Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: They cried wolf, time and again…when the creature arrived, they had no place to hide.
It turns out that Israel and the US already had intelligence about the imminent Hamas invasion—if not its magnitude or brutality—which started on October 7, the day the Jews, ironically, celebrated as a day of peace at a music festival organized close to the Gaza Strip border.
But they largely ignored this ‘routine’ warning.
It is also unclear if Israel noticed that Hamas had erected in the Gaza desert replicas of the targeted towns and cities where its terrorists received training and conducted rehearsals prior to their October 7 invasion, or the capability of its Iron Dome to repel missiles, the media reports suggested.
According to fresh reports, the US intelligence had, days before the Hamas attack, warned of the risk of a looming Gaza-Israel conflict. The intelligence updates, dated September 28 and October 5, indicated that Hamas was preparing to escalate rocket attacks across the border.
Ahead of the Hamas attack in Southern Israel, the US intelligence community issued two assessments based on intelligence shared by Israel, cautioning the Joe Biden administration about a growing risk of Palestinian-Israeli conflict, CNN reported, citing sources.
The CIA, in an October 5 wire, warned generally of the increasing possibility of violence by Hamas. A day before the October 7 attack, US officials received reports from Israel signaling unusual Hamas activity, suggesting an imminent attack.
However, these US assessments did not offer specific details about the scale and brutality of the operation that Hamas executed on October 7, leaving over a thousand Israelis dead. Although these reports were not new to many officials, they have raised concerns about whether both the US and Israel were sufficiently attuned to the looming risks.
Also, it is uncertain if any of these American assessments were shared with Israel, which provides much of the intelligence that the US bases its reports on.
America’s Middle Eastern allies, including Arab countries, had repeatedly warned US and Israeli officials that Palestinian anger had reached a dangerous level. Despite these warnings, the attack took them by surprise. CIA Director Bill Burns was also worried about increased violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the past.
While US officials insist that they were tracking the situation strategically, the lack of specific tactical warnings has led some to question the effectiveness of intelligence sharing. US officials emphasize that much of their intelligence on the region is provided by Israel.
Their failure to predict the magnitude of the attack may be attributed to a lack of imagination and Hamas’s adept use of counterintelligence measures. The terror outfit concealed its planning by avoiding digital communications that could be tracked by Israel and holding in-person planning meetings. Israel also failed to recognize key indicators, such as Hamas training exercises conducted at multiple sites near the Israeli border.
In retrospect, both US and Israeli officials acknowledge that they underestimated the threat posed by Hamas, and had been lured into complacency by Israeli policies.
It is possible that the scale of the Hamas operation exceeded the terror group’s own expectations.
Yet those strategic warnings did nothing to help US or Israeli officials predict the events of October 7, when more than 1,000 Hamas fighters poured across the border into Israel in an operation that would leave more than a thousand Israelis dead.
For most US and Israeli officials who were tracking the intelligence, the expectation was that there would likely be just another round of small-scale violence by Hamas — perhaps some rocket fire that Israel’s Iron Dome would intercept.
“If we had known or if we know of a pending attack against an ally, we would clearly inform that ally,” Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin said on Friday.