Intelligence Failure

I've seen a new theory of why the Israeli Intelligence community got everything so unbelievably wrong. It's actually pretty convincing, and if it's right then the prospects for Israel's plan to "destroy Hamas" are even worse than they look when you assume that the entire Israeli War Machine is just a pile of stupid fucking morons that couldn't tell their asses from their elbows even with Post-it notes on their arms saying "not here".

Anyways, let's consider the facts (as we know them) that need to be explained.

1. Israel Intelligence got a hold of the Hamas battle plan in 2022. This is described as a 40-page document which describes how Hamas was going to attack Israel and the basic strategy described is exactly what Hamas did on October 7. So Israel had a hold of Hamas' actual playbook.

2. The battle plan apparently contained sensitive Israeli military information. It's sounds like it's information along the lines of the locations and strength of the Israeli defenses along the Gaza fence.

3. The Israeli intelligence community dismissed this as being "aspirational". That there's no way that Hamas could pull of the attack as planned. Note that this is the assessment despite the plan containing Israeli military secrets.

4. Israel absolutely acted like they thought the battle plan was a joke. Even after watching Hamas fighters do a day long dry run training session. During this period they continued to relocate military forceds away from the Gaza fence and to the West Bank to support the terrorist campaign being conducted by Israeli settlers.

Okay, now some other facts (as we know them) 

5. Some fraction of Hamas is known to Israel and those members are under constant and extreme surveillance. And have been surveilled for a long time.

6. The October 7 attack was aa big and complex project - at least a year in planning and engaging hundreds of terrorist gunmen and whatever supports those guys needed to do their mass murder.

7. I mean, Israel had a copy of the actual battle plan. This was a big enough terror project and the surveillance of Hamas was intensive enough that Israel literally had a copy of the plan a year in advance. And also, Hamas could reasonably expected that this would be the case.

Okay - here's the theory. Israel didn't fuck up because they are stupid chuckleheads with the brainpower of a wet fart. The theory is that Israel got played. Hamas, knowing that they were under surveillance, acted in such a way to make the Israeli intelligence community go 100% groupthink on a bunch of carefully cultivated ideas. Hamas used Israeli surveillance to make Israel think that Hamas was both incapable of this type of attack and also that they didn't really want to attack either. And then Hamas used this cover to prepare and train for it, knowing that Israel was going to act like the battle plan was fake regardless of what evidence they saw to the contrary.

There's some things about this that seem sketchy. If Hamas knew that Israel was going to get access to the battle plan, why did they put the sensitive military information in there? This endangers their sources and it should have been a huge red flag for Israel that they were grossly underestimating Hamas' capabilities. This was a risk of blowing up the whole plan and they could have avoided that just by leaving the info out of the plan. Still, that's the biggest flaw I see in it. Otherwise, it explains everything perfectly.

As low an opinion as I have of the IDF, it's not credible to believe that literally everyone in it is a stupid idiot. There stories about the Intelligence Failure centre one Unit 8200 analyst who correctly determined that Hamas was way more capable than they were assessed at. But even that analyst was swayed by the argument that "Hamas doesn't want a war". This is after knowing that they were doing dry runs.

The description of what happened are that they knew the attack was being planned and practiced - but they didn't think Hamas was going to go through with it. And they believed this so hard that despite the consequences of being wrong, they acted like Gaza was never going to cause any trouble ever again. Something must have made them thing this - and it makes sense for Hamas to try to bluff out Israel this way.

But what does that mean going forward? It's super-bad. If this theory is correct, it means that Hamas is capable of fooling the Israeli intelligence community (and the US one for that matter) like virtuoso masters. Of playing them like a fiddle. And the Israeli intelligence community is in full on cover your ass mode - and the Israeli government is deeply vested in not criticizing their spies. So it's hard to see how this changes.