The Israel Defense Forces’ Military Intelligence Directorate received information and plans outlining Hamas’s intent to launch a wide-scale attack against Israel over a period of several years, but dismissed the plan as unrealistic and unfeasible, according to a probe of the intelligence failures leading up to the October 7 attack.

Instead, the Military Intelligence Directorate falsely assumed that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was a pragmatist who was not seeking a major escalation with Israel, and that the terror group viewed its 2021 war with Israel as a failure and was focusing its capabilities on rocket fire, and not a ground invasion.

As part of its investigations into its failures during the lead-up to the Hamas terror group’s October 7, 2023, onslaught, the IDF has now determined that Hamas had decided in April 2022 to launch such an attack. By September 2022, the terror group was at 85 percent readiness, and in May 2023, decided to launch the assault on October 7, 2023.

While the Intelligence Directorate received information in 2022 describing a large-scale ground invasion of Israeli border communities and IDF posts, it was dismissed as something that Hamas viewed as aspirational, and not practical.

The probe blames some of the failures of the Intelligence Directorate on the body’s flawed culture, in which officials believed they had intelligence superiority over Hamas and failed to wonder whether they could be surprised by the enemy, believing that the large troves of data to which they had access made them aware of all of the terror group’s plans.

The IDF investigations, which explored as far back as the 2014 Gaza War, found that the Military Intelligence Directorate failed — including with its research and surveillance — to correctly identify and understand Hamas’s strategy, aspirations, capabilities, and operational plans.

The investigations attributed the colossal intelligence failure to deep systemic problems at the core of the IDF’s intelligence methods and culture that evolved over the years.

The Intelligence Directorate’s investigations, carried out by each unit in the directorate, were presented to The Times of Israel and other reporters.

The investigations found three major failures in the Intelligence Directorate that led to Hamas’s October 7 attack, which claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians, with another 251 kidnapped to Gaza.

1. An ongoing and large gap between the Intelligence Directorate’s understandings of Hamas and the reality, a gap that widened over the years, especially following the 2021 Gaza War. This included wrong understandings and assessments by the Intelligence Directorate of Hamas’s strategy, aspirations, plans, and military capabilities.
2. A failure to warn against Hamas’s surprise October 7 attack in the days leading up to it. The Intelligence Directorate failed to identify Hamas’s decision to carry out the attack, as well as the preparations by the terror group. No warning was given for the possibility that Hamas could launch any kind of attack on Israel.
3. The Intelligence Directorate’s limited use of surveillance to obtain critical information on Hamas. Over the years, despite the relevant information existing, the Intelligence Directorate had not collected enough intelligence on Hamas’s aspirations to carry out the October 7 attack, as well as the terror group’s overall strategy and decision-making.

The investigations found that the Intelligence Directorate made the following assessments before the war, many of which were later found to be entirely wrong:

The investigations traced Hamas’s route to the October 7 attack, using both existing intelligence and many new findings, including from interrogating Hamas terrorists captured in Israel in the onslaught or during the ground offensive in Gaza. It found the following:

The investigations also found that there were around 10 opportunities over the years where the Intelligence Directorate obtained information or observed incidents occurring, that if they had been looked at more critically, potentially could have contradicted the leading assessments on Hamas. In reality, these moments were incorrectly interpreted as part of Israel’s “conception,” the investigations found.

Some of the moments include: Sinwar’s rise to power in 2017, and the Gaza Strip becoming Hamas’s center of gravity; the initial information received on Hamas’s attack plans in 2018; the 2021 Gaza war, which left Hamas feeling powerful; the 2022 “Jericho’s Walls” report; Hamas’s avoidance of joining Islamic Jihad’s rounds of fighting with Israel; intelligence information in mid-2022 on Hamas’s aspiration for a multi-front war; and the night of October 6.

The investigation found that the Intelligence Directorate had indeed collected, since 2018, information on Hamas that revealed its plans to carry out a wide-scale ground invasion into Israel, to defeat the Gaza Division. The intelligence suggested that the plans had been prepared since 2016, but it was interpreted, over the years, as an infeasible and unrealistic plan by Hamas, representing their future aspirations.

In 2022, the Intelligence Directorate obtained information from Hamas dated August 2021 which described a large-scale ground invasion of Israeli border communities and IDF posts. It was put into a report known as Jericho’s Walls.

The information was analyzed and identified by the intelligence unit at the Gaza Division as something significant, and as such was presented to a group of officers. It was presented to the officers as a plan representing Hamas’s force build-up aspirations, and not something the terror group was currently capable of doing.

Intelligence officials did not connect the document received in 2022, Jericho’s Walls, to the previous intelligence dated 2016 with the same Hamas plans. Therefore, the latest version of the plan that Israel obtained was not seen as a continuation of the previous document, and as such was not considered to be anything more than an unready plan.

Jericho’s Walls was not translated into a scenario that the IDF could have prepared for and did not become the focus of intelligence surveillance.

In the months before October 7, the Intelligence Directorate obtained information on Hamas invasion training, which led some members of Unit 8200, the directorate’s signals intelligence unit, to believe that Hamas’s wide-scale invasion plans were no longer just aspirations, but a solid plan.

The Unit 8200 members did not point to any specific date or indicate that the threat was imminent but did suggest it could happen by surprise. This assessment was presented, both via emails and meetings, to intelligence officers at the Southern Command and regional officers of 8200 in southern Israel. However, the information did not reach any senior officials, including top intelligence officers.

The Gaza Division’s intelligence unit did begin to look into the different assessments by the Unit 8200 members in the months and weeks before the war and reassess their viewpoint on Hamas’s plans, however, they did not finish this process by the time the war started.

The Intelligence Directorate’s investigations found a number of reasons why it failed, including:

As a result of the investigation and a look at the Intelligence Directorate’s activity during the war, its chief, Maj. Gen. Shlomi Binder is formulating a new strategic vision for the unit, which will lead its operations and force build-up in the coming years.

In the short term, Binder decided the following:

Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, the chief of the Intelligence Directorate on October 7, resigned in August. Southern Command chief Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman, announced his resignation last month.