No. of Recommendations: 7
The
New York Times is reporting as of 11/30/2023 that Israel had intelligence at least one year prior to the October attacks of the Hammas plan. Not just knowledge, a
forty page briefing outlining the scale of the planned attack.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeas...This had been rumored within days after the attack and squashed.
It was rumored about two weeks after the attack, then squashed.
It came up in mid-November again.
The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.Given Netanyahu's entire political existence has been anchored upon him being the only man who can protect Israel, a failure by his intelligence and military leaders of this magnitude with this level of detail available a YEAR in advance should have dire consequences for both Netanyahu and his ultra-conservative partners.
Even without hindsight, the facts at hand would seem to contradict any claim no one in Israel had knowledge of the plan beforehand. It would have been impossible for an entire intelligence community to miss EVERY sign of such plans unless they were essentially directed to ignore the evidence before them. That's exactly what happened.
WTH
No. of Recommendations: 2
The New York Times is reporting as of 11/30/2023 that Israel had intelligence at least one year prior to the October attacks of the Hammas plan. Not just knowledge, a forty page briefing outlining the scale of the planned attack.
Not only that. The Israeli military group focusing on Gaza said that the plan was basically wishful thinking, with no ability to actually accomplish it. And even though one of their highly experienced intelligence agents discovered that Hamas was preparing to carry it out, she was pooh-poohed. Copied from the article......
Then, in July, just three months before the attacks, a veteran analyst with Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, warned that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint.
But a colonel in the Gaza division brushed off her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by The Times.
“I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, fully matched “the content of Jericho Wall.”
“It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”
Officials privately concede that, had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them....
On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing.
The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times.
The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out.
The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off.
“In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.
No. of Recommendations: 9
And even though one of their highly experienced intelligence agents discovered that Hamas was preparing to carry it out, she was pooh-poohed.
I was going to sarcastically end my post with an obviously fake quote paraphrasing the likely internal response within the IDF... Who compiled this report? A woman? Pssssshhhhhhhwwwww. Figures. Nothin' to see here.
Figures, indeed. One could say the same thing was true in America. A group of intelligence specialists somewhere in the CIA or NSA had spotted the disconcerting pattern with visas, stays in the US, cash payments for FLIGHT SCHOOLS, etc. and reported it up the chain. The group was pretty much ignored cuz many of them were women.
WTH
No. of Recommendations: 2
One could say the same thing was true in America. A group of intelligence specialists somewhere in the CIA or NSA had spotted the disconcerting pattern with visas, stays in the US, cash payments for FLIGHT SCHOOLS, etc. and reported it up the chain. The group was pretty much ignored cuz many of them were women.
I wonder if you'll get the same political outcome in Israel that you had in the U.S. The Israeli electorate has historically been very unforgiving of intelligence and national security failures - the Yom Kippur War destroyed the political career of Golda Meir. So you'd think that this would be very, very bad for Netanyahu's prospects after the war. But who knows....
No. of Recommendations: 3
One could say the same thing was true in America. A group of intelligence specialists somewhere in the CIA or NSA had spotted the disconcerting pattern with visas, stays in the US, cash payments for FLIGHT SCHOOLS, etc. and reported it up the chain. The group was pretty much ignored cuz many of them were women.
That parallel occurred to me as well.
It's unfortunate that the highly esteemed Israeli surveillance/military interface may be tarred with the same oxymoron denigrating the Pentagon; military intelligence.
