When Israel completed construction of a $1.1 billion above-and-below-ground fence along its 40-mile border with Gaza – equipped with radar devices, cameras, surveillance sensors, and remote-controlled weaponry – it was hailed as an “iron wall.”
It was the ultimate high-tech foil to Hamas’ efforts to attack, in particular via underground tunnels.
But three years later, just after sunrise on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas forces launched a surprise attack. They used cheap drones to knock out sophisticated cameras and weaponry, “low-tech” tractors to simultaneously bulldoze through dozens of locations along the 20-foot-high steel fencing, and hang gliders to sail over it.
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The Hamas forces that carried out the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre penetrated a $1.1 billion, high-tech Israeli barrier on the Gaza border. Israel’s army and Shin Bet security force say they failed by relying on technology at the expense of human intelligence.
What followed was the deadliest attack ever on Israeli soil. Border communities and the army base there to protect them were ravaged, 1,200 people were killed, and 251 were taken hostage.
Last week, the first Israeli investigations into the disaster – one by the army and the other by Shin Bet, the internal security service – were published. They found both security arms failed to understand that Hamas was capable, let alone interested, in carrying out such a mass, coordinated attack.
Among the causes for the catastrophic intelligence failure was an overreliance on technology at the expense of the often Sisyphean task of human intelligence gathering and assessment.
“Technology is very tempting – AI, cyber, bugging telephones and communications lines, and penetrating computers. It’s an illness not only within Shin Bet and military intelligence but the Mossad, which also relies too much on technology,” says Yossi Melman, an Israeli journalist and author of “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars.” “They fell in love with their gadgets.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, has balked at demands for a state commission of inquiry into Oct. 7, saying such a probe would be biased against him. During a Knesset debate last week on such an inquiry, some family members whose loved ones were killed or taken hostage were denied entry. The wrenching scenes underscored how fraught the issue is.
Multiple sources
It’s not just Israeli intelligence that has been vulnerable to technology bias in its work, but Western security agencies as well, argues Ofer Guterman, senior research fellow at the Institute for the Research of the Methodology of Intelligence, a center near Tel Aviv that serves the Israeli intelligence community.
An axiom of intelligence analysis has always been that to get to the truth of what is happening, one must use many kinds of sources. “But once you become reliant on one source, your line of sight is narrowed,” says Dr. Guterman.
“For strategic assessments, you need more than innovation; you need the basics of the craft, which is ‘Know your enemy.’ So if dealing with Hamas, you should learn the history of the Palestinian people, of Hamas, of Islam,” he adds.
And it’s precisely these experts whose work has been scaled back in intelligence units in the past two decades, with analysts increasingly relying on artificial intelligence translations for some of the information collected. The thinking, experts say, was that technology could replace some of those positions.
Miri Eisin, a retired colonel from the army intelligence corps, says tools like AI translation do not convey tone, context, or the emotion of a person whose conversation is being listened to. Rebuilding that capacity is now going to be a long-term project, she says.
“It’s very easy to fire people, but once those positions are canceled you lose capability, and it takes time to build it again,” she notes.
“AI can help sort through information and translate it, but tech should be used as a wingman, a helper,” adds Dr. Guterman. “You cannot neglect the human technology. [It’s] such a basic lesson we need to learn, to never again forget.”
In 2022, a noncommissioned female officer, referred to in Israeli media reports as V, warned her military intelligence unit that Hamas had plans to execute a broad attack on southern Israel.
But her assessment was dismissed. It did not mesh with the assessment made at higher levels that Hamas had been placated, in part by the millions of dollars a month it was receiving from Qatar, reportedly with Mr. Netanyahu’s encouragement.
Needed: more “black sheep”
Writing in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, an Israeli military intelligence veteran using the pen name Yariv Inbar said Officer V’s example was one of courage in the face of intelligence community “groupthink.”
“If a few more bold ‘black sheep’ like V – individuals who dedicate time to deeply studying Arab and Islamic culture and refuse to succumb to groupthink – had challenged the shepherd who strives for herd cohesion, the outcomes might have been different,” he wrote.
In a sharply worded indictment, he noted that one of the army probe’s conclusions was the lack of understanding of radical Islamic culture.
“This is a difficult topic to address briefly, but the majority of those engaged in intelligence assessment simply do not truly know or understand the enemy – neither the Arab adversary nor the Iranian one,” he wrote. “It is obvious that more individuals proficient in the enemy’s language, religion, and culture are needed.”
Also dismissed were warnings of irregular Hamas activity by a unit of female “spotter” soldiers along the Gaza border. It reported seeing militants driving vans, trucks, and motorcycles near the fence, and reported they appeared to be training for a cross-border attack.
Fifteen of the spotters were among more than 50 soldiers killed at their base on Oct. 7. Seven others were taken hostage. One was killed, another was rescued, and five returned after spending almost 500 days in captivity.
Within the intelligence community, information obtained through technology tends to be considered more valuable, says reserves Colonel Eisin. But, she cautions, “When you are looking at the information with incorrect lenses, the technology is not going to help.”
Lack of agents
One of the main reasons the Shin Bet did not connect the dots before Oct. 7 was the difficulty in recruiting agents and intelligence sources on the ground in Gaza, says Mr. Melman, the author.
In the West Bank, Israel retains military control and has a broad intelligence network. But Israel withdrew from Gaza 20 years ago, and within two years Hamas took power, ousting the more moderate, secular Palestinian Authority. This made Israel’s human intelligence access reliant on Palestinians who entered Israel to work or receive medical treatment, for example.
“So they did not have enough sources and not enough quality ones,” says Mr. Melman, noting also that the state failed to recognize that Hamas’ Gaza was by then an independent semistate entity with an army at Israel’s border, not merely a terror organization trying to launch occasional pinpoint attacks.
Here again the promise of technology was seen as a panacea.
“On the one hand it makes life easier: You can recruit an agent you don’t have to meet, and they can even be recruited via social media,” Mr. Melman says. “But on the other, you lack what human contact offers.”
