- Israel did not anticipate Hamas’ attack beginning Saturday despite having a top-tier intelligence service, provoking questions as to why.
- An unfounded belief that Hamas was not interested in military conflict may have blinded Israel to signs of the planned onslaught, according to experts and media reports.
- A combination of collection gaps, analytical failures of imagination and disciplined operational security by Hamas could all have led to this intelligence failure,” Emily Harding, a former intelligence official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
(Daily Caller)—Days after Hamas terrorists conducted its most brutal and complex attack ever on Israel, more questions than answers remain regarding how Israel failed to see the operation coming.
Hamas’ terrorists six-pronged Saturday assault on Israel — resulting in more than 1,000 Israeli deaths and a declaration of war — caught Israel by surprise despite the nation’s reputation as a top-tier intelligence power and its near laser focus on Gaza, The Associated Press reported. Nearly four days after the attack and as Israel prepares to carry out a massive war on Gaza, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation they remain baffled at how neither the U.S. nor Israel appear to have anticipated the operation.
While Hamas fighters trained, Israel let itself be deceived by Hamas leaders while turning greater attention to violence on the West Bank, political turmoil and fears of Hezbollah, experts said.
“The Israeli services are among the best in the world, so missing something of this magnitude is truly shocking,” Emily Harding, a former intelligence official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the DCNF. “A combination of collection gaps, analytical failures of imagination and disciplined operational security by Hamas could all have led to this intelligence failure,” she said.
“Strategic surprise is like a plane crash — it’s not any one thing that goes wrong, it’s lots of things that add up to a disaster,” Harding said.
None of Israel’s intelligence services — the Mossad, Shin Bet or Aman (military intelligence) — received any specific warning of the complex attack, The New York Times reported, citing an Israeli defense official and U.S. officials. This is despite reports, denied by official sources, that Egyptian intelligence warned Israel of an imminent attack.
During the attack, Hamas fighters infiltrated Israel in at least six different locations along a 15-kilometer arc with engineers to deconstruct obstacles, showing unprecedented tactical and strategic prowess that suggests the involvement of foreign powers, Can Kasapugolu, an analyst at the Hudson Institute, said in a statement shared with the DCNF. Hamas first took out Israeli surveillance outposts with drones before conducting a second wave of air assaults with rockets and paragliders, Times of Israel reported.
The plan likely took months to come together, with preparations beginning as early as mid-2022, The Washington Post reported, citing a Western intelligence analyst.
Hamas’ ability to prepare for the attack without raising alarms raises serious questions regarding Israel’s knowledge of terrorist groups and how Iran uses them to threaten Israel, experts said.
“HAMAS, PIJ, and the other groups involved exercised exceptional operational security discipline and engaged in purposeful disinformation and deception to indicate that no sort of attack was likely,” retired Col. Rich Outzen, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told the DCNF.
“Israel’s ability to detect indications and warnings is unmatched,” Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the DCNF. That there is nothing to suggest either the U.S. or Israel anticipated a complex attack suggested that Hamas “and likely its terror sponsor in Iran have developed methods of evading intelligence collection,” he said.
Hamas fighters trained for the operation sometimes in plain sight while the political wing led Israel to believe it would accept economic carrots like work permits in exchange for cessation of violence, Reuters reported, citing a source close to Hamas.
As part of the preparations, Hamas built a mock Israeli settlement and filmed military drills storming the settlement, the source told Reuters.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another Islamist group operating in the Palestinian territories, learned of the operation just hours before it was scheduled to begin when Hamas invited the group to participate, Al Jazeera reporter Ali Hashem reported, citing an Islamic Jihad source. The same outlet reported even most of Hamas did not know, citing a Hamas source. Details of the operation were known only to a small group within the Qassem Brigades, which the military wing of the Hamas organization, the source reportedly said.
Reuters offered a similar account, saying that Hamas sought to minimize leaks by including only a handful of leaders in the planning process. Most Hamas fighters did not know the purpose of the exercises.
Israel has not had an overt physical presence in Gaza since 2005 but appeared to maintain significant covert electronic sensors and human sources in the region even after Hamas took control in 2007, according to the AP. Precision strikes on buildings ostensibly concealing Hamas leaders and tunnels used to ferry fighters and supplies through the region appeared to demonstrate Israel’s persistent eyes on the small territory.
Expert consensus has not yet emerged on what may have contributed to the failure, and who to blame.
Israel may have assumed that its defenses, including the Iron Dome air defense system, border fences and sensors, would deny Hamas any route by which to launch major attacks, according to Haaretz and The Economist writer Anshel Pfeffer. It may have relied too heavily on the belief that economic relief would suppress hostilities to a manageable level. Finally, it may have believed Hamas would not risk triggering a war with Israel.
Hamas had not attacked Israel in two years, leading Israel to believe the organization’s Gaza-based leader Yahya Al-Sinwar had no time to coordinate assaults amid struggles to manage chaos within Gaza, Reuters reported.
“We believed that the fact that they were coming in to work and bringing money into Gaza would create a certain level of calm. We were wrong,” an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson told Reuters.
“The problem is that intelligence was available but conflicted with prevailing opinions about intent,” Outzen told the DCNF. “The deception, and the view that longstanding operational concepts of containment, limited retaliation, and positive inducements were working led to missing the pattern that turned out to be real.”
Internal dysfunction also played a role, according to Kim Ghattas, a fellow at the Columbia Institute of Global Politics, said. Political disunity distracted the Israeli government from external developments.
“There’s deep disunity in [the] system,” she wrote. The army and intelligence agencies may have communicated to parliament, but politicians in their “hubris” could have ignored the warnings, she suggested.
Harding disagreed. “Intelligence professionals are mission-focused, and a mission as important as protecting Israel against terrorist attacks is above political wrangling,” she told the DCNF.
Levels of trust between Netanyahu and the military have declined amid institutional disagreement with the prime minister’s proposed judicial reforms, Outzen said.
Others said that Israel has devoted more attention to the threat from Hezbollah to the country’s north. Larger and more advanced than Hamas but no less hostile to Israel, Hezbollah was seen to present a greater danger. Israel also re-positioned military resources to the West Bank following a spate of minor clashes with militants there, where Jewish settlers who comprise part of Netanyahu’s base have called for a security crackdown, according to the AP.
“Right now, with terrorists on the loose, rockets flying, hostages held and a massive counteroffensive being planned, there’s little time for finger pointing. But there will come a time for that once the dust settles,” Goldberg told the DCNF.
Hamas has released video purportedly showing its forces training to breach the Gaza border fence. Note the training is taking place in the open, in broad daylight. How did IAF ISR miss this? pic.twitter.com/qTg8pPNocX
— Bill Roggio (@billroggio) October 10, 2023
Questions have also emerged regarding whether Israel misinterpreted or shrugged off more obvious warnings of an attack.
In August, a senior Hamas leader told the pro-Hezbollah network the organization is “preparing for an all-out war” and is “closely discussing the prospects of this war with all relevant parties.” But, he said the strongest resistance would come from the West Bank.
Swirling reports of sometimes contradictory information further complicate the picture.
Egypt’s top official for intelligence allegedly warned Netanyahu that Hamas was planning “something big,” but Israel ignored repeated warnings from Cairo, an anonymous Egyptian intelligence official said, according to Times of Israel. However, Netanyahu denied the reports.
“No early message came from Egypt and the prime minister did not speak or meet with the intelligence chief since the establishment of the government — not indirectly or directly,” Netanyahu’s office said, according to TOI.
Unnamed Egyptian sources also denied the story, Haaretz reported.
“Judging adversary intent is always the hardest,” Harding said.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.