Indicators and Warnings

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood

This piece belongs to the thematic series, “Flipping the Board.”

The Israeli government initially claimed to have been caught by surprise when Hamas attacked on October 7, 2023. Officials later amended this assertion, stating instead that security services had misinterpreted the gravity of the indicators and warnings of the attack, and so failed to respond appropriately.

Israel has long employed all manner of intelligence collection, both human and technical, to keep Gaza under a proverbial microscope. The entities primarily responsible for the efforts are Shin Bet, the country’s domestic security agency, and Israeli Military Intelligence, also known as Aman. There are also a great many guard towers, cameras, and ground sensors lining Gaza’s perimeter with Israel.

For reference, at least for Americans, Gaza is slightly smaller in area than Philadelphia, but it is long, narrow, and backed up against the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza’s dimensions make the task of surveillance easier than in other locations, because Gaza has such little depth from east to west. Even from north to south, Gaza measures only twenty-five miles (forty-one kilometers). Surveillance of this small strip is accomplished by land, sea, air, and space. In fact, with the exception of Gaza’s border with Egypt—which is also Gaza’s widest section at seven and a half miles (twelve kilometers)—Israel controls all surrounding land and water.

The most pressing surveillance challenge comes from Gaza’s network of subterranean tunnels. However, tunnels are not a complete black hole in terms of intelligence collection and analysis. Those who enter these passageways also exit them. They meet with others, some of whom might relay information to their adversaries. They often communicate using technology susceptible to interception. Likewise, their movements on the surface are trackable by air and space-based platforms.

Israeli security services have demonstrated such skills many times over. For instance, after amassing ground forces on Gaza’s border in 2021, the IDF tweeted, “IDF air and ground troops are currently attacking in the Gaza Strip.”¹ But no such attack was underway at that moment. This was a ruse to lure Hamas fighters into tunnels the IDF then attacked with airstrikes. This is not to say Israel has perfect knowledge of the underground happenings in Gaza, only to note that one should not consider tunnels, particularly these ones, to be impervious to surveillance. Then, of course, there is the fact that many of Hamas’s preparations for October seventh occurred aboveground, in plain view, and over an extended period of time.²

Consider the things one is expected to believe simultaneously. On the one hand, Hamas outwitted Israel leading up to and on October seventh. But on the other hand, Israel was able not only to kill Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, but to do so inside of an IRGC compound in Tehran. Months later, Israel detonated the explosives its operatives had placed surreptitiously in thousands of Hezbollah’s pagers as part of a decade-long plot. Ten days after that, Israel located and killed the longtime Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, in Lebanon. In a little over a week, Israel did the same to six other members of Hezbollah’s senior leadership.

It is likely that many of these feats were the work of Mossad, Israel's other and best known security agency. But is one to believe that Mossad possessed seemingly otherworldly degrees of competence and cunning, while Shin Bet and Aman were unable to see the events in Gaza that unfolded—quite literally—right before their eyes, both before and on October seventh?

Consider, too, the AI-based targeting technologies, such as “the Gospel” and “Lavender,” that Israel employed in Gaza shortly after the attacks. In 2019, the IDF announced the creation of a Gaza-focused “targeting center” that made use of “the fields of data science and machine learning in order to acquire targets.”³ According to the Israeli press, the IDF employed such technologies in 2021 during “Operation Guardian of the Walls.”⁴ The Jerusalem Post noted the IDF’s use of “the Gospel” and similar systems in the operation, which they declared Israel’s “first artificial-intelligence war.”⁵

Here one is expected to believe both that Israel possessed and had used such potent sensor-to-shooter capabilities prior to October seventh and that Israel was sufficiently blind not to have observed and understood Hamas’s preparations for the operation. According to the IDF, the attack involved thousands of Hamas fighters—some on motorcycles and paragliders— and the use of approximately one thousand rockets and other munitions. Yet the IDF’s response came hours later, and an unusually high number of its ground units were occupied in the West Bank.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to delay a public inquiry. Two related developments occurred on January 21, 2025. First, Israel’s legislature passed a law “criminalizing the denial, minimization or celebration” of the attack.⁶ Second, the Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Force, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, resigned, “taking responsibility for security failures tied to Hamas’ surprise attack.”⁷

What issues might such a public inquiry address?

1. https://nypost.com/2021/05/14/how-one-idf-tweet-led-to-false-reports-of-gaza-ground-attack/

2. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67480680

3. https://www.israeldefense.co.il/en/node/37799

4. https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/gaza-news/guardian-of-the-walls-the-first-ai-war-669371

5. Ibid

6. https://www.timesofisrael.com/knesset-passes-law-banning-denial-of-october-7-massacre/

7. https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-news-ceasefire-hostages-01-21-2025-f836d6eb2d939c3c4bd241c79cad1ee2

Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gaza_conflict_map2.png