An official Israeli investigation has revealed that the country’s security establishment failed to prevent the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack not because of a lack of intelligence, but due to long-standing misjudgments about Hamas’s capabilities. The preliminary military report found that Israeli officials wrongly believed Hamas had been effectively contained, leading to complacency and a failure to act on repeated warnings.

Retired Major General Roni Numa, who led the inquiry into Hamas’s “Jericho Wall” intelligence documents, said Israeli intelligence had been tracking Hamas’s plans to breach Gaza’s border defenses since 2016, with updates in 2019 and 2022. Despite these alerts reaching senior officers, they were dismissed as isolated data rather than signs of a broader strategy. The report also criticized excessive reliance on automated translation technology instead of Arabic language experts, weakening analytical understanding of Hamas’s intentions.

The investigation concluded that the failure was rooted in analysis, not intelligence collection. It described the October 7 events as a systemic breakdown in Israel’s assessment, planning, and decision-making processes.