Why did Mossad fail to foresee Hamas attack on Israel?

The ease with which dozens of Hamas fighters were able to enter Israeli towns and hit military targets across the border has raised questions about how Israel's formidable intelligence failed to see what transpired over the weekend.

The question is all the more pressing is Mossad, Israel’s main spy agency, has a wide range of espionage technologies and has long relied on moles inside the Palestinian armed groups to glean information. They routinely provide Mossad with detailed intel on the operations of such networks.

Such a massive and deadly attack by Palestinian fighters who launched a land, air and sea-based incursion simultaneously shouldn’t have gone unnoticed. But that didn’t happen.

How could Mossad have missed that?

“Israel's much heralded intelligence and surveillance apparatus failed catastrophically [to prevent the attack],” Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory – a recent book that takes a deep dive into Israel’s advanced spy technologies - tells TRT World.

“Heads will roll in the Israeli military and political apparatus in time but I doubt this will have much impact on Israel's surging arms industry, already at record levels in the last years.”

Loewenstein added: “The entire Western world is backing Israel and will want to support the Jewish state by purchasing its weapons and endorsing its brutal decimation of Gaza".

Wanting to save face, Israel will not share publicly how its vast intelligence apparatus failed. But analysts are already coming up with different theories.

One opinion holds that Hamas, weakened by years of Gaza blockade, was not viewed by Israel as capable of launching an attack on such a scale and it was the Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon that posed a more likely threat.

Arguably Hamas took advantage of this perception, gradually putting into action its attack plan – from building rockets it fired at Israeli cities to tearing down, with a bulldozer, the barbed wire fence that separates Gaza from Israel – without drawing immediate response from Tel Aviv.

Another theory, similar to the first, holds that Israel failed to recognise the resourcefulness of Hamas.

“Israelis knew the malevolent hatred that animated Hamas,” suggests a Washington Post article. “What they didn’t appreciate was the creativity and competence of their adversaries. This was a level of organized malice that was, literally, unthinkable”.

Though it is misguided in calling the attack “organized malice”, as it emanated from a morally sound desire that Palestine be free of cruel decades-long Israeli rule (he says nothing about the malice involved therein), the subtext of his observation is correct: the scale of the attack, let alone its impressive logistical and other coordination, was not anticipated by Israel.

Conceivably their arrogance towards Palestine has something to do with that.

Instead of seriously reckoning with what the Palestinian resistance movements have taught the world over the years, testifying to the effectiveness of the element of surprise rather than sheer military might, they’ve chosen to downplay such efforts.

Has there been internal fighting within the Israeli state that, willy-nilly, stopped it from acting quick enough to stave off the attack? Its columnist seems to think so and, as the third theory goes, believes that it was allowed to happen since Mossad saw its secular character directly at odds with Netanyahu’s ultra-orthodox religious government.

This leaves open the possibility that Mossad did know or at least have some intel about the Palestinian attack. However, given the lack of co-operation, it was not inclined to communicate such information to Netanyahu. In turn Israel became a more accessible target for the Palestinians.

Whatever the reasons Israel or, more specifically, Mossad failed to stop the attack it’s impossible Israel “just let it happen”, says David Miller, a Senior Research Fellow at Istanbul’s Centre for Islam and Global Affairs.

According to Miller, “it is a major embarrassment that the [Palestinian] resistance factions, not limited to groups publicly being described as ‘Hamas’ have been able to apparently – and at will – leave the open prison of Gaza and over-run more than 10 Israeli bases and some 20 settlements”.

“The casualties among the IDF [Israeli army],” Miller continued, “appear to be very high including large numbers of commanders and senior officers and in addition somewhere in excess of fifty have been taken prisoner, again including a general and other commanders. It is now three days later and counting and Israeli media are reporting that gun battles continue in Israeli towns”.

It’s unclear how much longer this will continue. But one thing is certain: Palestinians, in the last few days alone, have shown they are adept in undermining a much stronger and well-equipped military power.