For those seeking a definitive answer to who was at fault for October 7 and the associated finger-pointing, they won’t find it in While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East (St. Martin’s Press) by Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot. The truth it, as they note, there were a lot of people at fault. What they will find, though, in part, is who some of the heroes were.
Part of the incredulousness of what occurred that fateful day is that Israel had invested billions in technology on the Gaza border. Israel, a country that has more cybersecurity firms than the UK, Canada, India, Germany, and France combined, with a population of roughly 9 million, while those five countries have approximately 1.5 billion inhabitants, how were they so blindsided by the Hamas terrorists?
The book begins with the story of seven female soldiers who were part of a unit in the IDF called tatzpitaniyot, Hebrew for observers. These women, just nineteen and twenty years old, were in the middle of their two-year compulsory military service and stationed at the Nachal Oz base, a few hundred yards from Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip.
Known as the eyes of the army, these soldiers had one job: monitor screens inside the base that watched every inch along the Israel-Gaza border. It was a tedious task, predominantly assigned to female soldiers, who, according to military studies, possessed superior visual acuity and observational skills compared to their male counterparts.
They did their job, and they did it well. The use of technology in addition to their own intuition told the tatzpitaniyot that something was amiss. When they reported it to senior officers, they were not listened to. Sadly, most of them died in the early morning of October 7.
The tatzpitaniyot who had warned their commanders that they were concerned about the situation along the Gaza border in the months before the October 7 attack were told to stop bothering them and even threatened with a court-martial.
The tatzpitaniyot said that they had seen unusual training and other actions taking place next to the border, with more and more people suddenly getting near the fence in the months leading up to the attack.
When one of the tatzpitaniyot felt that they weren’t being heard, one of them decided to go directly to a senior commander in the area and was told, “I don’t want to hear again about this nonsense. If you bother us again with these things, you’ll be court-martialed.”
Konseptziya, Hebrew for conception, was a series of false assumptions that Arab nations would not initiate another large-scale war with Israel. This mistake led to the Yom Kippur War, where Israel was caught by surprise by the coordinated Egyptian and Syrian attacks on October 6, 1973.
Fifty years later, Katz and Bohbot write that Israel was again lulled via a konseptziya that Hamas did not want war. For every one of the concepts that Hamas was going to attack, it was ignored or explained away.
When it came to Gaza, the IDF’s focus was on maintaining quiet while preparing for a possible standoff one day with Iran and Hezbollah. The book notes that there was no operational plan for a full-scale offensive in Gaza, and no detailed strategy of what to do in the event of a war.
The authors have done a fantastic job of piecing together how October 7 occurred. While fascinating, it is profoundly troubling and saddening given the depth of terror and death involved.
As painful as the atrocities committed by Hamas are, it’s equally painful to read that Israel possessed all the intelligence to piece together Hamas’s plans, but the IDF never connected them into a comprehensive picture to understand what was happening right before their eyes.
One of the most significant faults leading to October 7 is that the book states that Israel lacked significant human intelligence (HUMINT) in Gaza.
NATO defines HUMINT as “a category of intelligence derived from information collected and provided by human sources.” A typical HUMINT activity consists of interrogations and conversations with people having access to information.
As the name suggests, human intelligence is primarily collected by people and is commonly provided through espionage or other forms of covert surveillance. However, there are also overt methods of collection, such as via interrogation of subjects or simply through interviews.
With thousands of Hamas terrorists involved on October 7, and even more who knew what would occur, there was not a single one who could have alerted their Mossad operative with advance notice. Effective HUMINT would have solved that.
Compare that with the joke during the recent war with Iran that someone bumped into someone in Tehran and said slicha. To which the other person replied ain biya. The joke being that there were so many Mossad agents within Iran. As opposed to a dearth of agents and operatives in Gaza.
The Israel Military Intelligence Directorate, known as Aman, is the military intelligence body of the IDF. The book details deep, systemic failures and flaws in the way Israel thought it understood Hamas. Aman failed to grasp Hamas’s true intentions and mistakenly believed that the organization’s leadership wanted a truce, rather than war.
A term used myriad times in the book is misread. From how the IDF clearly misread what was happening in Gaza when they decided in 1978 to grant approval for the establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza, to the West’s misreading of Hamas from the start of the organization, and more.
When assigning blame for October 7, the authors don’t point to specific people, but do note that it was a systemic problem and that the system as a whole is to blame.
One of the people the authors do praise is Avigdor Lieberman, who wrote a 2016 report that Katz termed almost prophetic in its appraisal of what Hamas could do. Lieberman’s advantage is that he is not a career military man and was not blinded by some of the military-based konseptziya.
The 9/11 attacks in part resulted from communication failures, including a lack of collaboration and information-sharing between intelligence agencies like the FBI and CIA. This prevented the connection of critical intelligence on the terrorists.
One of the operational challenges Israel faced was integrating the various branches of the defense establishments to work together and synergize the flow of information, particularly between the Shin Bet and the Israeli Air Force.
As depressing a narrative as this book is, it concludes with some concrete recommendations on key issues that they believe are critical for Israel’s security. They will, on one hand, help prevent similar attacks from taking place, and on the other hand, will assist Israel in prosecuting a war more effectively if its enemies force one upon it.
One of those recommendations is the better use of HUMINT, rather than relying solely on technology.
The authors point out some of the blame on Benjamin Netanyahu, in that his fear that members of his coalition might abandon his government caused him to delay decisions that could have expedited a hosted deal and ceasefire. They write that Netanyahu placed political survival above national interests numerous times, allowing the war to extend unnecessarily. They write that it must change.
They also write that Israel has been notorious for putting the wrong people in public diplomacy roles and not using the right officials as the country’s face and voice in the media. The IDF, for example, has chosen spokespersons over the years who had never appeared on camera before or worked with the media.
A few years before the war, a fighter pilot was appointed to the IDF’s foreign media spokesperson because he happened to speak English, while an Iron Dome officer was made the top military spokesperson because he had studied media relations 25 years earlier in college.
They write that Israel has to recognize that the media front is no less critical than the battlefield in Gaza or the home front on which Hamas missiles are fired. Israel also needs to recognize that public diplomacy is not limited to wartime. It needs to prepare messages ahead of time so that if and when a conflict erupts, people will understand why.
The authors have done a fantastic forensic analysis of how October 7 occurred, and sadly, how it could have been avoided. From leadership and military mistakes, overconfidence, complacency, to ignoring the tatzpitaniyot and more, there was a lot that went wrong on and before October 7, which the book details. This is a sobering yet important read about one of the most dreadful days in Israel’s history.
This is a book that is hard to put down once you start reading it, so don’t start if you have any immediate pressing deadlines. Israel did sleep, and Hamas did surprise them. Hopefully, it’s something that will never happen again.