Israel’s Military and Intelligence Failures of 7/10.

A failure of shared and not shared information between the Shabak (Shin Bet) and the IDF, the lack of accurate information and coordination, led to an avalanche effect with joint and individual under-valuations of the emerging threat from Gaza affected both the decision-making process and the lack of ability to respond to the Palestinian Hamas invasion of 7/10.When the IDF submitted its initial 7/10 report in February 2025 it did not present a detailed list of failures but, instead, issued accounts on a daily basis of what occurred in separate incidents on kibbutzim and southern bases rather than present a comprehensive account about the total IDF failures across the whole of southern Israel, including who was responsible, and why it happened.

They provide individual daily explanations to each kibbutz, town, and army position, that left no one satisfied.

The Israeli public have yet to receive a complete explanation.

At this time, no respected independent panel has conducted an official investigation into the failures of 7/10, and neither the IDF nor the Shin Bet have been ordered to hand over all the documents and have their decision makers properly investigated.

There were three main failures on 7/10 – Intelligence, Operational, and Coordination.

Instead of obtaining firsthand intelligence from operators on the ground in Gaza, which they had abandoned as a matter of policy, the Shin Bet had fallen back on hi tech intelligence gathering and extracting information from SIM cards indicating Hamas activity.

They claim that Sim cards were turned off during the night of 6-7 October 2023. This was a red flag and after a brief meeting at 3.15 am, they decided to reconvene in the morning. They knew something was happening, but the IDF Chief of Staff decided to reconvene in the morning at 8 am. But the attack had already begun.

The IDF knew about Jericho Wall since September 2022. This was the Hamas invasion plan known to the IDF, but apparently the Chief of Staff, Hezi Halevi, was not aware of it until after the war began even though he had served in important intelligence and operational roles years earlier.

Investigative reports also confirm that, in a classified General Staff meeting on July 27, 2022, then-Operations Division head Brig. Gen. Yaron Finkelman, the IDF’s Southern Command chief on October 7, had been ordered to make preparations for war with Hamas based on their “Jericho Wall” plans. However, no action was taken.

Additionally, and even more shocking, during that 2022 meeting, Finkelman had said that Hamas could only achieve surprise through a deception operation disguised as a military drill or by misinterpreting its own heightened readiness for an Israeli attack.

But when Hamas invaded Israel just over a year later and the IDF were literally caught with their pants down.

The failure of the IDF and the Shin Bet not to have human resources on the ground in Gaza providing them with intelligence led to them being blindsided by the thousands of armed and trained terrorists flooding across the border followed by an equal number of Gazan civilians storming into Israel on foot and in vehicles makes it clear that friends and family of thousands of heavily armed Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists also knew in advance of the planned invasion, but both the top Israeli military and intelligence hierarchy were blind-sided.

There was also a lack of adequate forces stationed in the south at the time of the attack. In fact, most of the army and intelligence bases were not only inadequately manned, but they also lacked sufficient weapons and ammunition for such a scenario.

On the 7/10 there were 40 battle points in Israel.

The Air Force probe into 7/10 also highlighted a lack of preparedness with too few helicopters in combat readiness for an event of this scale even though they had a Dawn Preparedness plan, because historically dawn is the time when most attacks occur but, on 7/10 they came up short on equipment and manpower.

Some of the individuals with a burden to bear for the failures include Brig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld, the Gaza Division chief. Rosenfeld not only lost control of his forward HQ that was supposed to manage the defense of the Gaza corridor, but he also refused to acknowledge his defeat which left much of the IDF so uninformed on what was going on in the early hours of 7/10.

Another at fault was Lt. Col. “A” of the Gaza Division an intelligence officer who countermanded a junior non-commissioned officer, codename “V”, who saw what was happening and tried to apply the Jericho Wall document to the situation which would have sounded the alarm.

7/10 revealed how technology had taken preference over human spying and came up short.

The 8200-unit chief, Brig. Gen. Yossi Sarid, had won the argument to replace human sources in Gaza with technology but the outcome was that it blindsided Israel to the possibility of a broad, deep, and large invasion of Israel by a force using more primitive methods of communication.

Further up the chain of command, both IDF Southern Command chief, Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelstein and IDF intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Aharan Haliva, were forced to resign.

What is shocking was that each of the leading IDF actors had partial levels of knowledge and did not see the full picture.

Halevi never knew about the Jericho Wall protocol or about the Hamas rocket crews but new about the Sim cards. Halevi was also not included in key virtual calls with IDF Chief of Staff, Halevi, Finkelstein, and IDF Operations Command chief, Maj. Gen. Oded Basiuk, and other intelligence officials, leaving him in the dark about how to respond to potential Hamas threats.

Finkelman seemed to know all the data points that Halevi and Haliva did not and he was also on every key call the night of 7/10. He knew about Jericho Wall and had written an analysis of it in 2022 warning that a mass invasion should be taken seriously. Yet, on the night between 6-7 October, he failed to mention it to the IDF Chief of Staff, possibly assuming that Hezi Halevi already knew of it.

In short, it was Finkelman’s job to constantly raise the alarm of different potential scenarios to keep to IDF on its toes, an IDF that had gotten stuck on the potential of a Hamas mass invasion.

There is also the question of why Halevi did not bring Haliva onto the initial call, or Defense Minister Gallant, or Prime Minister Netanyahu. Instead, Halevi held a consultation but left these key figures out of the loop and chose to consult with Finkelstein instead.

General Aharon Haliva, in his last speech as head of the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate said that he was responsible for not proving a warning ahead of the October 7 invasion of Israel saying, “The responsibilities for the failures of the MID is on me.”

He called for a state commission of enquiry into “all aspects that led to the war, so that what happened will not happen ever again.”

The incoming chief of MID, Maj. Gen. Shlomi Binder, said that as well as dedicating intelligence efforts to return our hostages and increase and expand our readiness for a new campaign, the MID needs to investigate itself and improve from its mistakes.

“The Israeli people have no other country. The State of Israel doesn’t have another IDF, and the IDF doesn’t have another Intelligence Directorate.”

Brig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld, the head of the Gaza Division, was replaced by Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram, the former head of the 99^th Division.

It is shocking to learn that IDF intelligence failed to detect three near invasions by Hamas before 7/10, according to recent military reports. These took place in April 2022, October 2022, and April 2023, but the IDF only learned about them during the current war by the capture of Hamas documents and by interrogating Hamas prisoners.

So entrenched was the conventional IDF mindset that Hamas was too intimidated and deterred to launch a large-scale invasion that the IDF dismissed the possibility.

It is clear that there was an incorrect intelligence, military and political assessment based on a false understanding that the large losses inflicted on Hamas in 2009-09, 2012, 2014, and 2021 was that Hamad was no longer interested in a large-scale assault on Israel preferring guerilla raids and rocket fire into Israel.

We have yet to hear from the political echelon, including the Prime Minister’s office, the Defense Minister, and the Security Cabinet.

What did they know or not know, and when did they know or not know it?

There is an important need for an independent inquiry into all aspects of the 7/10 disaster – military, intelligence, political. The inquiry must be manned by individuals with no vested interests or biases but is not likely to happen until the Hamas threat has been removed forever and all our hostages are returned to their families in Israel.

Barry Shaw,

Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.