Ultimately, perhaps the most important conclusions from the IDF’s inquiries were about the need to preempt and take the initiative in eliminating threats as they appear.
By Yaakov Lappin, JNS
Fundamental perceptions about the threat posed by Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces’ ability to respond effectively collapsed catastrophically on the morning of the Oct. 7, 2023, mass murder attacks, inquiries conducted by the Israeli military have found.
The first key lesson that emerges from the inquiries, according to an IDF official, is that “we cannot allow a threat to develop near the border. When choosing between prioritizing temporary quiet or removing the threat, the removal of the threat must be prioritized. It is not viable to ‘conflict manage’ against an enemy whose goal is your destruction.”
The inquiries, which examined a range of strategic and tactical systematic failures, were released on Feb. 27, and the outgoing IDF chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, stated on the same day, “The responsibility is mine. I was the commander of the military on October 7, and I also carry the weight of your responsibility.”
Halevi met the next day with the heads of the regional councils and southern Israeli communities located near the Gaza Strip.
He presented the main findings of the inquiries to them, alongside the commanding officers of the Southern Command, the Home Front Command and the the Gaza Division, as well as representatives from the Israeli Air Force and the Intelligence Directorate.
Key conclusions
According to an IDF official, key conclusions include that perceptions held by “the Israeli establishment, both political and military” were based on ill-fated “conflict-management” doctrines, that a large-scale Hamas ground invasion was not considered as a real threat, that intelligence failed to provide a warning in time, and the idea that the border could be defended created a false sense of security.
“Israel’s strategic framework was deeply ingrained, and over the years, there was no systematic or significant effort to challenge it. There was no deep discussion of the question: What if we are wrong?” according to the IDF official.
Lessons learned include that it is wrong to “conflict manage with an enemy whose ultimate goal is your destruction.”
A second set of inquiries, looking at intelligence failures, found that the Intelligence Directorate had assumed that Hamas is “pragmatic” and perceives war as “costly and is deterred from engaging in it.”
It concluded with a recognition of the need to fundamentally redefine the Intelligence Directorate’s mission, with a focus on early warning, and fostering intellectual openness and skepticism.
A third set of inquiries examined the nighttime events leading up to the morning attack on Oct. 7, and found that the prevailing assumption of a “calm period” and Israel’s focus on Hamas’s intentions helped misguided intelligence officers and commanders in how they viewed existing warning signs.
There was a “lack of a structured intelligence situational assessment at any intelligence level,” said the official.
‘The whole system collapsed’
Brig. Gen. (res.) Hanan Gefen, former commander of signals intelligence Unit 8200 in the Intelligence Directorate, told JNS on Feb. 26 that the failures should be examined in three distinct phases: the years leading up to the attack, the immediate operational collapse after 6:30 a.m. on Oct. 7, and the crucial hours between the night of Oct. 6 and the early morning of Oct. 7.
“I want to focus on the night between the 6th and 7th, say from 10 p.m. to around 6 a.m.,” said Geffen. “That’s when the whole system collapsed, and the catastrophe exploded.”
Gefen pointed to a key issue in the intelligence failures: the absence of a centralized mechanism to aggregate warnings.
“There was a flow of intelligence from various sources—Shin Bet, surveillance, other intelligence units—but nowhere was all this gathered and assessed as a changing situation,” he explained.
“It was as if reports were streaming in separately, but no one said, ‘This is adding up to something different.’” He warned that the breakdown was not just a matter of missing information, but a fundamental failure to act upon the warning signs.
This was followed by the defense system’s collapse after 6:30 a.m. on Oct. 7, including the military’s command and control abilities over an extended period of time, said Gefen, adding that these failures went on for “two days, even three.”
The IDF’s investigation concluded that “the Gaza Division was effectively defeated for several hours. This was not understood in real time, leading to a significant gap in situational awareness at the General Staff and Southern Command levels regarding the severity of the situation.”
Gefen referred to a Feb. 25 report by Yediot Achronot, citing a speech by the outgoing commander of Unit 8200, Brig. Gen. Yossi Sariel, who stated during a meeting with commanders at Palmahim Airbase in central Israel in recent days.
“At 06:29 on October 7, I did not accomplish my mission as expected by my subordinates and commanders, as I expected of myself, and most importantly—as the citizens of this country expected of me,” said Sariel.
He continued: “When I was appointed commander of 8200, they expected such things not to happen. And it happened. I, Yossi, failed. I understand that what has been done cannot be undone. I bow my head and offer my deepest apology.”
Sariel criticized the IDF’s handling of intelligence assessments and its decision-making process, stating that while individual investigations had been conducted, the military’s leadership had failed to come together for a collective review.
“The most complicated and difficult thing is that this group—our top commanders—has not stopped even once in 507 days, not even for 10 minutes, to ask how we failed as a group,” he said.
“When the IDF defeated Hezbollah, the whole system worked as one. But when we were defeated, suddenly it wasn’t the system—it was blamed on two individuals.”
Responding to this, Gefen stated, “This meeting is the most important point because this is where the names will emerge. I think that here we will see the beginning of a blame game—you know, knives drawn—between intelligence and the operational echelon, meaning the Southern Command, the Gaza Division, and the Operations [Branch] at the General Staff.”
Ultimately, Gefen said, intelligence did pass along reports that were sufficient to raise concerns, to the extent that the chief of staff and the IDF Southern Command chief at the time, Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman, to drive in the middle of the night to the Southern Command’s headquarters in Beersheva.
“Commanders, some from the Shin Bet, some from [the Southern Command] headquarters, got up and started talking. It was enough to trigger concern. But it was not enough to take any further action,” Gefen noted.
“And that is the big question. There was enough noise, but not enough to take action—to update the defense minister, to update the Prime Minister’s Office earlier and not at 6:15. And here I return to what Yossi said. Yossi said, ‘We bring intelligence; we cannot’—if you listen carefully to what he said—’tell the commanders what to do and how to do it.’ The commanders will say the intelligence wasn’t good enough, wasn’t accurate enough, wasn’t clear enough. And that is why they said, let’s wait until 8 a.m.”
According to Gefen, “That is the framework of the problem. Now, if I look inside, I’m missing the [Southern] Command and the [Gaza] Division aspect because I didn’t see it, and Yossi also said that they didn’t talk to us about what happened at the Command and Division. But from what I saw from the intelligence side, or at least from Unit 8200, is that there were fragments of intelligence. And I didn’t see anywhere—and maybe I have a blind spot—anywhere in the Command or Division or anywhere at all, someone who gathered everything that came from the Shin Bet, from the surveillance, from everything collected, and say, in the two or three days before the attack, ‘We now have a different situation.’
“There was no focal point,” Gefen said. “It was as if reports were streaming in separately, and nowhere was there a point where they were consolidated into one, where someone would say, ‘This connects; this gives me a different picture.’”
“That is the essence of strategic intelligence, and it didn’t exist,” he added. In the fallout from the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which also saw intelligence ignored, one of the lessons was the need to centralize responses to intelligence at multiple levels, at the regional command, the regional division, at Unit 8200, and at the Military Intelligence’s Research Department, Gefen said.
“Within 8200, we raised this argument. We asked: Why didn’t this happen? And here, there is a problem in the transmission system.
“Someone needed to step in and say, ‘Look, we don’t have two days to investigate. We need an alerting mechanism now.’ That element of ‘Now, an alert!’ was missing in those hours. The reports were there. If someone had had a full day to investigate, they would have arrived at a much clearer conclusion. But there were only three hours to make a decision,” said Gefen.
“In those three hours, information needed to be funneled to a single focal point where someone would say: ‘Look, we have accumulated enough reports from multiple sources—not just one.’ The Shin Bet, the surveillance, all of them. And not just overnight, but also the previous day. But no one looked at the prior intelligence—they only looked at the immediate reports.”
Shoshani explains
On Feb. 17, IDF International Spokesperson Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani described the process of the inquiries. “This was a very long process with many people investigating these events,” he said.
“Starting next week, we will be ready to present them to the public—first to the families, then to the broader public, in writing and through briefings if needed.”
Shoshani outlined four key areas of investigation: the long-term strategy regarding Gaza, intelligence failures, decision-making on the night of October 6-7, and the first 72 hours of combat.”
Ultimately, perhaps the most important conclusions from the IDF’s inquiries were about the need to preempt and take the initiative in eliminating threats as they appear.
The inquiries concluded that “priority should be given to eliminating threats over achieving temporary security calm, with effort made to prevent enemy entrenchment near the border.”
Bradley Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Washington, D.C.-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said, “The IDF deserves credit for conducting a painful, thorough, and necessary assessment of what happened on October 7 to ensure the needed reforms are adopted. This assessment is vital because the only regret of the terrorist enemies of Israel and the United States is that the barbaric October 7 murders were not more successful. Terrorist groups will try again if they have the means.”
Bowman added: “Key themes that emerge are incorrect assumptions about adversaries, overconfidence, overreliance on technology, insufficient ground force readiness, and inadequate forward-positioned combat capacity. Israel, like the United States, confronts multiple adversaries at the same time, and we cannot build the necessary military capability, capacity and readiness and prevent disasters without significantly increased defense spending.”
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