On mistakes – Amos Harel in Haaretz:

‘For over a year before Hamas’ massive attack on Israel last month, Military Intelligence had detailed information on the group's plan to breach the Gaza border at dozens of points and attack dozens of communities and army posts, defense officials say.
Most of this information was shared with the Shin Bet security service, the officials said in the weeks since the war erupted, adding that the political leadership, which changed at the end of last year, was familiar with at least some of the intelligence. But Israel didn’t properly prepare for the threat and didn’t seem to believe that the Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, intended to implement the plan.’

(…)

‘Many of the shortcomings have already been reported by Haaretz and other Israeli journalists. These include warnings by the head of Military Intelligence’s research division, Brig. Gen. Amit Saar, about a “perfect storm” in the region that would exploit Israel's domestic turmoil wrought by the Netanyahu government's plan to weaken the judicial system.
There were also the warnings by the army's women spotters on the Gaza border, and the nightly consultations in the army and Shin Bet that didn’t produce the right adjustments and enabled Hamas to kill around 1,200 Israelis and take around 240 hostages on October 7.’

(…)
‘When terrorism spread in the West Bank in March 2022, Israel placed troops just inside the Green Line. Gaza became a lower priority as most of the intelligence community and successive prime ministers – Netanyahu, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid and Netanyahu again – falsely assumed that Hamas had been deterred and didn't seek war.
During the May 2021 air war with Gaza when Netanyahu was prime minister, Hamas fired rockets at Jerusalem in an attempt to expand the fighting. Thousands of rockets were fired from Gaza for over a week, while Arabs and Jews clashed in Israel's mixed cities.
But Hamas didn't attack along the border. The following rounds of fighting in Gaza, the last coming this past May, pitted Israel against Islamic Jihad. These air clashes ended within days. The political and military leaders congratulated themselves for the damage done to the smaller group. They convinced themselves that Hamas’ absence from the fighting proved it had been deterred, even weakened, and preferred to invest in Gazans' welfare.
In this way Israel made another mistake: It increased the number of entry permits for Gazan workers into Israel. On the eve of the current war, after days of tension along the border, the government promised mediators from Qatar that it would raise the number of permits to 20,000 from 17,000. (Qatar had given Hamas billions of dollars, most of which it used to expand militarily.)
In retrospect, suspicions have grown that some of these workers collected intelligence on the Gaza border communities that Hamas used in its attacks on civilians on October 7.’

(…)

‘In the run-up to Hamas' murders, kidnappings and abuse on October 7, the army did not receive any information on plans to carry out sexual assaults, of which evidence is increasing.
Officers in the Southern Command and higher admit that Israel's defense plan wasn't designed to combat thousands of armed terrorists, among them around 1,000 elite Nukhba fighters in the first wave. The Israelis were counting on a more focused effort, not a large force breaking through at 20 points.
It’s hard to understand this when the military had intelligence on a highly ambitious plan. It’s even harder to understand why the entire security establishment didn’t rise up to thwart the Israeli approach. It seems that even a proper early warning system, à la before the 2014 Gaza war, wasn’t crafted.
Some of the difficulties stemmed from a decision at Unit 8200, the Israeli army's equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency, to reduce coverage of the enemy’s tactical communications. Israel apparently chose to rely on more advanced technology and mistakenly believed that it had a full picture of the enemy’s intentions and capabilities.

There was one righteous person in this story, an experienced, professional noncommissioned officer in Unit 8200 specializing in the enemy’s military doctrine. Her warnings jibe with the many warnings that the women spotters in the Gaza Division raised.
Over a period of months before the war, she wrote three documents warning her superiors about Hamas' intentions. A few months ago, she reported that Hamas in Gaza had completed exercises simulating an invasion of kibbutzim and border-fence posts.
In July, she reported that the group had completed even more exercises. In one document she added a horrifying statement revealing Hamas' intention to severely harm residents of the kibbutzim.’

Read the article here.

Hubris, arrogance, overconfidence, tactical mistakes, and the belief that your concept of reality is reality itself.

This happens everywhere, but when overconfident intelligence services make these mistakes the results can be deadly, the consequences will be immense, for the whole world.

Interestingly enough, the ‘righteous person’ was also a woman.