School of War - Ep 227: Yaakov Katz on What Went Wrong on 10/7

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

Yaakov Katz, senior fellow at The Jewish People Policy Institute and author of While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East, joins the show to discuss Israel���s intelligence and military failures on the night of 6-7 October, 2023. ▪️ Times     •      01:35 Introduction     •      02:47 Foundational facts     •      09:45 Communication failure           •      17:39 Minority reports     •      25:40 Left alone            •      30:15 Accountability           •      39:37 Cultural costs     •      47:30 A deal Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Today's interview goes into a fascinating minute-by-minute account of just what went wrong for the Israeli security services on the night of October the 6th into the morning of October the 7th, 2023. The Israelis continue to wrestle with this controversy two years on, and I think understanding the nature of Hamas's success is important for anyone interested in the nature of deception and self-deception in war, and for any of us concerned about how new wars might look in their opening hours. Let's get into it. Follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today. Yakov Katz.

He is a co-founder of the Mead Policy Forum, the former editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post. He's a senior fellow at the Jewish Pupil Policy Institute and the author, most recently, of a book called While Israel Slept about the October 7th attack. Yakov, thank you so much for joining the show. Aaron, it's great to be with you. Thank you for having me. So I want to take us back to 2023. Your book covers a lot that happened before October 7th and a lot that's happened since. But I think for the purposes of this conversation, actually really understanding what went wrong, both on the day itself and then sort of

expanding out from there will be of real value. I have long harbored the concern that we in the United States underestimate the role that surprise can play in on the modern battlefield and that if you look at the Pacific, there's an argument to be made that we, we are likely to be the victims of a surprise that can some respects resemble what happened on October the 7th, structurally speaking. So your book has a remarkable kind of tick talk of the events of both the sixth and the seventh. And what's so fascinating in what you document is that for as much as it was, obviously a surprise of a sort. It definitely didn't come out of the blue. It was a busy night, the sixth and the seventh. What were the first concrete indicators on the day prior itself that were

obviously misinterpreted, but with the benefit of hindsight, we know that they were indicators that something was afoot. Well, I mean, let's keep in mind a couple of just important foundational facts here. Israel and Hamas have been at war pretty much up until 2023 for about 25 years or so, ever since Hamas really became powerful force inside the Gaza Strip. And definitely since the summer of 2007, when Hamas effectively took control of Gaza and became the governing entity over the Gaza Strip. And if you look from that point forward, Israel pretty much fought a war or a round of violence, if we want to call it that, some sort of conflict with Hamas every 18, 24 months up until 2023. So it wasn't out of the ordinary that there was always

going to be a heightened state of alert. There was always going to be a lot of intelligence collection on that border inside Gaza. Israel was always supposed to be vigilant of what was happening. But at the same time, when Israel was looking at its different fronts from the north to the south to the east and the west and also far away to the north east where Iran is located, it. Hamas was deemed to be probably the weakest of Israel's enemies and the most least threatening of Israel's enemies. Yes, it had capabilities. Yes, it had rockets and thousands of fighters and several tens of thousands of rockets. Yes, it had tunnels. But it wasn't deemed to be a threat that had anything of strategic proportions. And I can tell you, Aaron, that after speaking over the last couple of years now,

almost two years since the war began with members of definitely the top echelons of the IDF, but also ministers in the security cabinet, when I ask a lot of them, what was your greatest lesson now in the past 22 months or so since the war broke out? The answer often is the same. We were surprised that Hamas could be a strategic threat. So I start by answering your question with this because I think this sets the stage for understanding this mindset or the state of mind that Israel found itself in on that weekend that we went into before the Saturday of October 7th. What began to happen on Friday, and already in the middle of the night pretty much between Thursday and Friday, were some indications of Hamas beginning to do something, although

unclear what it was going to do. For one example, on Friday, so September 6, Hamas, about 100 or so cell phones in Gaza suddenly switched their SIM cards from their Gaza cellular phone to their, to an Israeli SIM card. Now, when you're in Gaza, you don't need an Israeli SIM card, right? You're pretty much just calling people inside the Gaza Strip. Why would you need an Israeli SIM card? And this is something that would lead to an indication that maybe Hamas is planning to invade Israel. And once they cross the border, they won't have their cellular coverage, so they would need to have Israeli cellular coverage. That was one thing that happened that set off some alarm bells, if we could call it that,

that got people thinking, okay, something might happen. Later in the day, they began to look at other indicators that were coming out of Gaza, but definitely late that night, a Friday night, after the Sabbath had settled inside Israel, and it was a weekend, a holiday weekend, part of the Simchat Torah holiday, which is the culmination of the Sukkot holiday, the intelligence agencies began to see that Hamas was doing a number of additional things. One was it was uncovering some underground rocket launchers. Two, it was preparing bunkers inside Gaza, some of them that are used for the more senior officials of Hamas. All of this led some of the people within the IDF and in the

shinbet, which is the counter-terrorist intelligence agency focused on Palestine. Indian terror, that something might be happening. And then when they took that whole pie and kind of put it together, the question really came down to one. Is it a drill or is it an attack? And then the second question was, let's say it's an attack. What type of attack is it going to be? And here, at the very worst scenario, they thought maybe half a dozen, a dozen, 20 people would try to cross the border, nothing of what ended up happening on October 7th when eventually several thousand people invaded Israel. But that question of drill or attack is essentially where Israel failed and where Israel made the wrong conclusion of what it saw happening, and that led to a total

lack of preparedness. I mean, you know, you're a veteran, you know this better than a lot of people, Most people. This border, for a lot of people who have visited it over the years, right, know that it was really one of the most fortified borders in the world. Electronic fences, remote-controlled weapons, right, in case you saw somebody there. The joke was that if a mosquito flew near the border, Israel would see it, detect it with radars and you've got a phased array radars, all the different kinds. The fact is that had they taken two tanks and put them up on the border a little closer, turned down the floodlights, had they put up two Apache gunships along the border, and said, hey, guys, we see you, we know you're thinking about something,

probably nothing ever would have happened. It was that simple to potentially have stopped this from happening. So there's a lot there I want to unpack. Let's start with the intelligence services in this conclusion that they come to, that it's probably a drill, but on the chance that it's an attack, it's a small scale attack, which I take to be the kind of general consensus that's arrived at by mid pre-dawn morning. What is striking? Your books called, While Israel Slept, and I guess Israel was literally asleep, as we're unfortunately at the tactical level, you know, things were not on a high alert. But at the more senior levels of the military and the intelligence services, they weren't asleep, quite literally. It was a busy night. And you

document, you know, these calls that the IDF chief of staff is having, the Southern Command, all the relevant senior players that you, you know, all the relevant senior players that you, you would hope would be taking this seriously. Well, they are taking it seriously. They're just, their imaginations do not take them to the place that they, they need to get to. Maybe for an audience that isn't, you know, completely familiar with the structure of things, talk a bit about, you mentioned Shinbet had particular responsibility for this. Talk a bit about the structure of the Israeli intelligence or security community and these different

pieces that were playing important roles that night. And ultimately, what I'd like your answer to take us to is how they, how they either communicate, well or failed to communicate. Because clearly, there were people at a senior level who were concerned, and then the more junior you got, the less that trickled out. Super important question. And I would say that really, I'll jump for a second to the end. But when my co-author and I, Amir Bukhbut and I wrote this book, we were very much troubled

with, okay, this happened once. How do we ensure it does not happen again? And not that, you know, we're just two journalists, writers, authors. is we don't carry that burden of responsibility. We're not the policymakers and the decision makers. But if not investigated and really studied, and one of those examples that we do talk about at the end of the book is, okay, what can be fixed? And we do get into the weeds a bit of potential lessons on the intelligence agencies. And we even borrow from the 9-11 commission. So I'll get to that in a moment. and this will just explain why. Israel has, for general purposes, three primary intelligence agencies.

One is called the Mossad. It's basically the equivalent of the U.S. CIA. It's for foreign espionage activity, very well known for covert operations all across the world, but primarily, for example, in recent years in places like Iran and covert operations against Iran's nuclear program. The second agency is the Shinbet, which is, as we mentioned, focused on Palestinian terrorism, so hyper-focused on the West Bank and very much on the Gaza Strip. And then there is what's called Amman, and that is the Hebrew acronym for what's known as military intelligence. It's basically the IDF branch, the Israel Defense Forces branch of intelligence. So lots of collection, lots of analysis, lots of research, and some operations. It does do some operations covert mostly. One unit that's very famous that is attached to the intelligence corps is Sayyaret Marcal, the general staff reconnaissance unit, very well known for operations, the kind of the 1976 raid on the Antebi airport to save those Air France hostages, where Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyo's brother was the commander of that unit and was killed. So those are the three at that time. Those are the three primary intelligence agencies that operate. The Mossad was not relevant here because Mossad looks outside of Israel in farther away places,

doesn't focus on Palestinian terrorism. Throughout the night, what we had were conversations that went on between mostly the shinbet within its own up structure. So you have a director of the shinbet, and he has different deputies and different commanders who are in charge of different areas and sectors and different subcategories, and then military intelligence. They were talking mostly among themselves, not with one another. There was an occasional conversation at the lower level between some of the deputies with one another, but not between the directors, neither of military intelligence or the head of the shin bet. In addition, the head of the

IDF at the time was a general by the name of Herzli he did not speak throughout the night with the director of the shin bet. The first phone call and conversation that they had with one another, and they're basically colleagues, right, they're both directors or both heads of these agencies, and one of the military, much larger, but one of the shin bet, only spoke literally when the attack began at 629 in the morning, when the head of the shin bet said to the command, the chief of staff of the IDF, be ready, they might be kidnapping people. And of course, we know 251 people were abducted by Hamas on that day. But during the night, you had also the commanders more on the tactical level who were speaking among themselves and with one another. So Gaza is overseen by a

structure called the Southern Command. It is the regional command that is responsible for the Gaza Strip, for the border with Egypt, and for some parts of the border with Jordan. And now we're switching over to the idea. This is the military we're talking about. This is within the military, exactly. The head of the Southern Command, who's responsible, has overall responsibility for Gaza, in addition to the border with Egypt. And like I said, the border else with Jordan, he did have some conversations with the Gaza Division Commander. That's the officer in charge of looking just at Gaza. So this is a two-star general who's in charge of the command. The Division Commander is a one-star general. They were speaking with one another. But they did not drill down.

deep enough to know all of the intelligence that was happening, all of the different indicators, shin bet basically to make it simple, had some stuff that it saw. Military intelligence saw some things of its own. Somewhere at the higher military intelligence level, somewhere at the division intelligence level. And what I'm getting at, and you know this from 9-11, which really was the epitome of the failure when there's so much intelligence and so many different players, but they're not shixt. You know, sharing it with one another is how do we create a system that can better coordinate and make sure that the flow is everybody seeing everything and everybody's seeing the same thing and everybody understands what the other understands. And if we don't have that, and I'll, I don't want to

drag on for too long, but I'll just add one last piece to the puzzle. The shin bet and the Mossad, they are subordinate to the prime minister directly. The military intelligence commander is subordinate to the IDF chief of staff, who's subordinate to the defense minister. Now, you can imagine in a country like Israel, highly politicized, where oftentimes, because it's a coalition-based government, your defense minister could be the leader of a different party than the prime minister. They could be political competitors. So you now have a situation where I'm the defense minister. I don't like the prime minister. I'm his competitor or contender in a future election, maybe I won't share everything I know with him and vice versa. That's not healthy.

When you're in a situation like the one we're discussing, we really have to see everything to understand the full picture. So you have throughout the night all these various indicators because you can't, I mean, it ends up being what in essence is a brigade level assault from Hamas, which can't really be hidden. Though they have to do, you know, they do a creditable job of a deception plan. Both you suggest in your book that there's traffic. that leads the people listening in to suggest that this is a drill. Like the Hamas deception plan involves leaning into presenting what's happening as a drill. But then, and here's where I want to get you next,

all of this traffic is coming across and being digested, but being at the end of the day, you know, misassessed, because it's happening within the context of this broader understanding of what Hamas is capable of and what Israel's interests with respect to Hamas are, this conceptia, which I know. has been a big subject of conversation in Israel for the last couple of years. So that's one dimension of it, which I want you to speak to, which why was the Hamas Deception plan so successful? What was the Israeli mindset that led to this success on Hamas' part?

And then the second piece of it that I'd like you to speak to is you document in the book, several will call the minority reports, you know, I don't know what phrase you would apply to them, but you did have in the lead up to the attacks, the years, months, and weeks leading up to October the 7th, Israeli security officials or in some cases relatively junior members who did in fact predict what happened or at least saw things that led them to be much more concerned than people ended up being concerned that night. So take that in whatever order you please. The minority ports that were ignored were the broader Israeli mindset with regard to Hamas that led to the success of this deception point. You know, at the end of the day, I think that

what we have here, and this ties into how you opened up, Aaron, where you spoke basically about the challenge of a strategic surprise. And you spoke about them more in the arena of the Pacific. But really, the challenge here for any military at the end of the day, you know, we often think about is preparing for the next war, not by preparing based on the last war, right, which is always going to be a challenge for a military because it's very easy to train based on what you just saw or just experienced on a battlefield, you don't know exactly what's going to happen, but also constantly in challenging your preconceived conceptions or ideas or the state of mind. I've become something of a critic now because of this. And after writing

this book, deeply disturbed by what I've discovered, but I believe that to an extent Israel fell in love with a fairy tale. And this is going to sound very simple. But the fairy tale was that we could live alongside a genocidal terrorist organization that we see what they're saying. We see what they're doing and we hear what they're saying. We see them training. We see them practicing. We see them creating mock IDF bases inside Gaza and showing how they storm them and kidnap soldiers. We see, we know they have tunnels. We know they had tunnels that crossed into Israel. They popped out of them. They kidnapped a soldier that way. They killed other soldiers that way. We know that they have long-range rockets. We've seen over 20 years how their first rockets flew maybe

300 meters. Then they went to fly a couple of kilometers. Then they went to fly dozens of kilometers. We saw how they were constantly upgrading and improving and everything was getting easier and better for them. And at the same time, we said, you know what? We can live alongside this. We don't have to take action. We can hit them on the head every once in a while. We can play a game of whack-a-mole. We can focus more on getting the money from the Qataris

and about helping them improve their quality of life with economic prosperity and allowing in workers from the Gaza Strip into Israel to work. They don't want war. And that idea, what you called the misconception, the misconception, is what exploded and blew up in Israel's faces on October 7. That's what was shattered. And really, at the end of the day, the question is, how does a country fall into this place of, I guess complacency is probably the best word, but this situation that it believes that

somebody who they see is training and practicing and developing capabilities to kill them is saying, we want to destroy you. Israel, as a country is saying, no, you don't. You just want money. No, you don't. You just want workers to enter into Israel. How does that happen? And the problem here, and I think that this is the great challenge is you see in this case, definitely, that from the top down, so even from within the political echelon, into the top command of the military, down to the tactical level of Battalion commanders and brigade commanders and division commanders, everyone assumed that this was in fact the case. Now, there were people, like you said, these minority reports, there were people who challenged the conventional wisdom.

There were what we call in Hebrew the Tatspitanioats, the spotters, the surveillance soldiers. These were the young female soldiers who were famously kidnapped by and abducted by Hamas, five of them, or six of them, sorry. One was rescued in a military operation early on in the war. Five were then released in one of the hostage releases and prisoner swaps midway through the war. But these were women who sat in these command posts along the border and saw things that were happening that raised their suspicion. These are people, these female soldiers, their entire job is to watch sectors of the border and to analyze what's happening. And anything out of the ordinary, to bring up to their higher-level commanders. And they did, and they wrote these reports, and they were completely ignored because they didn't fit in to the conceptia, to this belief, to the paradigm.

There was the defense minister back in 2016, a Vigdor Lieberman, who didn't come from the military. He was not, which typically is where the Israeli defense minister does come from, is usually a former chief of staff or a former high-ranking officer. In this case, he was a civilian. He was a Russian immigrant.

He was somebody who did, he wasn't part of that group of people, that click of military generals and officers, but he saw things already back in 2016. And we got our hands on his report on his paper that was classified at the time, top, top secret. And he presented it to the cabinet. And he gave it to the prime minister. And in this report, he says, Hamas is on track within a couple of years to launch a surprise invasion against Israel.

and they are developing longer range rockets and deeper tunnels, and they are going to have greater capabilities and more deadly means, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and nothing was done with this report. It was just put into a drawer somewhere and thrown away. So there were people who called it out, but they were the outliers. They were the people who weren't coming from within. I think this is really the great challenge for any military or any institution for that matter, is how do we deal with,

somebody who's a disruptor who's coming to challenge what we think is to be the right way. And especially when you're dealing with life and death, like what Israel saw happen on October 7th. And what led to being dragged into a war that no one ever would have imagined would last as long as it has. I've wrestled with this question myself and other Israelis to include some senior security officials I've talked to in the years since October 7th really emphasized the issue of the worker permits. to me as an important element of the Hamas strategic deception plan, that Hamas, of course, wanted Israel to be complacent and wanted Israeli intelligence officials and politicians and so forth to believe that, okay, on the one hand, yes, Hamas is constitutionally committed to the destruction of the state of Israel. There's no getting around that. But in practice, they got to collect

the trash. They got to run a series of pretty big cities over there, and that takes money. And there's just, you know, you got to be a grown-up political operation, and at some point, that's going to take away from the amount of energy and time you have to devote to your genocide. And to me, the success of this speaks, this is just a theory that I nurture. I'm curious your response to it, that it speaks to Israel sort of fundamentally, you know, I don't know if you want to call it Western or liberal or whatever it is character and this notion that we in the West, broadly speaking, have. The purpose of politics is the preservation of peace, that we want as peace. We want the pursuit of a good life, a good life for our families, a better life for our children than we had, ideally.

And that's what it's all about. And any sane person has that as their goal. And so any evidence Hamas could give that they were sort of lapsing into that was eagerly, eagerly taken up. Because at the end of the day, you know, and what's so stunning is it's Israel, which of all Western nations is the nation, maybe along with the Ukrainians, most right to be paranoid about everything. And it's Hamas at the end of the day, this sort of self-declared a bunch of terrorists that it occurred to that it just speaks to the fundamentally Western character of the place. That's just my pet theory. I don't know if that appeals to it. I'll tell you something, Aaron, I think you're hitting the nail on the head. And this is also why when we finish the book,

we were both very concerned. Because at the end of the day, what is it that Israel wants the most, is to be left alone and to be able to live a quiet and peaceful life. That is what Israel has always sought after. It is why Israel has made peace with Egypt, giving back the Sinai. It's why Israel walked away from Gaza 20 years ago in the summer of 2005 and gave it, handed over to the Palestinians and thought, here, make something of it. It's why Israel tried to make peace with Syria and tried to make peace with the Palestinians for so long and made peace, of course, with Jordan, normalization with the Abraham Accords.

Israel just wants to be accepted in this region. And therefore, when there was an opportunity to kick the can down the road, so-called, and to say, okay, they're focused on economic prosperity. They have to take care of the garbage. They got to take care of the hospitals. They got to take care of the schools. Let's help them with that. They're more focused on that.

We tell a story in the book about how Israel even was in touch with other Arab leaders who were coming into Gaza, meeting with Yachiazinewar, and was getting reports. from them where he's, yes, he's committed to the ceasefire, he's committed to the quiet, he just wants to keep getting the money, he wants to keep building up Gaza. It made it seem that Hamas was, I don't want to say normalizing itself, but was focused on governance as opposed to genocide. The problem is that Israel at the end of the day needs to recognize that it doesn't live in a neighborhood like Belgium for that matter. It's not Luxembourg. It's surrounded by these genocidal regimes or terrorist organizations, unfortunately, that just don't see things the same

way that you and I do, right? Western people, we tend to fall into a trap. And I think that this happens often. And we've seen this in America's wars over the years also. We look at the other person. And we say one second, he has two eyes, two ears, two arms and two legs. He talks. He can even speak English sometimes, he must have values and a set of ethics and principles similar to ours. And sadly, the reality is that that's totally not true. Their values are very different than ours. They seek, unfortunately, in the case of Hamas, death and destruction. And we, Israel, and I think the rest of the West, seek life and progress. And that is where this clash will always take place. And the real challenge going forward is how do you not fall back into that trap?

Because we'll have quiet after this war for a period of time, definitely. But then at some point, it could be a year from now or five years from now, you'll see Hamas moving a rocket. You'll see them digging a tunnel. You'll see them training once again. And then the question is, what do you do? Do you preempt? Do you hold now by an preemptive strike policy that everything that you see, every rocket, every tunnel, every bad guy you're going to attack and risk a spiral into a larger conflict? Or are you going to say, hold on a second, it's the summer, it's the end of August, it's the beginning of the school year, it's a holiday season again, it's a weekend. Let's write it up where it is.

We'll put down it the dot on the map and we'll remember, and then we'll deal with it next time. And then next thing you know, you're back where you start. So we've been talking so far about the failures of the intelligence services and intelligence collection apparatus and the analytical apparatus. And if you like kind of like political failures, at a deep level, like failures of political conception. Let's talk a bit about the military itself and the IDF during the attack and immediately prior to the attack.

This is where I suppose I'm as a reader of your book and of somebody who's been looking at this for a little while myself, I suppose I'm the least. least forgiving. I've been fooled before in my life. I could be fooled again. But as somebody who once served in the infantry as a relatively junior level commander, I mean, it's your job in that position to be paranoid. And frankly, to not trust the intelligence people. If the intelligence people tell you that everything is okay, well, that's probably you should have a natural instinct to be distrustful of that. Talk about the IDF itself that morning and what happened there and how this division that was, you know, again, you document the division commander's up most of the night.

He's talking to his brigade commanders. He's talking to his boss at the Southern Command. And yet that division is overwhelmed that morning. They are, they are effectively overrun and helpless in the face of this assault, even though, of course, there's individual valor all up and down the battlefield. How does that happen? No, you're 100% right. And the, the IDF here failed in such a terrible way that really is something that. that is a stain on all of these officers who were involved. Many of them have already gone home. I think that more need to step down and eventually also be held accountable for what happened. There is something to be said, and this is a big question that you can go different ways on,

but somebody who has failed, you give them the chance to potentially correct themselves and learn from these mistakes also. There might, could be, I could see the value in that. But take the Gaza division as an example. This is one of the largest bases along the border with Gaza. It's called Raim. This is where the Gaza Division headquarters are located. The commander himself was there. Avi Rosenfeld, he has, of course, since stepped down and taken responsibility.

But he was in the base over that holiday weekend. He's locked inside the command room. It's called the Hamal. It's the very heavily fortified command center in the center of this base. I've been there a number of times. Hamas, when it crosses into Israel, it does it very quickly, just with a few small squads. They use drones to drop munitions onto the cameras and the remote control weapons along the border to block those. They immediately, those who initially cross in with motorbikes, speed very quickly to these border-like.

positions and blind them, cut their communications and cut. So basically, not only can they no longer see, but they also can no longer speak to one another. So take, for example, you're Avi Rosenfeld, you're this one-star general, brigadier general in your command center in Gaza division headquarters. You have no clue what's happening outside. You can't see anything. Your cameras are dead. You can't talk to really to anyone because you don't have communications because they've knocked those out. And now it's just a battle with. within your base. It's going to be a numbers game. How many soldiers do you have with weapons and how many terrorists are coming in at the same time? And there were some amazing,

courageous battles that took place. Some of them with Israel winning, some of them with Israel losing. And that's, for example, what happened at the Nakhal-Oz surveillance base, where those female spotters, those surveillance soldiers, were taken captive. 15 were killed. And the six were taken by Hamas, alongside so many other soldiers who were killed in those battles there, they were just completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of Hamas terrorists that crossed in. But what this also led to is there's been a lot of criticism, for example, where was the Air Force, right? Why didn't they throw up a couple of, again, Apache gunships or, you know, Black Hawk helicopters, whatever it would have been, cobras along the border and just start to blast whoever's

trying to cross into Israel. I mean, I personally spoke with pilots who boarded, you. their F-16s and F-15s and flew out to the Mediterranean to protect the gas fields and the gas rigs because the thought was that Hamas might try to launch a surprise attack against Israel's vital economic assets at sea, right? No one understood what was happening and that this can happen along the border, right? So the fact was, how did this happen? Where was the Air Force? So I've heard so many conspiracy theories. There was a mole. They had a spy that someone on the inside.

I think it's much simpler. The Air Force couldn't talk to the border. There was no one there who could get on the phone and say, this is what's happening right now. No one understood what was happening. There was no one there to tell them what was happening because they were completely disconnected and cut off. And that's what led to this tremendous failure.

So you see really that when you look at the failures themselves, we kind of, we break them in the book, we break them up into three, there was the intelligence failure, misreading what you and I already spoke about, was this a drill, was this an attack, what type of attack, what was happening. That was failure number one. Now, Israel should have been able to still prevent something because we've built up the greatest defensive border in the history of mankind, right? It puts the DMZ between both Koreas to shame. I mean, this is, it has an underground wall to prevent tunnels. It's got an above ground wall. It's got those remote control cameras. It's got soldiers and tanks and you name it. The fence should have stopped them,

but the fence did it because they were quick and they were smart and they knew how to outsmart it. But then you have your IDF troops who are deployed along the border. Where were they? How come they weren't as vigilance as they should have been? Why weren't they on alert? That goes back to the intelligence mistake. But I think all three of those are tactical mistakes. they pale in comparison to the bigger conversation we had about the so-called misconception, about the paradigm, the wisdom or the conventional wisdom at the time, that Hamas doesn't want war. And once you assume that Hamas doesn't want war, that trickles down and overtakes everything else. Yeah. Yeah, there's clearly an overreliance on the obstacle plan, on the wall and on the,

on the sensors, and clearly a very smart operations plan on Hamas's part to, you know, disable these things. But I'm going to run another sort of pet theory by you, and I'm very curious to this. I don't think I've ever said this in a public forum. But, you know, the IDF, the Israeli security infrastructure writ large is capable of some amazing stuff and has done some amazing stuff since the fall of 2023. It's done some amazing stuff over the life of the state of Israel. I mean, just to pick one recent example, the campaign against Hezbollah in the fall of 2024, the various supply chain attacks and sort of whiz-bang aspects of that. It's hard to think of another military that could be quite as spectacularly successful and outperform expectations so spectacularly. It really was just

a remarkable addition to the proud, remarkable new chapter to Israeli military and security history. That all said, all militaries have cultures and they're good at some things and less good at other things. And the story I'll tell is I've been to Israel numerous times since fall 23. One time, this is during 2024, I won't, I won't say which command I was at because I don't want to get anybody into trouble. But the group that I was with, we got a brief from one of the regional commanders in Israel, sat in the general's conference room, fascinating conversation, brilliant guy. It was an honor that he was willing to take some time away from, you know, an actual war to to tell us what was going on. But here's my story. We come out of the conference room, and there's

a couch in the hallway outside of the conference room. And on that couch is a young, soldier. I don't know exactly what his rank was, but he was young and he was junior. And he's on the couch outside the general's conference room. And he's doom scrolling on his phone, one leg up on the couch, kind of slouched there. We all walk out, the general walks out. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't stand up. No one says anything to him. And now we all go with our day. And this is a totally insignificant incident that has no real impact on anything, except it's graded on me to this day. Because I think back to my time in the American Marine Corps, as a very junior, I was a company commander was my most senior billet. And I try to think of a world in which I walk out of my office

as a Marine Corps captain with a young Marine slouched on a chair outside the office, doom scrolling on his phone, and a world in which that would be possible. And the truth is it's not possible. There is no universe in which that could happen. In the universe in which it did happen, I don't want to say summary execution would have been the consequence because that is illegal. But, you know, suffice it to say that I would never have to say a word. Some Marine non-commissioned officer would have stepped in long before I ever opened my mouth and corrected the deficiency and the sort of highly disciplinary and dot your eyes, cross your tease world of the United States Marine Corps. Now, does that come at the cost maybe of some create, that culture, that

marine culture, does that come at the cost of some creativity? Maybe. That's an interesting conversation to have. But Marines famously are very good at standing post. They're very famously good at the kind of unrewarding, unpleasant, like the pain is the point. kind of duties that being successful in the world of the infantry kind of requires. And here's my pet theory assertion to you, Yakov, is that I nurture this worry that there's something about the IDF that is just not naturally at home in the defense. They're just not naturally at home in the long, boring, unromantic work of watching the line because you don't have to be creative to do that.

actually sometimes creativity can get the better of you. You convince yourself that you've been creative about things for which actually there are no creative solutions. And you just have to stay in there and watch the damn place and be ready at times when you wish you didn't have to be. And that's and that's, this is a cultural observation based on I grant, you know, sort of ridiculously limited anecdotaph, nevertheless. It's a worry of mine.

You know, first of all, you picked up on something that I think is fascinating. In one of my previous books called weapon wizards, I look at how Israel created really some of the most advanced military technology. A lot of it we've seen over the last two years of this war, missile defense, Iron Dome, Arrow, our satellite capabilities, our cyber capabilities, our Mirkava tanks, all different kinds of different tech. And a lot of it comes from the fact that we have a culture in the military that has no structure, no hierarchy, that young, soldier, commander, whoever it was, who didn't bother to stand up for the general. That's classic Israeli military culture. There's no saluting. There's there's arguing it's the is Jewish trait or Israeli traits of chutzpah. It's the constant questioning of authority. Some people look at it as insubordination here in the IDF. It's viewed as a strategic asset because it leads to, it's

supposed to lead to that type of questioning, to that culture. of innovation and creativity, and it has served Israel. I mean, you mentioned the pager attack against his Bala. Wow, unbelievable. Look at what Israel was able to do against Iran and creating aerial superiority and taking over the skies over Iran and causing that damage to Iran's nuclear program and uranium enrichment facilities

and, of course, to its ballistic missile production. Unbelievable, thousands of miles away from Israel's borders. I mean, to be able to do that. But at the same time, it comes at a cost. And the cost is exactly what you put your finger on, Aaron, is hold the line. Just look at the border. Now, take the Gaza border as an example. It's one of the fascinating, it's really one of more troubling stories, I think, of October 7th.

Israel, back in the first time we saw a tunnel used against Israel as a cross-border tunnel was 2006 when Hamas crossed in and kidnapped one Israeli soldier, who was eventually released five years. later in exchange for about 1,500 Palestinian prisoners, among them, the leader of Hamas on October 7th, Yachia Sinwar. But we saw in 2014 in another operation, semi-war, mini-war between Israel and Hamas, more tunnels that were used. What did Israel do? It invested billions of dollars in building an underground wall to stop tunnels. It invested billions of dollars in creating tunnel detection systems using sonar and

and like earthquake-like technology, you name it, all seismic technology, all available, made available for the IDF, all uniquely developed for the IDF. How many Hamas guys, terrorists, crossed into Israel through tunnels on October 7? You know what the answer is? Zero. Not a single one. So that huge investment in technology, that huge investment in underground walls and seismic and sonar, and you name it, was for nothing.

because they didn't use those tunnels. They just crossed above ground. And what you needed there was, like you said, the soldiers who could hold the line, and they were not there. And that is the other flip side of when you have two laxiculture, when you neglect the core mission to some extent, which is what just the basic mission of being a soldier, of standing guard, of watching the enemy,

and just looking at it for what, it is and not always thinking about the creative solution. I mean, I'll give you another example. Iron Dome, everybody knows what Iron Dome is today, right? One of the most amazing, sophisticated, innovative systems in the world, missile defense, small little rocket called the Tamir, able to intercept rockets, short-range rockets that are fired from Gaza. First goes operational in 2013 and takes what was potentially a strategic threat and turns it into something that no longer has to drag Israel into a war. If a rocket lands and kills someone, you have to respond. But if a rocket doesn't land, you know, it's like the famous tree. If no one hears it, did it really fall in the forest?

So if the rocket's fired, but you intercept it, do you have to do anything? You don't have to respond. You could sit back and say, we got this under control. When you think about it, on the one hand, Iron Dome is amazing, saves lives, prevented wars, prevented economic damage to Israel, prevented did casualties in Gaza, because if Israel were to retaliate, there would be dead people in Gaza, also. But on the other hand, it was a tragic mistake because what it did is, again, this brilliant technology led you to believe that the real, that the threat was something that you could contain and that the basic military challenge of a bad guy crossing your border and coming to kill you, you don't have to think too much about that one. When really, that was exactly the challenge

and exactly the threat that you needed to prepare for and you were not prepared for. Yeah. Yeah, again, it's probably more a function of my own experiences than anything else. The decisions that bother me the most are the ground combat commander decisions kind of at the level of the division commander, the brigade commanders, the guys who had some knowledge that something was afoot and didn't order, you know, the full stand too, didn't order the alert. I've been to the main base down there, the Gaza Division base,

prior to October 7. I've also been to some of the, I won't attempt the Hebrew word, but the observation posts where the young female soldiers watched the screens. Actually, it was not along the Gaza border. I visited a couple of those installations

up along the Lebanese border, also prior. Yeah, they have them along that border as well. Yeah, by the way, I thought they were amazing. I mean, it was such a clever idea, too, in the way in which sort of, if you will, like the gender stereotypes were played into, I think usefully, you know, like assigning these tasks to young female soldiers

who seemed sort of natural. very good at it. But then, you know, you have such an obligation, I don't fully understand why these posts had to be immediately co-located on the border themselves, where the observers were. But if you're going to do that for whatever reason, you just have such a moral obligation to provide security to these troops who are not combat troops, but who are right there on the line, I mean, immediately in the face of the enemy. And the failure to do that, I realize this is sort of silly coming from America and at a great distance, but it does, it does bother me and it does great on me. And you know, these guys, to include at the brigade commander level, in many cases,

extremely valiant. Like, you just, the Southern Brigade commander, you document, you know, he leaves a six-year-old child who's on the base with him in the care of somebody else as he ruffs, rushes off into the fight and he's killed in combat that morning. Like, there's nothing to do with his body is still held in Gaza as we speak. Yeah. And it's nothing to do with courage and everything to do with just the dumb business of being in the infantry.

Well, look, I commend your book to everyone, Yaakov. I think it's important in the United States that we study this ourselves and we understand what went wrong because there's absolutely nothing preventing us from making similar mistakes, whether at the intelligence level or at the military level or at the political level.

I can't let you go without asking you, and I'll say we're recording this here on Monday, August the 25th, and this won't be up for a week, so a lot can happen. But obviously, things are not resolved in Gaza. Israel's made enormous strides, It's, you know, on its northern front and with regard to Iran, the whole Middle East is different, and I think largely to Israel's advantage than it was in the fall of 23.

But in Gaza, we're still in a tough spot. Where do you stand on this question of what comes next? This question of the hostage negotiations and attempted a negotiated solution versus taking Gaza City, which seems to be the current direction. Again, this could all change before this goes up in a week. But what are your thoughts on what comes next or what ought come next? I think that everyone understands at this point that a deal will be needed for this war to somehow end. And the deal will have to include the return of the hostages, whether it's done in a phased way.

So some hostages, some sort of temporary ceasefire and more negotiations for the rest of them, or is it all hostages in exchange for an end to the war and some release of the Palestinian prisoners that Israel has? Those are, I would say, in the details, very important details, but that's the detail. The real question that Israel grapples with right now is after that deal is done, what is going to be the governing entity inside Gaza and what is going to prevent Hamas from reconstituting itself? Because that's the great challenge. And I think that here we have yet to hear from the government in Israel what that plan looks like. And who is that entity going to be? Is it going to be Israel itself that is going to continue to occupy Gaza? Well, then that's not going to work because Hamas won't agree to that. And I don't think the Israeli public either is going to agree to that. Israel will have to retain some sort of security control along the border, due to Gaza, what it does in the West Bank, goes in and out, carries out operations as needed, but not necessarily a permanent presence in all of Gaza, maybe just in some of the critical lines like,

what's known as the Philadelphia corridor along the border between Gaza and Egypt, where they used to have hundreds of smuggling tunnels and they got some of the more sophisticated weapons. So if Israel can keep that area under its control and prevent the smuggling of arms, that's important. But the real question here is when we look to the future, how do we prevent Hamas from rebuilding, reconstituting? And it might take five or ten years or fifteen, but being able to have the capabilities once again to launch another October 7th style attack. And that's going to be the greatest challenge for the state of Israel. I think definitely for this government to be able, because the government of Netanyahu right now is

very right wing, does not agree to certain Palestinian actors, even those who come not from Hamas to be part of any future government in Gaza. So who then will it be? That's going to be the real challenge. But I think that at the end of the day, most of the degrading of Hamas has been achieved. Most of the military objectives have been met. And now it's about bringing the people home in a way, though, that we don't lose all of the accomplishments that we have achieved in this war.

And I'll just say one last thing, because I think this is probably the most important way to look at it to some extent. Hamas' attack on October 7th, which we document in the book. book was so successful because what it did was not only did they kill about 1,200 Israelis that day. It was the most Jewish people killed on a single day since the Holocaust, since World War II. That itself was the disaster, enough of a disaster. But by taking people hostage, they put Israel in a bind. Because what they did was I could have told you, Aaron, on October 8th, that we will win this war because we're going to get back. all the hostages, but Hamas will remain in power. I would have said that's a victory. You would have

told me that's a loss. That's a defeat. And you could have told me also on October 8th. We will get back, we will bring down Hamas. It will no longer govern Gaza, but we will lose the hostages. I would have told you, that's a defeat. And you would have told me that's a victory. There was always going to be that tension here. And that's what made Hamas so its attack really so successful is they put Israel between Iraq and a hard place that's still so many months later, almost two years later, this country, which is so powerful, so strong, still can't find its way out in a clean way. Yaakov Katz, author of While Israel Slept, an important book, I think, in a really interesting

conversation today. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.