Intelligence Scoop: Could Netanyahu Have Prevented October 7?

The events of October 7 2023 reshaped the Middle East. But could what happened on that fateful day, and everything that has come after, have been prevented? Listen as David and Gordon dig into whether there is any truth in the reporting that Benjamin Netanyahu was warned about the October 7 attacks, and chose to do nothing. ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: therestisclassified.com/newsletter ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee 🌍 ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:03David McCloskey?

  For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books, join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com.

• 0:25David McCloskey?

  The events of October 7th, 2023 totally reshaped the Middle East. But could what happened on that fateful day and everything that has come after have been prevented? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey.

• 0:38Gordon Corera?

  And I'm Gordon Corera.

• 0:40David McCloskey?

  And we are about to reach the third anniversary of the October 7th attacks. Now, we're not going to tell the full story of October 7th here. It is a grim tale of a horrendous terror attack and an absolutely devastating war in Gaza. But we want to zero in on one particular question. Was there an intelligence failure?

• 0:59Gordon Corera?

  That's right, because it is a question, David, that's been asked ever since the attack itself, in the immediate aftermath. But it's actually grown and been particularly in the news recently because of, I think, quite a stunning report from the Israeli newspaper, Harretz, which we're going to analyze, which suggested a specific warning to Israel's prime minister. And it's hugely political, this question, and important because there is an election campaign going on with polling on October 27th, and it's finally balanced. And the issue of whether Benjamin Netanyahu received a warning and what responsibility he might bear for that intelligence failure, if there was one, is clearly a massive issue in that election campaign.

• 1:42Gordon Corera?

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• 1:50Gordon Corera?

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• 1:52David McCloskey?

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• 2:38Gordon Corera?

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• 2:56Gordon Corera?

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• 3:40Gordon Corera?

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• 5:22David McCloskey?

  So, October 7th. To start, I think it's worth setting up what actually happened on that day.

• 5:28Gordon Corera?

  Just to bring it to life, I think it's important to set the scene of Gaza itself. Gaza is a narrow 25-mile strip of land, with Israel on the north and east side, the Mediterranean on the west, and Egypt on the southwest. It's got a population of just over 2 million Palestinians, and it's been run by Hamas since 2007. I visited Gaza, and I stayed there before the Hamas takeover, so quite a while ago. It's a densely packed place with the border crossings very tightly controlled by Israel. Now, Israel thought it had built a high-tech wall around Gaza as we get to October 7th. There'd been a 20-foot-high barrier put up.

• 6:09Gordon Corera?

  It's part of a billion-dollar upgrade, which they'd finished in 2021. And as well as this fence, there's also concrete under the fence, underground, which is to block tunneling. There are surveillance towers at intervals. There's cameras, even remote-controlled guns. And yet, on October 7th, 2023, at 6:30 a.m., Hamas takes Israel and its security forces by surprise. Hamas begins by firing rockets from inside Gaza out into Israel. That's, in a sense, cover for what they're about to do. It's not necessarily that unusual. But then Hamas fighters target the cameras, the sensors, the remote-controlled weapons on the fence.

• 6:54Gordon Corera?

  They use drones, which drop explosives. Then they use explosives and anti-tank mines to blow holes in the fence. And then thousands of Hamas-led gunmen head out from Gaza in vehicles and on foot, on motorbikes, from about 30 different breaches in that fence. And then they go on to attack nearby Israeli communities, military bases, and a large music festival. On that day, about 1,200 people were killed, and 251 others were taken back to Gaza as hostages. And of course, Israel at that point then responds by, soon afterwards, launching a military campaign in Gaza, during which it's estimated that at least 73,000 people have been killed,

• 7:39Gordon Corera?

  according to Gaza's own Health Ministry.

• 7:41David McCloskey?

  And I guess it's probably also worth saying, although it won't be the subject of our conversation today, that that includes over 70,000 children, and 90% or so of Gaza's population has been displaced. So that day, and the events of that day, and everything that has come after have completely shaken and changed the Middle East and the world. And Israel had been convinced beforehand, we'll talk more about this, that its intelligence, and in particular, the technical intelligence that it collected on Gaza through those cameras, the sensors,

• 8:25David McCloskey?

  the just blanket of coverage that the Israeli state had over Gaza, would be good enough to provide warning of major attacks. But on October 7th itself, I think most of us could remember, the day is just an absolute movie of confusion and destruction and chaos as those Hamas troops and gunmen stream into Israel through those breaches and attack kibbutz, and attack the music festival, and attack military bases.

• 8:55Gordon Corera?

  And there've been real questions about the intelligence failure since the day itself. And there've been some reports by some of the organizations in Israel, like the military, which we'll come to. But it's worth saying, there's been no national state commission of inquiry, a kind of independent inquiry into what happened and what went wrong. Now, some of the senior military figures, the head of Shin Bet, which is Israel's domestic security service, have resigned or been pushed out by the government since the attack for a variety of reasons. But not the man in charge of the country at the time, Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. And he has delayed an independent commission taking place. He says he doesn't want that or believe it's the right time.

• 9:40Gordon Corera?

  So lots of other people taking the blame, not him. And he's tended to always blame the security officials for what had happened. I mean, he's even suggested they didn't wake him up early enough on the morning. And so this question of where responsibility might lie has, in the last few weeks, become very intense due to a news story.

• 9:59David McCloskey?

  It is a news story broken by Harretz, which is a leftish liberal Israeli newspaper that is quite critical of Netanyahu. But it drops this bombshell report a couple of weeks ago about a warning that is issued to Benjamin Netanyahu in advance of October 7th.

• 10:17Gordon Corera?

  And this report says that in late September 2023, so about a week and a half before October the 7th, the leader of the UAE, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, calls Benjamin Netanyahu and he calls him from his presidential palace in Abu Dhabi and they speak for 45 minutes. He would often speak directly with Netanyahu because relations between Israel and the UAE had been normalized as part of the Abraham Accords back in 2020. So there were frequent discussions, including about security between them.

• 10:49David McCloskey?

  And I think it's worth saying, the Abraham Accords, a series essentially of bilateral agreements that are brokered by the US, happens in 2020, and the intent is basically to normalize relations between Israel and as many states of the Arab world as possible. So that included the UAE, but also Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, even places like Kazakhstan. So it's this kind of effort to make the bilateral relationships between these states normal and to open embassies, for example, in each other's countries.

• 11:20Gordon Corera?

  And so the contacts were there, but normally when they spoke by phone, a representative from the Emirati Embassy in Israel would come to the Prime Minister's office in Israel and they'd bring a special phone device, a kind of encrypted phone. Now, Harretts, the newspaper, claims that when this call took place in late September 2023, bin Zayed warned that Hamas's leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning a major operation against Israel, one big enough that it could destabilize the region and undermine the Abraham Accords. Now, from the article, you can get a sense that this was from Palestinian sources who had been talking with Sinwar, and there'd been this phrase which was, if there's not

• 12:03Gordon Corera?

  progress or change with Israel, then to expect an earthquake. This is the kind of conversation that had been passed on and then goes to a Palestinian contact close to the ruler of the UAE. So that seems to have been the source of this quite specific warning, which is then passed to Netanyahu.

• 12:23David McCloskey?

  We should say that these types of warnings, I mean, to get the ruler of the UAE on the phone with Netanyahu, even in an environment where relations are normalized between the UAE and Israel, this is an abnormal thing. This isn't happening every week. And the, the information, I suppose, that the Emiratis believed was credible enough and sufficiently explosive that it had to be passed along to the Israelis. So this is, this is not a durable thing for Mohammed bin Zayed to call up Netanyahu and say, you should, you know, you should be aware of this.

• 12:58Gordon Corera?

  That's right. I mean, I think, you know, there are questions about, well, why, why was Sinwar telling someone else that something should be expected by Israel? I think this raised some questions about what Israel and what the UAE thought was behind the message. But the claim is that this call takes place and bin Zayed tells Netanyahu to take the situation seriously. Now, according to Harretts, their account, Israel's prime minister is not worried by the warning. He says the West Bank, which is seeing a bit of an uptick in violence at that time, is more of an issue and Israel is prepared for any scenario. And Harretts goes on to say that Netanyahu doesn't brief the head of Shin Bet, Israel's domestic

• 13:40Gordon Corera?

  security service, or the head of Mossad, the foreign service, or the Israeli Defence Forces, or the Chief of Staff.

• 13:47David McCloskey?

  It's worth saying also that the warning from Mohammed bin Zayed is not particularly specific.

• 13:53Gordon Corera?

  No.

• 13:54David McCloskey?

  And it seems reasonable, given that Hamas frequently, I mean, in the past, has attacked Israel with, with rockets coming from Gaza, that Netanyahu, I'm not, I'm not, you know, excusing the fact that Netanyahu didn't pass this information along to his

• 14:10Gordon Corera?

  Allegedly.

• 14:10David McCloskey?

  security chiefs, allegedly. But it is plausible that in Netanyahu's mind, this is a warning about another rocket attack, which is perhaps not as big of a deal. I mean, it's something to be concerned about, but it's not something, it's not October the 7th, right?

• 14:26Gordon Corera?

  It's not saying specifically, this is happening on this day and this is what it will look like. I think that's right. Now, it's interesting because it's also emerged or been claimed, we should say, that a similar warning reaches Netanyahu, this time from the Egyptian intelligence chief, who also supposedly has a phone call with him, warning of something unusual, a terrifying operation about to be launched by Hamas. There's a very good recent piece in the Atlantic magazine from the US, which says that the Egyptian intelligence chief flies into Israel on September the 26th. So the same kind of timeframe, week and a half before October the 7th, he flies in on a Cessna jet, a private jet, lands at an isolated area of Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, and he carries with him this warning

• 15:11Gordon Corera?

  that if Israel doesn't change course over Gaza, where the border crossings have just been closed and pressure is rising, that Hamas seems to be planning something, that it's mobilizing for something. It's again, not specific, and it's not clear who he meets on this visit, but his private jet, according to flight tracking sites, is only on the ground for 67 minutes before the Egyptian intelligence chief goes back to Cairo.

• 15:37David McCloskey?

  This warning, or I guess this kind of the sense that something might be about to happen, has filtered into the US intelligence community at the time. I think the Atlantic article also covers this, that on September the 28th, the CIA issues an internal report, it's not specific what, what sort of report that is, but issues a report about a possible Hamas escalation in Gaza, which is reportedly based in part on information from foreign intelligence services. So it could have been the Egyptians or the Emiratis actually telling the Americans, passing along to the Americans the same information that they passed to the Israelis. And so you have this sense that something is about to happen. It's not

• 16:17David McCloskey?

  exactly clear what, but that the warnings are credible enough and the, the sense that the operation that's coming is big enough that you have foreign intelligence chiefs directly warning the Israeli political leadership about this.

• 16:33Gordon Corera?

  That is the claim. Now, we should get to Benjamin Netanyahu's response, because he has denied these claims absolutely. He has been absolutely adamant that he did not receive a warning from Egypt.

• 16:48David McCloskey?

  He's not accepting blame for?

• 16:50Gordon Corera?

  No, he is most definitely not.

• 16:52David McCloskey?

  Shock.

• 16:53Gordon Corera?

  So maybe we should go through his denials, because he says no conversation took place with the president of the UAE between the beginning of September until October 7th. He says there's no mention in his call log of a conversation or anyone coming to his office with an encrypted phone. He says that report from Harretts is an absolute lie. It's part of a sinister plot to interfere in the upcoming election. He's told lawyers to begin defamation proceedings against Harretts, and he's done the same with the allegations about the Egyptian contacts. It's interesting, the UAE Foreign Ministry has said it doesn't comment. Sources over there in the UAE have said, security matters are not normally discussed with leaders, but that's not really a denial. And it, some people have noted that Netanyahu

• 17:37Gordon Corera?

  actually paid an unannounced, very short, four-hour visit to UAE just this last Sunday, September the 27th. Now, it looks like it was a broader security meeting about the Middle East, but the Associated Press have claimed that he also wanted to ask the ruler of the UAE to deny the Harretts reports of the warning. Now, again, he said even that claim of this conversation took place is not true. And Harretts, meanwhile, stands by its reporting, says, has three foreign senior sources familiar with the conversation between the ruler of the UAE and Netanyahu, and that it's based on extensive research for a book. So they are certainly standing by their story.

• 18:19David McCloskey?

  And then The Times, New York Times, I should say, on September the 25th, kind of appears to also back up the story, saying that there had been a call between the two leaders, between Mohammed bin Zayed and Netanyahu, and a warning of a major attack, and that that warning never reached leaders inside Israel's security establishment. And the New York Times report sources that back to five former senior Israeli officials. Says there was a big meeting of top Israeli officials on October the 1st, but that Netanyahu's line in that meeting was to not take any action against Hamas in Gaza because, and this, you know, I think the political climate at the time is important, because that could prevent

• 19:01David McCloskey?

  what was then seen as an imminent political diplomatic deal with Saudi Arabia to move closer to actually normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi, which was a big diplomatic goal that Netanyahu had. So, you know, you get the sense that What does Netanyahu actually think of these alleged warnings? Hard to say, but he doesn't really treat them seriously, in part because he's worried about the political knock on effects that it could have for his regional policy.

• 19:28Gordon Corera?

  I mean, what do we make of this? I mean, it's obviously disputed. There've been claims, there've been denials, but there is a lot of reporting now. Netanyahu has been keen all along to avoid any responsibility for what happened. I mean, he's been very clear, he's tried to shift the blame onto his security establishment. And to some extent, he's been quite successful in doing that because, you know, head of Shin Bet has left, head of the military has left. He's been successful at deflecting this by just basically all out denials. And that seems to be his strategy.

• 19:58David McCloskey?

  It feels to me like the really critical piece of this reporting is that it directly implicates Netanyahu. So, for example, I mean, Shin Bet has done, the internal domestic security agency in Israel, has come out with a massive internal report of the various failures that led up to October the 7th. The military has done something similar, but there hasn't been like an all out state level national commission on it in the same way that the Israelis did after the 73 war, in the same way that America did after 9/11. And I think that all of this, to me, it's sort of, it makes me think it's quite plausible.

• 20:40David McCloskey?

  I'm inclined to believe it because as we'll see, as we go into the nature of the failure, there were a lot of different types of warnings bubbling up through the Israeli system around this time and in the run up to October the 7th. And it makes sense that foreign partners, the Egyptians, the Emiratis, would pick up similar kind of, you know, little bits and pieces. And because the Egyptians and Emiratis have close security relationships with the Israelis, they would pass those along. So I'm inclined to believe it, not least because when you look at the Haaretz report, when you look at the Times reporting, these aren't like single sourced pieces.

• 21:23David McCloskey?

  I mean, you know, there's a multitude of Israeli security officials who are providing the information to corroborate these stories and to build these stories. So I'm inclined to believe it.

• 21:33Gordon Corera?

  And I mean, I think we know Benjamin Netanyahu is a political street fighter, who has made his career on being the defender of the security of Israel. And so to have missed warnings or have not taken them seriously enough would be devastating to him politically. And he is a very, very canny political operator. I mean, I think it's also interesting because there are echoes here. I think, you know, we just did this series a few months ago on 9/11. It's not the same, but I think some of the issues are similar, where after 9/11, you had this question, had the politicians been warned? Had, you know, President Bush had warnings in his presidential daily brief that an attack was coming? Had he not taken it seriously enough?

• 22:14Gordon Corera?

  These become very, very political, the questions of was something missed? And it was a huge story for a number of years, but in the US, you did have a 9/11 commission, which eventually was able to answer those questions. And I think the absence of that just leaves you, you know, with kind of political street fighting over it.

• 22:34David McCloskey?

  I think this is me. The reason that Netanyahu has blocked any effort to create a national commission is because it is going to unearth exactly these types of facts. And it's going to make it clear that there were warnings of all sorts bubbling up from within the Israeli system that made it to Netanyahu's desk, not all of them, but some of them, and that he received warning in advance from foreign partners like the Emiratis and the Egyptians and probably others that just haven't been reported, to suggest that something is coming. This is again, David McCloskey talking. I think he does bear real blame for the, not only the intelligence failure, but the policy failure in advance of October the 7th.

• 23:19David McCloskey?

  And it makes sense politically why he would want to just continue to kind of stiff arm that. I mean, the other, the other thing is, you know, I think we should note, the warnings are not particularly specific.

• 23:31Gordon Corera?

  No, I think that is important, bit like 9/11.

• 23:33David McCloskey?

  A bit like 9/11. So that you could also plausibly say, well, okay, what am I supposed to do with this? Now, I think we'll come to this. I actually do think there are things that could have been done that would have maybe not prevented October the 7th, but would have made it much less of a tragedy than it was. All that to say, we're seeing that this wasn't just a internal Israeli military and security issue. I mean, this is a political issue at the Netanyahu level and he didn't do anything about it.

• 24:00Gordon Corera?

  I think that's absolutely right. And in some ways, though, the issue of this phone call is only part of that wider question. Was there an intelligence failure? And if so, what kind of intelligence failure? So after the break, we'll be investigating that question.

• 24:15Speaker 03

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• 25:58David McCloskey?

  Welcome back. Let's step back, I think for a minute to have a look at the very specific reports about the nature of the warning that the Israelis received prior to October 7th and what kind of intelligence failure might have taken place on that day.

• 26:14Gordon Corera?

  That's right, because I think it is a much bigger question than just this report of a phone call, whether it's the Egyptian one or whether the UAE one. From the start, the question has been, how did Israel miss this massive attack? I mean, Israel, as we've talked about many times on this podcast, has one of the most adept, technologically advanced and aggressive intelligence and security services in the world. So to have missed something this big involving thousands of Hamas fighters engaging in a long-term plan is certainly an intelligence failure. And I think the interesting question is, what kind of failure was it? And why did it happen?

• 26:59David McCloskey?

  It is worth setting up the different types of failures and what, what sort of constitutes an intelligence failure versus something else? And just, the term gets thrown around a lot and it's not as analytically useful as it could be if we just give it a bit more specificity. So I think about it this way. I think you can have a failure to predict, you did not see something coming. And that could be driven by a collection failure. We talked about this in our 9/11 series, right? You actually don't have the information in your hands to predict. It could be driven by an analytic failure. Maybe you had enough of the information, but it's scattered throughout your system and it's not pulled together in a way that could be used.

• 27:43David McCloskey?

  You also can have organizational failures where that information exists, but it's kind of stove piped in different security agencies or in different parts of security agencies. And so the whole picture doesn't come up to the policymakers who actually need to make the decisions. I think you could also have different types of analytic failure, particularly when you're dealing with the prospects for a terrorist attack. So we've just finished talking about this with the Haaretz reporting, is that you can have strategic warning that something is coming and that could be correct.

• 28:17Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 28:18David McCloskey?

  But if you don't have the tactical who, what, where, when.

• 28:22Gordon Corera?

  The granular, yeah.

• 28:24David McCloskey?

  You're not inside the plot. The, the prospects for disrupting it go way down. Although, put a pin in that because I think actually at this case, the Israelis didn't need tactical information to disrupt the plot or to potentially kind of mitigate its effects. But you could also have, and this is important, is I think Netanyahu has wanted to make this an intelligence failure in the purest form. This is a failure of the security and military apparatus to see this coming and to stop it. But you can also have policy failures, meaning the political leadership receives enough information to make policy changes and they don't.

• 29:06David McCloskey?

  So they don't act on the intelligence that they receive. So it's, I think it's important to kind of lay out a bit of that construct because I think as we'll see, October 7th probably ticks all of the boxes, to be quite honest.

• 29:21Gordon Corera?

  I think that's right. I think it's a really useful framework because as we get into what the failures were, you can, you can align them with your set of different failures and see how many are actually matching up against those. And it is, I think, very interesting to compare it to 9/11, where we've looked at and done a whole episode on the intelligence failures there. And we've got quite a few details from news reporting. There is an Israeli military report, there's one from Shin Bet, the security service. And I think one aspect which gets to your framework is that there was certainly an intelligence collection failure, wasn't there? And I think this is a really interesting one because they had loads of technical intelligence, didn't they? They have amazing penetration of mobile phones, they have drones and have all these cameras and sensors on the border.

• 30:04Gordon Corera?

  But I think there's some evidence that they came to actually over-rely on that, to assume that that was enough, when actually what they needed was old-fashioned human intelligence as well.

• 30:14David McCloskey?

  Again, the nine eleven parallels are interesting because when the intelligence target is a terrorist organization, that means that they're highly secretive. These kind of plots are very compartmentalized inside the organization. So in other words, you could have a source in Al Qaeda prior to nine eleven, or you could have a source inside Hamas. If that source isn't inside the plot, you don't know about the plot. These organizations are also extremely paranoid. And so it makes it difficult, just, you know, by virtue of the essence of the organization, to recruit human sources inside them. I also think that the Shin Bet report that came out, this kind of after-action on what

• 30:56David McCloskey?

  went wrong, the Shin Bet report found that the Israelis had a relatively poor network of human assets, spies inside Gaza prior to October 7th, because there was a there was a botched intelligence operation that Shin Bet had run inside Gaza. Hamas uncovers it in 2018, rolls up a bunch of Israeli assets. So you get the sense that on the back of that, the kind of human penetration that Israel had of Hamas was perhaps not what it should have been and not what it had been a few years before.

• 31:33Gordon Corera?

  That's right. So that's, I think, one failure. The next one, I think, is that, again, making the parallel to some extent with nine eleven. We had a lot about connecting the dots, the failure to join the dots, where you have intelligence, but you don't understand what it means, you don't put it together. I think that's interesting. It's slightly different with the Israeli case, the October 7th case, but there are lots of possible warning signs, which frankly seem to have been overlooked. There's a very good BBC report by my old friend and colleague, Alice Cuddy, which is about young female conscripts. They sit on surveillance bases right by the border, in these rooms for hours, looking at the live surveillance footage captured by the cameras on the high-tech fence. Also, they've got balloons that are hovering over Gaza.

• 32:18Gordon Corera?

  I mean, it's a hugely intensely watched place. And it's watched by these units, often of young women in their late teens and early twenties, who log what they see on computers and with their commanders. And in the months leading up to the attacks, they start to see things. They start to see practice raids, mock hostage-taking, farmers behaving strangely on the other side of the fence. I mean, they see them actually doing things which are going to be what they do on October the 7th, practicing effectively the raid. I mean, they have a model tank, they practice how to take over. They have practicing of the explosives on the fence and how to coordinate moving through it and kidnapping people.

• 32:59Gordon Corera?

  They do pass these warnings up, and they say that the military basically don't connect the dots. And some of those surveillance soldiers themselves end up being killed or taken hostage because they're right by the border on October the 7th. What I think is more astonishing as well is Israel actually had details of the Hamas plan. I mean, this is, this is fascinating reporting, I think, which comes, a lot of it comes from the New York Times, where it says that they've actually got hold of a 40-page document, and its codename Jericho Wall, initially conceived in 2016, discussing how to do a methodical assault to overwhelm border defenses and storm key military bases, including a local division headquarters.

• 33:42Gordon Corera?

  Again, all the things they end up doing are in a plan which the Israelis have got hold of.

• 33:47David McCloskey?

  This is where I think it's important to separate out the analytical failure from the collection failure, because the fact that the Israelis get their hands on a 40-page document that essentially lays out what happened on October the 7th, might suggest that it was less of a collection failure than one might think, because you've actually got the plan. Now, this is the important distinction, and why I think collection failure still is part of the story. You have a plan, but you, you may not have the intentions around that plan.

• 34:21Gordon Corera?

  Of when it's going to be executed.

• 34:22David McCloskey?

  When is it actually going to happen? Is it going to happen? Because, you know, Hamas probably has a lot of plans on the shelf that it, it may or may not use, and some may be aspirational or just kind of blue-sky exercises. And so if you're the Israelis, how do you wait this plan? Is this, is this a real thing? And what I think is interesting, though, and what kind of gets to the analytical failure, is that when you pair that plan with what a lot of these female conscripts were seeing at these surveillance installations on the border, when you kind of pair the two together, it looks like Hamas is rehearsing aspects of this plan, but, but yet the dots aren't really connected. I mean, I do think it's interesting that this, this document, though, this Jericho

• 35:07David McCloskey?

  Wall document is circulated pretty widely in Israeli military and intelligence circles. I mean, it's seen by the IDF's intelligence chief, it's seen by the Unit 8200 commander, so the head of their signals intelligence directorate. It's seen by the Gaza Division commander inside the IDF. It's seen by the leadership in IDF Southern Command, which is responsible for Gaza. What isn't clear, though, is if that report was shared with the political leadership, and in particular with Netanyahu. So you have this case where you get the plan or an outline of the plan, does it, does it make it up to the political leadership? It's, it's not clear it did.

• 35:46Gordon Corera?

  No. And I mean, Hamas, we should say, and other, some of the other groups involved in the attacks actually rehearsed storming mock Israeli military bases and published some of this on their social media channels. There's a lot of indications, because you also get some of these other warning signs in the run-up just before. And there's an analyst from Unit 8200, which is Israel's Signals Intelligence Agency, it's the equivalent of GCHQ in the UK, NSA in the US. And a non-commissioned officer warns in an email, sent to several officers up the chain in the days leading up to the assault, that something is coming and to warn people while there's still time.

• 36:28Gordon Corera?

  I mean, these analysts at 8200 have put together a document on September 19th, so about three weeks before October the 7th, that warned Hamas was training for a large-scale invasion. So again, it's that specificity of what kind of thing. And this seems to be ignored. And this one particular female analyst warns in an email that the training they'd seen shows us that the Jericho Wall plan, the one we'd been talking about, is an operative practiced plan, meaning that Hamas already has the forces who've practiced how to carry it out and implement it when the order comes. Now, of course, you're right, that is not the same as knowing when the order's coming. But I think that, you know, that analyst is pushing up that warning, saying something could be coming.

• 37:12Gordon Corera?

  And it goes up to a Lieutenant Colonel, intelligence officer of the Gaza Division, who's responsible for the border, and he dismisses it. And it's only, I mean, I was reading about this in the Israeli press recently, only nearly three years later, very recently, that that officer, the intelligence officer who received the warning, is dismissed after they fight against, you know, being fired for basically missing a warning.

• 37:34David McCloskey?

  The military report says overall that, quote, "information was generally misinterpreted as an unrealistic or unfeasible plan." And that is a key point, because it, it leads to what you could, I guess, call a failure of imagination, although listeners to our nine eleven series will know that I despise that term. I think, I think what this really is, is a set of underlying assumptions about what Hamas was capable of or intended to do that turned out to be totally wrong. It is a mistaken belief that Hamas wouldn't be able to pull something like this off, and that it perhaps didn't even want to, which we can talk more about.

• 38:19Gordon Corera?

  You know, I do take your point about failure of imagination is a strange phrase, and I think its use in nine eleven is an odd one. I think in some ways, in this case, it's actually more relevant, because I think it is an underestimation of Hamas, of what it, what it's capable of and what it wants to do, and the idea that it might want to do something strategically different from what it's done in the past. And if you have that mental framework for Hamas, then you're going to disregard intelligence, which challenges that framework and suggests they're doing something else. And this Israeli military report from February 2025 says, "It was assumed that Hamas was neither interested in nor preparing for a large-scale war." It's also, I think, reinforced by Hamas's own deception tactics, isn't it?

• 39:04David McCloskey?

  Yeah, the deception tactics are, are interesting, because it does seem like Hamas communicated that they had no intention of attacking the Israelis on channels that they knew the Israelis were listening to and monitoring, right? So you could, you get this, the Israelis could be getting this intelligence to suggest, in fact, that nothing is coming. In retrospect, this assumption that Hamas didn't want to attack Israel in this way and wasn't able to pull it off in the first place seems insane. But up to October the 7th, 2023, the deadliest Hamas attack ever on Israel was a suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in Natania back in 2002.

• 39:49David McCloskey?

  It had killed 30 people. So Hamas is killing Israelis with kind of one-off suicide attacks. There was an IDF operational concept that I think was published in 2019 that referred to Hamas as a kind of rocket-based terror army. So further, there's this thought that, well, if something big happens, it's probably a massive rocket attack, and we'll be able to deal with that with our, you know, surface-to-air missile defenses, Iron Dome and the like. There's also an interesting twist to this from an intelligence historian named Michael Handel, who talks about the risk paradox. And he, he writes that the riskier a surprise attack appears to be, and I think that Jericho

• 40:34David McCloskey?

  Wall plan, what happens on October the 7th, certainly looks to many in the Israeli security establishment, like a crazy risky idea, I mean, like a frontal assault on Israel from Gaza. What in the world would they, why would they do that? That's crazy. Handle says that the riskier an attack appears to be, the quicker it will be dismissed as unlikely to occur, which is exactly what the Israeli security establishment does, thus in fact, becoming less risky and likelier to succeed.

• 41:01Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 41:02David McCloskey?

  Right? Because it's been collected, seen, dismissed, and therefore that crazy plan is much likelier to actually succeed.

• 41:12Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, and I think the Israeli military report definitely gives this sense of flawed assumptions. It's interesting. They also talk about what some officials call an addiction to precise intelligence, which was lacking. I think that's an interesting idea, is that they're so used in Israel to having very, very, very good granular, precise intelligence and acting upon it. If you don't have it and you're so used to having it, then you assume you're not missing anything. The report says, there was no deep discussion of the question, what if we are wrong? It's the ability to kind of red team, to have someone go, what if we're wrong? What if actually all our assumptions about Hamas are wrong? That was missing. The outgoing chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces at the time

• 41:54Gordon Corera?

  took responsibility for those failures, said, I embrace responsibility, it's mine, talks about how Gaza was seen at the time as a secondary security threat, because the priority was on Iran, it was on Hezbollah, it was on the West Bank, and the military had chosen this conflict management approach to dealing with Gaza, to kind of keeping a lid on it. What that military report doesn't address was one of the other failures which you talked about at the start, which was the policy failure, the decision-making failure in the run-up to the attack. And I think that is the one which is crucial and which gets back to the Prime Minister himself of Israel.

• 42:29David McCloskey?

  Yeah, exactly. And I think, again, it ties back into Netanyahu's, I think, political calculation that he doesn't want there to be a national commission, because a commission is going to shed light on exactly this, which is, yes, it's an intelligence failure, but it's also a massive policy and political failure. And that political failure, I think, is undergirded by many of the same assumptions about Hamas that we just talked about, which is that it's not capable of this kind of attack, it's deterred, it has no interest in fighting with us right now. And frankly, seen from Netanyahu's perspective, he's got much bigger fish to fry in the region, right? I think that is an absolutely critical component

• 43:14David McCloskey?

  of this. I mean, it's also worth noting that there had been fighting between Israel and another Palestinian terror group called Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PIG, that had occurred in the spring, I believe, of 2023, and Hamas had sat it out. And so I think you have this sense that it seemed, again, from Netanyahu's mind, that, well, Hamas is kind of deterred. The other angle we haven't talked about is the fact that Hamas was getting a lot of money from the Qataris, which was being sent into Gaza. The Israelis were allowing it to be sent into Gaza, which we could talk more about. But I think Netanyahu's calculation

• 43:56David McCloskey?

  was that, well, Hamas has consolidated its rule in Gaza, we're helping to facilitate funding for that, they wouldn't want to disrupt that by conducting a massive attack.

• 44:08Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, and I think that goes to this point about the policy failure and the strategic failure, which is, I think, an assumption at the political level, that Hamas was in a box in Gaza, that they had it contained, that you could have this strategy of keeping it in a box. And, you know, there's the awful kind of phrase they use of mowing the lawn, which is just every now and again, you go and take out some of the militant leadership. But basically, you don't have to do anything differently. Netanyahu himself, I mean, we know, has always been obsessed with Iran. That's always been his particular focus. We talked about that in previous podcasts. Iran is his focus, Hezbollah is his focus. They are, at the time, a bit more worried about the West Bank. I mean, Netanyahu himself is

• 44:50Gordon Corera?

  also distracted by his own domestic reforms to the judiciary, which he's trying to push through, which are leading to protests. So I do think there is a policy failure, which is to think that the situation in Gaza was sustainable and contained, and to not be focused on it, and not to think about it, and not to think about the implications, and instead to be following other paths and other kind of avenues. And Netanyahu, of course, has been Prime Minister of Israel for the 13 of the 15 years before the attack. So if anyone bears responsibility for that policy failure, there's no doubt that it's him. I mean, no doubt about it. It's not like he can blame it on a previous government. Those wider strategic questions, I think, go to him, don't they?

• 45:35David McCloskey?

  They absolutely do. And, you know, I think it brings us to a question, which is a little different from the intelligence failure question, which is, could it have been prevented? Or could the impact of the attack have been mitigated? And, you know, when we did our 9/11 series, I made the point, and it's impossible to know, right? Because it's a counterfactual. I made the point that I didn't think ultimately that 9/11 could have been prevented, even if there had been, you know, better intelligence sharing between the FBI and CIA, on and on. I think in this case, because Israel essentially controls all of the borders to Gaza, with the exception of that southwest quarter to Egypt, the Israelis

• 46:18David McCloskey?

  have more tools to use to prevent these kind of attacks. And, you know, when you, for example, if, if in response to any of the information that had bubbled up from inside Shin Bet or Mossad or the IDF anywhere, if in response to the information that had bubbled up, or in response to the information that Netanyahu allegedly received from the Egyptian intelligence chief and the Emiratis of the weeks before, if you had done things like raised the military alert level, for example, or, I think, more practically, if there had been any kind of military redeployment prior to October the 7th, you'd probably have far

• 47:01David McCloskey?

  fewer people killed. Because 32 IDF battalions were stationed around the West Bank prior to October 7th, two were around Gaza.

• 47:14Gordon Corera?

  Hmm.

• 47:15David McCloskey?

  Which gives you a sense of how dismissed all of this reporting had been. I mean, also, we talked about Unit 8200, the signals intelligence director, right? Their coverage on Gaza had been scaled down a few years before and was largely inactive on weekends. So you may not, again, you may not hear Yahya Sinwar describing the plot, you know, on a cellphone, but you might pick up more bits and pieces of the preparation if you had had more of a blanket kind of SIG and coverage. Because when you look at the defense of these kibbutz, these Israeli communities that end up being overrun, I mean, some of them have as few

• 47:55David McCloskey?

  as like five standby security members. So if you had had more IDF presence in the area because of all these warnings, you may not have had the kind of the severity, the awfulness of the attack that ends up happening. So I think the Israelis, all that to say, like, my view is that maybe it couldn't have been prevented from starting, but you could have significantly limited the severity if Netanyahu or if some of these security chiefs had said, we should take this seriously and do something about it, even if we don't think it's likely, it's plausible, and we should hedge our bets.

• 48:35Gordon Corera?

  And there were certainly enough signs that could have led them to do that. I think that's what's so interesting, is that when you look at it in detail, you know, you can see multiple failures. You can see the collection failure to penetrate the plot. You can see the analytical failures in not listening to some of the warning signs that people were trying to pass up the change. You can see the wider mindset failures in terms of the assumptions. You can see the policy and strategic failures. Which is all to say that the specific warning that Netanyahu gets, you know, this Harets report, I think is important, but actually, it isn't the whole story, because I think you have to see it in totality. The fact Netanyahu doesn't listen to it, allegedly, and of course, he denies it, goes to a mindset

• 49:18Gordon Corera?

  he has and a wider set of assumptions and a wider kind of policy that he's pursuing. And I do think, you know, there are levels of accountability in this, which are important, but I do think they go to the top in this case. I absolutely do think it rises to the top. And in previous intelligence failures, you do see, in some cases, prime ministers take responsibility for when something like this has happened in Israel's past. And I think in this case, you see someone who is trying not to.

• 49:46David McCloskey?

  Why do you think he ignored the warnings?

• 49:49Gordon Corera?

  That's a good question. I think it may be he just dismissed them as more of the same. And it goes back to the kind of failure of imagination point. I think he is distracted personally and politically by his own survival, by domestic reforms. He also has a mindset which says the real threat is if it's from the Palestinians at the West Bank, but really the threat is Hezbollah, and really the threat is Iran. You know, people are telling me this stuff, but I just, it's not his priority. It's not the way his mind is formed, which is, I think, why it goes back to him. I mean, I do accept it may not have been a specific warning, of course, he says there wasn't one at all. But I also think it goes to his mindset, that the reasons why he didn't act on it or see it as important.

• 50:30David McCloskey?

  I also think it's something we, an angle to kind of Netanyahu mindset that we haven't talked about, which is, I think he saw a Hamas-run Gaza that was kind of fenced in and occasionally creating problems, but to use their terminology, you could mow the lawn occasionally. This being propped up by funds that are being, you know, sent in by the Qataris that are, you know, the Israelis are allowing in. I think he saw that as a good thing. Right? Because it created divisions in the Palestinian community and the political leadership between the West Bank and Gaza.

• 51:10Gordon Corera?

  Makes a two-state solution less likely.

• 51:12David McCloskey?

  Exactly. Which he doesn't, which he doesn't want. And so everything you just said is correct, that, that there's a massive sort of underestimation of what Hamas would be able to pull off. But I also think he's, he's living with this kind of underlying logic that Hamas is a threat, but it's a contained threat. And in that contained capacity, it's actually good for me, Benjamin Netanyahu, politically, because it means that I don't have to deal with a unified Palestinian front that's going to, you know, be able to push in a more effective way for, for statehood.

• 51:45Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. So I guess what, where we end up is, you know, there is an intelligence failure, but there's also a, a policy failure and a strategic failure, which leads to this devastating war and its consequences.

• 51:55David McCloskey?

  What do you think is the more dominant? Do you think it's more an intelligence failure or more a policy failure?

• 52:01Gordon Corera?

  I think if you had intelligence collection, which really said, this is coming on this day, then it would be hard to ignore. So I think, I think there is a specific point of an intelligence collection failure, which might have made the difference. But I do think more broadly, the failure, for instance, to listen to the alleged UAE and other warnings and take them seriously and do some of the kind of remedial steps you talked about, that is a political failure. So I don't know, it's quite hard to separate. What do you think?

• 52:30David McCloskey?

  I think it is hard to separate because they're, they're knitted together by the same underlying set of assumptions about Hamas's intentions and capabilities that I do think were largely shared by the upper echelons of the security and military community and by the political leadership, even though obviously we've seen those two communities, you know, fall out since. I think, I think they, they shared many of the same kind of assumptions about Hamas. So I think, I think it is hard to separate them. I think that, in my view, it is primarily a political failure. It's a policy failure because I actually think that the Israelis had strategic warning

• 53:12David McCloskey?

  and they were in a position, given the fact that Hamas isn't a group hiding out in a bunch of camps in Afghanistan, thousands of miles away. The Israelis actually had levers to pull to mitigate that risk. And, and those were policy levers that Netanyahu chose not to pull. So if I had to pick one, I would say it's a policy failure.

• 53:33Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. Well, the Israeli public will get their chance to vote on Benjamin Netanyahu's future. I think the elections are October the 27th, so coming up soon. I think, you know, given the Jarets report, some of the other reporting that's come out, this is certainly going to be one of the issues, which is going to be at the heart of that campaign. So we shall see how that unfolds. But meanwhile, for us, next week, we go to a bit of a corner turn, isn't it? We go back on Monday to Kim Philby, go back in time to a slightly different question of intelligence failures and why the Brits managed to miss the biggest Soviet mole within MI6. Back to that on Monday. And sitting alongside it, we have a great series on mole hunts, don't we?

• 54:17David McCloskey?

  That's right. We have gone deep into the, the literary impact of Kim Philby, the after effects of his, his espionage on both the US and UK intelligence communities. And we've had a conversation with a real life CIA mole hunter who was involved in uncovering a Soviet and Russian spy in the 1990s. So great, great bonus content for our beloved Declassified Club members. And just a reminder to everybody that you can join the Declassified Club right now by going to therestisclassified.com and signing up. We will see you next time.

• 55:00Gordon Corera?

  See you next time.

• 55:09Speaker 05

  Hello, Goalhanger History listeners. This is Marina Hyde and Richard Osman from The Rest Is Entertainment.

• 55:14Speaker 06

  Hello, everybody. Every Thursday and Friday, we are reacting to the pop culture phenomenon that is The Celebrity Traitors. We'll be on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. And Marina and I are digging into all the castle's twists and turns, giving our expert opinion on what should happen next.

• 55:29Speaker 05

  Now, which historical figure do we think would be the greatest traitor?

• 55:33Speaker 06

  It's tempting to think of an actual traitor.

• 55:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:35Speaker 06

  A, a Guy Fawkes or a Kim Philby. But then all of those are traitors who got caught.

• 55:39Speaker 05

  Philby had a great run, though.

• 55:41Speaker 06

  He did have a great run.

• 55:42Speaker 05

  I think he could probably see off, you know, Joanne.

• 55:45Speaker 06

  Yes, maybe. And probably is sort of where he ended up in Moscow is probably roughly like where the contestants have to spend every night as well. So, so maybe there's, there's some sort of equivalence. So if you're watching Celebrity Traitors, don't forget to tune into our reaction episodes every Thursday and Friday night at 10pm.

• 56:01Speaker 05

  Find us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.