Bloomberg: Hamas attack is Israel's biggest intelligence failure in 50 years, with casualties amounting to hundreds

Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7 can be considered one of the biggest failures of Israeli intelligence since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The attack involved the kind of planning and coordination of military action that intelligence services should have known about.

Bloomberg writes about this. According to an article published on the agency's website, although Jerusalem has long claimed that terrorists were preparing for violence, the timing and scale of the attack allegedly came as a surprise to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israel, as well as the United States, which has allocated $3.3 billion for Jerusalem's defense in 2022, will investigate who is responsible, the journalists said.

"I am shocked that they (Hamas - Ed.) were able to do this without Israel or the United States noticing. The inability to prepare... The failure to deploy troops along the border, the destruction of the fence along the border, for which they paid millions of shekels," said former US Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk.

The Hamas attack comes 50 years after Israel failed to repel a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria during the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday, Bloomberg writes. At the time, a commission to investigate the intelligence failure was set up, with many studies and academic publications devoted to the attack.

"The real problem is probably that the Israelis simply did not believe that Hamas would risk breaking through the border. The lack of sufficient Israeli forces in the area was a serious failure," said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The failure may also be investigated by the US Congress, given that Israeli and US intelligence agencies should have been expected to detect the preparation of such an attack, the article says.

Israel's intelligence services allocating significant resources to monitor Palestinians, including Hamas, through networks of informants and surveillance technologies, were not helpful as well.

As reported by OBOZREVATEL:

- On October 7, militants of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas launched a massive rocket attack and ground invasion of Israel. In the evening, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) regained control of some border towns. On the morning of October 8, 350 Israelis were reported killed and 1800 wounded, and 750 more people went missing. The Palestinians reported 265 deaths in the Gaza Strip.

- On October 8, Israel announced its entry into a long war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assured that its first phase ended with the destruction of most terrorists and the rescue of hostages, and advised residents of the Gaza Strip to "flee immediately."

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