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October 7 Hamas Attacks: How Life Changed at Israel's Borders, One Year

Reevaluation of Israeli Security
Israel's intelligence and security services are also still reeling from October 7, squarely blamed for failing to stop the attacks. Former Israeli intelligence officers say the information was there but the interpretation of it was not. "The accurate term that we should use is not a reevaluation but earthquake," said Milshtein, adding that Israeli intelligence agencies have spent months in the "deepest crisis."
Abandoned vehicles at the site of the October 7 Hamas attack on the Supernova music festival in the Negev desert, southern Israel, seen on October 13, 2023. There have been high-profile resignations within the Israel... More JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty
High-profile resignations over the failures included Major General Aharon Haliva, the then-head of the IDF's military intelligence unit, in April. "I carry that black day with me ever since, day after day, night after night. I will carry the horrible pain of the war with me forever," Haliva said in a statement. In mid-September, the head of the IDF's secretive Unit 8200 intelligence unit, Yossi Sariel, resigned.
It's still hard to unpick how Israel's security agencies and military intelligence fell so out of alignment, said a former Mossad official. They told Newsweek that on the night of the attacks, dozens of new telephones lit up in Gaza but the alert wasn't raised—just one example of intelligence being brought to the attention of high-up officials but then disregarded, they claimed.
Several former Israeli intelligence officials said the security services, military, political and academic circles and the media fatally misunderstood Hamas. "The lesson that we learned from October 7 is that we should stop trying to read his mind," said Zehavi. "We cannot—we don't have the capability."
There was a sense of "arrogance," held up by Israel's technological superiority and a belief it was invulnerable to the type of attacks Hamas could launch, Milshtein said. Other errors came down to misunderstanding Hamas' priorities, or simply too many intelligence officers having little knowledge of Arabic, according to Milshtein. "You cannot really believe that you can predict, or you can analyze, the intentions of the other," he said, "if you don't know his language."
With intense warfare ongoing, the ex-Mossad official suggested it is unlikely any significant reorganization of these inner workings could have taken place since. Newsweek reached out to the IDF for comment.

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