest for the trees.
They are easy to spot in hindsight but stubbornly hard to guard against as they are unfolding. Intelligence involves taking pieces of information and forming theories, which can be hard to shake. Evidence that contradicts the prevailing assessment often gets dismissed.
"If good intelligence tells you what you think won't happen, you just won't use it," said John Ferris, a history professor at the University of Calgary who studies intelligence and its failings.
In the case of the Oct. 7 attacks, Israel was under the impression that Hamas was angling for economic concessions by stirring up tension on the border. No senior official thought the U.S.-designated terrorist group, significantly weaker than Israel's military, wanted a full-scale war.
Almost exactly 50 years earlier, Israel had made a similar catastrophic blunder.
Egypt and Syria were mobilizing forces on its border and declared their intention to win back territory Israel took from them six years earlier. Israel had received numerous warnings that war was imminent.
Yet, right up until just before war broke out, on Oct. 6, 1973, Israel thought its enemies were bluffing. No way, thought Israeli intelligence at the time, did its neighbors want war again so soon after a crushing defeat in 1967.
Three decades earlier, the U.S. made an even bigger error in judgment. Before the Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Washington had clear signs it was coming.
The day before the attack, U.S. intelligence decrypted Japanese messages that indicated they were through with peace talks they had been conducting with the U.S. Weeks earlier, the Japanese fleet had disappeared into the Pacific Ocean. The U.S. Army and Navy sounded warnings of possible hostilities.
Yet, said Ferris, the U.S. top brass didn't imagine Japan was capable of or interested in war with America. Even a final opportunity to prepare -- when radar picked up 183 aircraft 137 miles off the Hawaiian coast about an hour before they struck -- was mishandled.
After the war, Gen. Sherman Miles, the assistant chief of staff, summed up the failure: "We had a yardstick. We had no reason to doubt our yardstick's approximate accuracy. Yet it was wholly false."
About six months earlier, the Soviet Union had made its own blunder. Soviet intelligence had given Joseph Stalin clear evidence that Nazi Germany, purportedly an ally, was preparing a massive invasion. But historians say Stalin failed to mobilize his army.
Ferris said Oct. 7 was among the most egregious strategic intelligence failures because of how absolutely Israel was taken by surprise.
Israeli military officials said they mistakenly believed their intelligence apparatus was so good that they knew what would happen.
"We were addicted to the precise intel information," said one of the officers who presented the findings of the Oct. 7 investigation to reporters. "The addiction is thinking you know everything."" [1]
1. World News: Oct. 7 Marked Familiar Failure in Spying. Lieber, Dov. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 Mar 2025: A8.
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