The biggest question hanging over the Israel-Gaza conflict from day one remains mysterious: how did Hamas spring such a massive operation without Israel knowing? So massive that rockets from Gaza continued to rain down on Israeli towns for weeks, and resistance continues. Somehow Hamas sneaked large amounts of weapons into Gaza unnoticed. Clearly the tunnels played a crucial part, sixty feet down, some 300 miles of them into a territory less than half as long. How did Gazans even manage to hide such extensive, continuous activity over the years it surely took to build them? That is to say, hide them from reputedly the world’s most effective intelligence outfit. No doubt a smuggling tunnel network already existed from Egypt, but new arteries planned as specific arrowheads for a co-ordinated campaign into Israel like October 7 – they had to be precisely purpose-built and the Israelis missed it. How?
Various conspiracy theories have done the rounds, chief among them that Bibi Netanyahu must have known but looked the other way for political ends. You’ve heard the narrative: he needed a crisis to fend of the corruption probes or to save his career or to unify the country behind him. Or even to ethnically cleanse Gaza once and for all. The equation seems compelling at first glance but falls apart upon closer inspection. Fact is, he couldn’t have kept the intelligence services quiet if they’d known – and they’d be the ones to know before him. He just couldn’t have kept them in line: Israel has too many dissenting voices all the way up the hierarchy not least in the defense and intelligence bureaucracy. Any such information, silenced from above, would’ve leaked loudly. Furthermore, Israelis don’t think that way, including Netanyahu – knowing of an attack and willing to sacrifice a few individuals for some distant purpose. Finally, Netanyahu would know upfront that a successful Hamas surprise-attack would end his career, his reputation, his legacy and the future of anyone close to him, as indeed it will once the war is over. He wouldn’t and didn’t conspire to look the other way.
So, how to explain it? The tunnels manifestly played a central role in Hamas operations. Tunnel warfare is not so arcane as to be utterly unknown. Certainly not unprecedented. In WW1 it was almost as widespread a phenomenon as trench networks, with each side tunneling to literally undermine the other. In the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong used tunnels extensively. And they’ve been ubiquitous in Ukraine. In WW2, they featured prominently in POW escape attempts and in any number of prisons world wide (not least Mexico) for decades, indeed centuries. The Israelis have dealt with Gaza tunnels constantly in the past. The measures and countermeasures are virtually a world-wide science by now – as much as, say, mine laying, bomb disposal or range-finding. You can bet that Israel deploys saturation-level audio and video monitoring over Gaza, facial recognition, sound recognition, humint, movement pattern tracking, counter-tunnels for eavesdropping and much else. Here is the recent, exhaustive, NYT piece on the tunnels. The
The Israelis should have heard the tell-tale regular-rhythm sounds of tunnel digging and certainly watched for the accelerated extrusion of suspicious amounts of soil. The data was surely plentiful, but you had to be paying attention.
Why didn’t they? Here is one possible plausible narrative. And it has to do with Netanyahu, Putin, Iran and the timing. For some years now, Israel and Russia have developed surprisingly strong bonds, notably under Netanyahu, with a great deal of Russian money washing around.
During the same period (last dozen years or more), Israel seemed to have uninterrupted access to clandestine knowledge of hostile Iranian activities inside Syria, weapons transfers, troop movements, bomb factories and the like, suspiciously early. Enough to neutralize them each and every time, consistently and unerringly, with precise timing before they posed a threat, so often that the world took it for granted. Russians always stood aside – no use of air defenses, no retribution. And this in Syria, a client state. It suited Moscow that Syria became ever more dependent and that Iran couldn’t challenge or share the Kremlin’s power over Damascus. Meanwhile, out in the world, the suspicion grew that Moscow and Tel Aviv maintained a very deep back channel of intelligence sharing on Iran and Syria. Tragically, Israel grew dependent on the flow of info.
Then two things happened, game-changers both. The Abraham Accords and war in Ukraine. The first no doubt angered both Moscow and Tehran, as it potentially excluded the two from the future of the Middle East. But especially the Mullahs who didn’t care about cultivating Netanyahu or Trump. If we look at the timeline, the September 2020 Accords happened only three years ago. Hardly enough time to build or arm all the extra tunnels quietly, the ones needed for a major attack. But the negotiations took at least two years before the signing and were scarcely kept successfully secret, so the Iran/Hamas axis had five or more years to prepare. Now, that’s a more realistic timeline. As soon as the Mullahs heard of the planned accords, they likely started counter-planning something like the Hamas attack as a spoiler of the potential Arab-Israeli detente. As for the Kremlin, they saw no harm in the Iranian preparations, for now. They could leak it at any time.
Then came Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine and Moscow grew highly dependent on Iran suddenly for arms and drones. Suddenly, because the Kremlin never expected a multi-year attritional war. When Tehran stepped up, the Mullahs surely insisted on a quid pro quo. “Here’s our condition: you let us wreck the Abraham Accords. Which means we agree to give you drones for Ukraine, but you must stop informing Israel about threats from us.” Moscow no doubt had quietly kept the option to leak Hamas details to Israel at any time closer to maturity. And, to repeat, Tel Aviv had grown dependent on early warnings from Moscow especially in Syria. But suddenly the equation changed. Putin was desperate. He couldn’t risk losing Tehran’s alliance and weapons supply. He had to accede to their condition. And even help them set up the global cyberwar dimension of the conflict ahead of time. (The Israeli disinfo analytics company Cybara calculated that, within 48 hours of Hamas attacking, some %25 of social media commentary came from pre-prepared false accounts – a scale of campaign beyond Iran’s cyber experience.
) In short, Israel had neglected to follow the myriad tiny indicators of build-up in Gaza because Tel Aviv assumed that Putin would inform them as he had done for many years of Iranian machinations. This time he didn’t.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/melikkaylan/2023/11/13/why-israel-was-unprepared-its-all-about-iran-russia-ukraine/