The Daily - The Oct. 7 Warning That Israel Ignored

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

 In the weeks since Hamas carried out its devastating terrorist attack in southern Israel, Times journalists have been trying to work out why the Israeli security services failed to prevent such a huge and deadly assault.Ronen Bergman, a correspondent for The New York Times, tells the story of one of the warnings that Israel ignored.Guest: Ronen Bergman, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.Background reading: A blueprint reviewed by The Times laid out the Oct. 7 attack in detail. Israeli officials dismissed it as aspirational.Here’s the latest on the war.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. In the weeks since Hamas carried out a devastating terror attack inside of Israel, my colleague Ronan Bergman has been investigating what kind of warnings Israel missed beforehand. Today, the story of one of those warnings. It's Monday, December 4th. Ronan, this is your first time on The Daily, and you bring a unique expertise

that I'd like you to describe for just a moment, because you have been covering the Israeli military and its intelligence services for decades, and you've gotten to know those worlds extremely well. Israel is the country that I think is influenced by its intelligence service more than any other country in the Western world. It always had the biggest intelligence community per capita. And today, it's the second biggest intelligence community in total number after the U.S. Wow. So just think of the size difference of those countries. Right, right. Yeah.

So Israeli security strategy is based on the intelligence services to supply a pre-alert to any kind of enemy intent to launch a preemptive strike on Israel. To supply with viable real-time intelligence what are the intents and the capabilities of the enemy and it's vast it takes massive resources and it has a lot of secrets every day they create unbelievable stories not all, by the way, are glorifying them. Sometimes the Israeli James Bond looks more like Inspector Clouseau. But it's always interesting and it's always very consequential. There's no historical turn. There's no historical event.

There's no major decision-making process in the history of Israel that the intelligence community didn't have like a massive important imprint, if not the decisive role in that. So this is my professional task. I'm trying at least to give the readers of the New York Times a better understanding of how this secret realm

is so consequential on everything we see in the real world. You, of course, end up spending a lot of time after October 7th trying to understand how Israel's government failed to anticipate that attack or really even blunt it. It's always been in my head this question that didn't leave, that didn't stop bothering me. How could this happen? that didn't stop bothering me. How could this happen? And what I was getting at the beginning when I was speaking with people, even at the first evening, with sources, with officials,

throughout the intelligence community and the defense establishment, they all said we had no idea. They all said there was nothing. Just a total 100% shocking surprise from zero to 100 in a second with no clue, nothing that would suggest that this is coming. Were you skeptical of that, Ronan? and this, I would say, spontaneous and very fast admittal into something that an intelligence officer would not like to admit,

which means that the coverage, the intelligence coverage, human intelligence, signal intelligence, cyber, and all the rest just failed completely. Nothing. The channels were empty. So I thought either it's courageous, people with kahunas who say we failed. But because I heard this from multiple, multiple directions, I thought that's a little bit odd.

Maybe some people are courageous and maybe some people are very fast to admit something that is very embarrassing right but in order to hide to cover up on a much darker truth and so i started to speak with sources and then i think it was two days after the war began when a source said listen 8 200 that's the israeli equivalent to the nsa or the british gchq the Cyber and Signal Intelligence Unit, which is the biggest single unit in the Israeli defense establishment. And also one who takes the best brains, the best youth when they are being drafted to the military. So they said 8200 long ago stopped or diminished its dealing with tactical communication of Hamas. But then after a few days, I get another source who says this is not even important because the real story is not about what they didn't know, not about the lack of coverage, tactical or strategic, whatever. It's about what they knew.

There was the sources. There was something big in the pipeline. And he suggests to say they knew something about how this is going to happen. But the source was vague. The source was evasive, which of course makes me a little bit mad.

So I said, I know this is not what you want to get. And maybe one day I'll tell you. And I said, I told the source, listen, if there's a dark secret in A200, in our days, this will not remain a secret for a long time. And then I start hearing something that's codenamed or named the email thread with the Southern Command. People start describing something to you as the email thread of the Southern Command.

Yes. And I start hearing stories that there's a woman who alerted, who got it right. And then I got access to the email thread. And in summary, what does it tell you? It tells me that there is a veteran professional analyst that is sitting in an intelligence base in the south this base is in

charge of the intelligence collection from gaza it's a massive base and this woman is studying the battle techniques of hamas and so in july 6th of this year she writes the first email in that thread where she is describing a military drill that haas was running in the center of Gaza City with two platoons. And she starts and say they were making this military exercise and it was madness. And she is describing the drill. The drill, the exercise, including taking down a helicopter. They are imitating the possibility. So they are taking down Israeli helicopter.

They are taking down Israeli fighter jet. They cross the border into Israel. They raid a kibbutz. They put the flag on the synagogue of the kibbutz. They put the flag on the synagogue of the kibbutz. And then they raid some kind of military academy. They kill all the cadets. Of course, there are people playing there.

From early dawn until the night, they were doing it with bigger forces, bigger capability. And generally, she says, I never saw anything like that. It was madness. Now, madness is not usually a word that you use in those usually very dry intelligence reports.

She said, that was shigaonu, teruf in Hebrew, madness or crazy. It also had a sense of almost, I would say, she adds, here is another small addition. One of the commandos was speaking over the radio with another one. Commandos was speaking over the radio with another one, and he was using a quote from the Quran, from Surah Al-Mad'a, which is this specific chapter. The quote was, whoever passes this gate and surprising the other side will get the blessing of Allah.

And she says, referring to the addresses of the email, you remember this quote? This is the same quote that is at the very beginning of Jericho Wall. Hmm. I just want to pause for a minute, Ronan. So in the days after October 7th,

you end up obtaining these highly sensitive internal emails in which this analyst has picked up on an elaborate drill in which members of Hamas very much seem to be planning some kind of attack. communicating this drill to the people she works with. This analyst invokes a quote from one of the commandos, uses this phrase, Jericho wall. It seems like that phrase might mean something. What do you end up coming to understand it means? She uses that twice. And it's clear that it's not physically the walls of Jericho, which is, you know, an ancient and modern city. It's in the Bible, the Israelites came and surrounded that Jericho and toppled its walls and conquered the city. So it's clearly a code name.

And she referenced to that code name and says, what we see in that drill is in complete overlap with Jericho Wall. So suddenly you want to know what on earth is Jericho Wall. Yes. And so I start asking around. When you say Jericho Wall, you say, ah, the booklet. I hear this a lot. Oh, the booklet. You mean the booklet.

I hear this a lot. Oh, the booklet. You mean the booklet. And at a certain point in a certain military facility, I was able to get and read the booklet, Jericho Wolf. And what is it? Last updated Hamas plan to attack Israel. Wow. It was obtained by Israeli intelligence after massive effort during 2022, more than a year ago. And it's about 40 pages. I saw the translation to Hebrew. This was the one that was shared with many seniors and analysts inside Israeli intelligence. And I said, it's shocking because the first thing you realize is the depth of intelligence that Hamas was able to gather on Israel. Like what? The purpose of Jericho Wall is to take down the Gaza Division. Gaza Division is the division that is protecting the Israeli-Gazan border.

They control a massive fence which is erected above ground and underground to stop the tunnels, but it's also fortified with many cameras and communication hubs. And I see all the details, the secret details of how this works, how many people, where they sit, where is the headquarters, where are the regional brigades, where are the towers with the machine guns,

where are the scouts watching them and operating them. You see everything into how the front is built and protected. In the hands of Hamas, in this booklet that Hamas has written in a plan for attacking Israel. But they take the intelligence and they translate that into a detailed attack plan that describes how to attack the border. to attack the border, first to have a massive bombardment with mortars, rockets, and missiles on Israel to create diversion. They have a detailed plan how to neutralize the cameras, the communication hub, using drones, using paraglides. And then they have raiding forces that are tasked to break the fence in 60 different places.

Wow. And of course, everything you are describing from this plan is precisely what happens on October 7th. That plan becomes a reality. Nobody could believe that this could happen, but it did. To the details, this is the master plan for what happened on October 7th. Right. So I want to return to that analyst

you mentioned earlier, because she clearly does take this report seriously. She warns in an email that she thinks that a drill that she's watching happening in Gaza is basically a dry run for the Jericho wall plan that she has read. And so what happens when she flags this to the people around her? So first, everybody are complimenting her for the detailed job that she's doing, because I'm just giving you the gist, but this is a long memo with very detailed, meticulous work.

And then the intelligence chief of the Gaza division, he says, compliments, compliments, He says, compliments, compliments, intelligence gold, but we need to keep that in proportion. We need to differentiate between what they do for show-off and what they're really able to do. Because the scenario, he says to the analyst, the scenario that you described at the beginning of this email, conquering the kibbutz, putting the flag, this is imaginative. So he challenges her reading into the current, current meaning in July, current Hamas capabilities,

and he says, no, they can do this on dry when there is no enemy, so no Israelis when they're not actually firing. But this is for show off but she is not shy she is reacting she says this is not imaginative this is not something that they are hoping to do this is something they want to do and capable of doing and then she says something which is i think maybe the most important. She says, this is a plan for invasion, not a plan for a raid.

Because the whole terminology of everybody, even the unit that is in charge was raid. Raid, small scale, two platoons crossing the border. She says, this is a preparation for war and it can happen. So the analyst's colleague, who's a very important figure in keeping Israel safe from Gaza, he basically says to this analyst, I think you're wrong. This isn't a drill for a real life attack. Hamas can't do what you think they can do. Thank you for your work. It's very impressive.

But your worries are misplaced. And the analyst comes back and says, no, no, no, no, you are wrong. They can do this. This isn't for show. You should be very worried about this. But ultimately, his view carries the day. His view carries the day because this was the common wisdom. She was going against the stream.

She was saying something, together with two of colleagues from her base that supported her in the exchange. She was saying everything you, everybody else, believe about Jericho Wall is wrong. Jericho Wall is for real. Jericho Wall is for real and it's about what Hamas is capable of doing

now we'll be right back. Ronan, help us understand why no one took these warnings from this analyst seriously, and ultimately, why nobody who read the Jericho Wall blueprint behaved in a way that might have stopped this attack. The intelligence blunder has three parts. First of all,

a total misreading of Hamas' mindset, or maybe be more precise, what was going in the head of Yechia Sinua, the leader of Hamas? In Gaza, right. In Gaza. They know him for a long time, 22 years he spent in Israeli prison.

Right. It's not a new guy. They knew that there's a struggle in Hamas. One part wants to be a ruler of a state that is theirs. If you are governing a state, you need to take care of the water, of the electricity, of the sewage, of the health. You cannot afford yourself to be in all-out war with Israel because then you cannot supply those services.

And the other side of Hamas was about a permanent status of war. And Israel believed that SINWAR was ultimately starting to lean towards governance and away from war. Yes. And Israel believed that this is going towards a good place. Five days before the invasion, the national security advisor for Prime Minister Netanyahu, someone called Zahi Hanegbi, gave an interview to military radio where he said, Hamas is totally deterred.

They learned the lesson from the previous round of hostilities this May 21. They understand the price of defiance. They don't want that. And it's all going towards the direction of calm period. So you're describing a misunderstanding or underestimating of Hamas intent. Of Sinoir intent, Sinoir and his buddies, the people around him in Gaza, he took a decision. This is about intents. Well, what else explains this failure to heed the warnings of this

Jericho Wall report beyond misunderstanding Sinoir's intent. Professional intelligence analysts will make a clear distinction between assessing intent and assessing capabilities. So if you fail one, the other will have sort of a safety button. But here, I think they were influenced by the understanding that Sinoir is not going towards war.

It is not planning an all-out attack against Israel. And so maybe subconsciously, they didn't understand how important is the military buildup. Now, some of this was just deception. So for example, Hamas did not do a full exercise of all the fighting forces. So there was no one incident, many, many military drills. But there was no single event that Israel could see all the different platoons together standing.

And you're saying the capacity that Israel did see, they underestimated it because they had allowed their views of that capacity to be so colored by their determination that Sinwar, that Hamas, was not in this moment a threat. So their views of intent bled over into their views of capacity. Yes. And also just maybe poor intelligence, poor assessment, poor professional understanding. Just maybe poor intelligence, a poor assessment, poor professional understanding. In November of 22, Israeli Southern Command is writing a memo. They say Hamas have between 2,000 and 3,000 Nuchba commando gunmen trained and ready to be deployed. However, Hamas is capable of deploying only 70. Okay, 70 is not that bad. It dictates a total different set of preparation and defenses from Israel.

So on top of everything you're describing so far, Ronan, a misunderstanding of intent, a misunderstanding of capacity, I'm curious how much Israel also just misunderstood its own security system, right? Israel spoke so frequently about this fence, which turned out wasn't impregnable. The fence was created as a lesson from a round of hostilities in 2014 when Israel discovered that Hamas is digging tunnels from Gaza into Israel. Now, those are very hard to detect, very hard to destroy. And Israel started to think of

how technology can solve that. And six years later, they finished building this massive barrier that had also, that like above ground wall and underground up to 100 meters deep with sensors, with explosives.

In practice, it solved the problem of the tunnels. Hamas was not able to continue with this anymore at all. But it forced Hamas to be smarter. It forced Hamas to work on an open field and plan how they will execute Jericho Wall above ground. And nobody in Israel believed that this can be like open. If it's open, then we don't need to detect

them. We have all those computers and telescopes and scouts and cameras. We'll see it. People got completely, people of the military, got completely enchanted by the wall. And in time,

they allocated fewer and fewer forces to the southern front. And those forces were less and less alert because it's all about technology. In short, you're saying Israel became complacent. The forces on the border were not sharp, were not ready, because they said that defense is invincible. You see the videos from the day of the invasion. You see how easy it was for Hamas to break the fence. And you don't understand the gap between invincible and, you know, just one bulldozer. Just take it out. What would have happened in a world where the Jericho Wall report was taken much more seriously, had been distributed much more widely, and more and

more people in the military and in the government took the view of this analyst, for example? How easily could Israel have prepared for and prevented the ultimate October 7th attack if they had decided that report, that plan was for real? So the other day, someone very high rank official in the Southern front, he calls me and he asked me to come to see him privately. So I understand it's something very secret. And when I come and see him, he says, do you know what is Jericho Wall? I said, well, as it happens, I know.

Because you hadn't yet published your investigation. Yeah. And he said, I didn't know until yesterday. He didn't know. And I said, okay, what would you do if you knew? And he says, there are two options here. Either you deem the force of Hamas at this moment is too risky to Israel, and then you go to preemptive surprise attack against Hamas to take them down.

But also acknowledging, we both said this immediately and simultaneously, there was no government, no prime minister, no public that would support such a ground invasion before October 7. So the other option is to prepare in case that happens. Some steps are easy, put landmines behind the fence. And some are by far most significant. So instead of four battalions, Israel would need to have throughout the year four to five brigades. This is massive. We're talking about like 20,000 troops. But there's no other way. We're talking about like 20,000 troops.

But there's no other way. Because if you think that there is a threat, if they have the capability, you don't need even to think about the intent. None of that happened. They did not put landmines. They did not enlarge the forces because they didn't think it's real. So I have to ask, what has been the reaction to your reporting within Israel? The Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said there will be a moment to account for his government's failings to prevent October 7th when the war is over. Is what you have found here, the existence of this report and the failure to take it seriously, is that going to mean that when that accounting comes, it's going to be devastating, especially for him? Benjamin Netanyahu is occupied mainly with one thing, to put all the blame on the shoulders of the intelligence and the military.

Now, not that they didn't fail. They did. Their leaders took responsibility. They said, we failed. We will conclude the necessary lessons after the war, which is in Hebrew, that means that they will resign. But first they said, we need to fight. Benjamin Netanyahu said, it's not me. It's them. Here, they took responsibility. And in any case, we don't investigate now. Now, if there is a true investigation after the war, what we discuss now, this is going to be one of the main chapters of the investigation panel. Right. How could it not be? No doubt. Where a senior New York Times editor asked a high-ranked official if there's a moment he regrets in hindsight that he could do something else.

And that person said, we will all have a lifetime to think about that. So we're talking about high-level officials, but I'm curious how much this attack and the idea that it was preventable, how that has changed how everyday Israelis view this enormous military intelligence apparatus that we have been talking about here that was supposed to protect them? I think most Israelis didn't need the New York Times to know that intelligence failed because the failure is just all over the defense establishment. The failure to prevent and then, when it happens happens to rush the forces and save those people that are being butchered was clear from the first evening. And he writes exactly

into the reasons why Israel was established in the first place. The promise that every Jew that comes to Israel will be protected was one of the main cores of the establishment, the DNA of every Israeli. That contract between the state and the Jewish people was brutally violated.

When I was a kid, and basically throughout my life, everyone always complained about the government, that it's dysfunctional, that it's corrupt. But everybody were also living under the assumption that whatever the government does, the defense establishment is a different island, is a different universe. And they might fail from time to time,

but at the end of the day, they will supply the necessary security that would prevent any enemy to reach Israeli territory. That feeling of confidence was hammered. People in Tel Aviv now are afraid to leave their houses. And so this intelligence blunder will haunt the Israeli future for many, many years. Well, Ronan, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you, Michael. Pleasure to be with you.

Over the weekend, Israel appeared to set the stage for a ground invasion of southern Gaza by bombarding the region with airstrikes and ordering residents of several towns there to leave their homes. ordering residents of several towns there to leave their homes. In remarks to reporters, a spokesman for the Israeli military sought to dispel the idea that Israel's goal of destroying Hamas could be accomplished in a short period of time. The spokesman described a, quote, long war that is not bound by time. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. On this vote, the yeas are 311, the nays are 114. Two-thirds voting in the affirmative, the resolution is adopted. The chair announces to the House that in light of the expulsion of the gentleman from New York, Mr. Santos, the whole number of the House is now 434. The expulsion of Republican Congressman George Santos of New York on Friday over serial fabrications and allegations of theft from his own campaign has touched off an intense battle to replace him. The Times reports that the governor of New York is expected to schedule a special election to fill Santos' seat in February,

an election likely to become one of the most high-profile, competitive, and expensive off-year races in decades. Santos' former district on Long Island is politically moderate, and both Republicans and Democrats see it as a major electoral prize in a closely divided House. Today's episode was produced by Rachel Quester, Mooj Zadie, Carlos Prieto, and Stella Tan. It was edited by Patricia Willans and Michael Benoit, contains original music by Mary Lozano, Diane Wong, and Dan Powell,

and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Rundberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.