Excerpt

It’s now clear that a rare Israeli intelligence failure enabled the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas to overrun the border and carry out the coordinated and bloody assault that claimed more than 1,300 Israeli lives and rocked the country to its core.

For more than a year, the Israeli intelligence services—the Mossad (foreign intelligence), the Shin Bet (domestic intelligence), and Aman (military intelligence)—were operating on the faulty assumption that Hamas no longer wished to invite painful wars upon the beleaguered population of Gaza. They believed Hamas was content to export violence to the West Bank, where political rivals in the Palestinian Authority cling to power and where the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had been struggling to contain unrest that has been steadily building since March 2022.

Jonathan Schanzer is senior vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on X: @JSchanzer.