RSS
Did Hamas’ Innovation — or Israel’s Complacency — Lead to October 7 Massacre?
Hamas terrorists kidnapping Israeli women at the Nahal Oz base near the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: Screenshot
Israel possesses one of the world’s most sophisticated intelligence capabilities with which to obtain and provide information on its adversaries’ capabilities, intentions and actions. That intelligence serves to guide Israel’s policymakers in deciding on courses of action. Yet on October 7, Hamas was able to carry out an unprecedented attack on Israeli soil with devastating consequences.
What core intelligence challenges did Israel fail to meet in the run-up to this event?
Critically, Israeli intelligence failed to grasp the disruptive changes in Hamas’ approach to Israel — a failure that was facilitated by a related failure of organizational implementation. Explicit advance knowledge of a Hamas attack at the unit level of the intelligence apparatus was not considered valuable, so it was not translated into a competitive advantage. Drawing on public information distilled through Yakov Ben-Haim’s info-gap theory, this article analyzes these two intelligence challenges related to the October 7 attack. It also discusses a means of managing uncertainty that seeks to reduce the impact of surprises on policy outcomes.
Some elements of human affairs are fundamentally unknowable because of the vast uncertainty inherent in human behavior. Scholars of economics apply the concept of Knightian uncertainty, which addresses the difficulty of forecasting in view of the unknowability of all possible events and market innovations. But when it comes to intelligence, predictive errors can also arise from deception and denial.
If a change in the adversary’s camp is truly innovative, there is no prior experience from which probabilities can be deduced. Shackle-Popper indeterminism (SPI) is a concept in which human behavior depends on what we know. When we do not have a prior incident from which to learn and draw conclusions, undetermined elements interfere with our attempts to predict future human behavior. Since policymakers must make critical decisions in contexts that are both uncertain and limited in resources and time, intelligence is needed to reduce the uncertainty as much as possible. The question thus arises: Did Israeli intelligence fail in its core task to reduce uncertainty to the greatest extent possible in the run-up to October 7, or did we witness a disruptive terrorist “innovation” by Hamas that was almost impossible to predict?
This analysis draws on info-gap theory, which originally comes from engineering design and safety analysis. An info-gap is not simply a gap in one’s knowledge or information. It is “a gap with significant consequences for the outcome of a decision.” It describes “the disparity between what is known and what needs to be known in order to reliably and responsibly make a decision.”
Accordingly, the intelligence services’ task of reducing uncertainty has two meanings. The first is to reduce uncertainty (ignorance, ambiguity, and the potential for surprise) by increasing knowledge and understanding of situations or actors. This is the traditional understanding of intelligence. The second is to reduce vulnerability to uncertainty by managing the negative consequences of ignorance, ambiguity, or surprise on the outcome of a policy or decision.
Info-gap theory argues that uncertainty is not negative per se as long as the adverse consequences of a defined policy can be reduced. It proposes the concept of robust satisficing — a term that combines the words “satisfy” and “suffice” — which aims to enhance the robustness of policies against info-gaps with significant consequences. In such a scenario, policymakers define the minimum requirements necessary to achieve a defined goal while intelligence is tasked with constantly evaluating this policy “in terms of how large an info-gap it can tolerate and still achieve the policymaker’s stated goals.” Ideally, intelligence regularly assesses the degree to which current data, knowledge, and understanding can err or change such that a policy will continue to meet the policymaker’s defined outcome requirements. A policy is considered robust when only large surprises would have negative consequences. It has low robustness when even minor surprises affect the outcome negatively.
Concerning Hamas, Israeli policymakers’ minimum outcome requirement would have been to contain the terrorist organization in Gaza and avoid direct combat friction to the greatest extent possible to protect Israel from harm. To achieve this, Israel pursued a policy of maintaining technological and military superiority vis-à-vis Gaza concurrently with bribing Hamas to keep it “weakened and deterred.” According to the principle of robust satisficing, intelligence should have evaluated these policies against info-gaps. How much could Israel err in its understanding of Hamas’ behavior, capabilities and intentions? To what extent would Israel’s policy of technological and military superiority paired with bribing Hamas still ensure the minimum outcome requirement of containing Hamas in Gaza?
Since leaving Gaza in 2005, Israel was largely successful in mitigating the negative impact of repeated rounds of violence and rocket attacks by using Iron Dome and conducting limited military operations. We also now know that Hamas actively deceived Israel by exhibiting restraint over the years as a pretense that it was satisfied with the status quo. Thus, based on prior experience and knowledge, the policy of technological and military superiority plus bribery was considered robust. This presumably led Israeli decision-makers to tolerate info-gaps concerning unusual Hamas behavior.
Recurring conflict patterns and Hamas deception over the years reinforced a common and, in retrospect, wrong understanding by Israel’s intelligence and policymaking echelons that the country’s policies to control Gaza were sound. This ultimately made them blind to the disruptive change in Hamas’ intentions and approach that a practice of robust satisficing might have helped to counteract. As a consequence, this blindness appears to have caused them to lower the level of what needed to be known to ensure the minimum outcome requirement of containing Hamas in Gaza.
Paradoxically, when you lower the level of what needs to be known, the commitment to a policy increases and the tolerance for info-gaps grows. In an illustration of this tendency, Israeli policymakers decided to shift resources away from the Hamas problem to other areas. This included, for example, reducing the military presence at the Gaza border and halting the practice of eavesdropping on hand-held radios of Hamas militants, which was considered a waste of time. Both decisions would prove to have devastating consequences on October 7.
Israel’s “blinded” understanding of Hamas rendered new intelligence on unusual activities at the Gaza border more “tolerable,” which in turn facilitated the second failure in the run-up to October 7. Israeli intelligence failed to organizationally implement new knowledge because that knowledge was not considered sufficiently valuable to be deemed worthy of translation into a competitive advantage. Reports show that at the unit level of the Southern Command of 8200, explicit information of a pending Hamas attack existed based on the previously obtained “Jericho Walls” operation plan and mounting evidence of unusual events in Gaza. However, not only was this information dismissed “top-down” by the responsible superiors, but the highly sophisticated technological tools of Israeli intelligence failed to identify the existing signs as strong.
To return to the two meanings of reducing uncertainty: The bottom-up elements of Israeli intelligence did indeed work to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity concerning a pending attack, as described by the term’s first meaning. Tragically, they were not successful at implementing this information beyond their unit for further use. That is because Israeli intelligence failed to evaluate and reduce the negative consequences of a potential surprise on policy outcomes, which is the second meaning of reducing vulnerability to uncertainty.
Some form of organizational “top-down” barriers, facilitated by a “blinded” understanding of the situation, impeded a process of robustly satisficing the existing info-gap about unusual Hamas behavior. Again, the question is whether this organizational tolerance for non-implementation of new information for further use was facilitated because policymakers and top security officials lowered the requirements of what needed to be known to ensure the minimum outcome requirement concerning Hamas in the first place.
The Israeli security establishment and policymakers came to consider their policies of technological and military superiority vis-à-vis Gaza plus bribery of Hamas as very strong, based on prior experience and understanding. This led them to tolerate larger and larger info-gaps and eventually made them blind to the disruptive change in Hamas’s intentions and capabilities. October 7 thus arrived as a catastrophic surprise — a terrorist “innovation” that disrupted existing policies.
The top-down tolerance for info-gaps concerning Hamas seemed to contribute to the second intelligence failure of organizational implementation, by which explicit and mounting knowledge about a pending Hamas attack was not acted upon. As discussed, the practice of robustly satisficing info-gaps can help manage uncertainty and surprise, including deception by adversaries, to ensure minimum policy outcomes. A robustness question in the run-up to October 7 could have been, “How much could our knowledge and understanding about our technological superiority over Gaza and Hamas’s capabilities err without altering the final assessment of the unusually aggressive military activities at the Gaza border and, more strikingly, the obtained ‘Jericho Walls’ plan?” Had the relevant policymakers and intelligence echelons regularly challenged their understanding of existing policies, the evidence of unusual Hamas activities might have been interpreted quite differently. An attack could have been identified as not only possible but even plausible.
Stefanie Kirchweger…Stefanie Kirchweger is a PhD student at the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University, in a cotutelle agreement with the Department of Political Science at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Her research is focused on international intelligence relations and foreign policy. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
The post Did Hamas’ Innovation — or Israel’s Complacency — Lead to October 7 Massacre? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Netanyahu Says Houthis Paying ‘Heavy Price’ After Israel Strikes Yemen
Smoke rises after Israeli strikes near Sanaa airport, in Sanaa, Yemen, Dec. 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Israeli warplanes bombed a power station and two ports in Houthi-controlled Yemen on Friday in retaliation for the Iran-backed terrorist group’s drone and missile strikes against Israel, and pro-Houthi media said at least one person had been killed and nine wounded.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that the Houthi rebels in Yemen were “paying and will continue to pay a heavy price for their aggression against us.”
“Today, we attacked terrorist targets of the Houthi terrorist regime along the western coastal strip and deep in Yemen. The Houthis are a proxy of Iran, and they serve the terrorist objectives of the Iranian axis in the Middle East,” Netanyahu added. “They constitute a danger to Israel and the entire region, including global freedom of navigation.”
The strikes hit the Red Sea port of Ras Issa and the major port of Hodeidah and the Hezyaz central power station in Yemen’s capital Sanaa, and Harf Sufyan District in Amran province also came under air attack, said Al Masirah TV, the main news outlet run by the Houthis.
An employee at the Ras Issa port was killed and six others were injured, while three people, including a worker, were wounded in the strikes on Hezyaz, the outlet said.
The Israeli military said more than 20 aircraft took part in the attack, dropping around 50 bombs and missiles in an operation which required airborne refueling during the 2,000-km (1,240-mile) flight.
Earlier, British security firm Ambrey said airstrikes on the Ras Issa port targeted oil storage facilities in the vicinity of shipping berths, though no merchant vessels were reported to have been damaged.
The supply of petroleum derivatives is stable, the Houthi government spokesperson Hashem Sharaf Eddine said after the attack.
An Israeli military statement confirmed the targets, saying the power station served as a “central source of energy for the Houthi terrorist regime in its military activities.” It added that the targets struck were examples of the “Houthis’ exploitation of civilian infrastructure.”
“The Houthi terrorist regime has repeatedly attacked the State of Israel, its citizens and civilian infrastructure in Israel,” including using drones and surface-to-surface missiles, the IDF said. “The State of Israel has the right and obligation to defend itself.”
The Israeli military added that Houthi “attacks on international shipping vessels and routes continue to destabilize the region and the wider world.”
“While the Houthi terrorist regime operates as an independent terrorist organization, it relies on Iranian cooperation and funding to attack the State of Israel and its citizens,” it continued. “The IDF will continue to operate at any distance against any threat to the State of Israel and its citizens.”
Within the past 48 hours, the Houthis have fired three drones at Israel‘s commercial hub Tel Aviv and more drones and missiles at the US aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman in the Red Sea, Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said.
The Houthis have targeted Israel, hundreds of kilometers to the north as well as international shipping in waters near Yemen since November 2023 in support of Palestinian terrorists at war with Israel in Gaza.
Israel has responded with airstrikes in Houthi-held areas of Yemen, as have British and US forces in the region.
Netanyahu said last month Israel was only at the beginning of its campaign against the Houthis.
The post Netanyahu Says Houthis Paying ‘Heavy Price’ After Israel Strikes Yemen first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
US House Education Committee Chair Denounces Biden Admin’s ‘Toothless’ Campus Antisemitism Settlements
Demonstrators take part in an “Emergency Rally: Stand With Palestinians Under Siege in Gaza,” amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Oct. 14, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
The new chairman of the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce has excoriated several recent civil rights settlements that, he says, allow colleges to evade accountability for being derelict in their handling of campus antisemitism after Hamas’s attack on Israel last Oct. 7.
“It’s disgraceful that in the final days of the Biden-Harris administration, the Department of Education is letting universities, including Rutgers, five University of California system campuses including UCLA, and John Hopkins, off the hook for their failures to address campus antisemitism. The toothless agreements shield schools from real accountability,” Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said in a statement issued on Thursday. “The Trump administration should closely examine these agreements and explore options to impose real consequences on schools, which could include giving complainants the opportunity to appeal these weak settlements. And certainly, no more complaints should be settled before President Trump takes office.”
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR), a division within the US Department of Education, has spent the past year and a half investigating universities accused of allowing an open season of hate on Jewish students. Such inquiries, if they are not closed due to insufficient evidence, may result in settlements in which higher education institutions admit to having violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and commit to enacting policies which remedy their noncompliance.
For example, Rutgers University recently agreed, as part of an OCR settlement, to train employees to handle complaints of antisemitism, issue a non-discrimination statement, and conduct a “climate survey” in which students report their opinions on discrimination at the school and the administration’s handling of it. In that case, OCR identified “compliance concerns” regarding the university’s handling of violent threats against Jewish students, the desecration of Jewish religious symbols, and discrimination targeting a predominantly Jewish fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi).
Additionally, Temple University agreed last month to implement “remedial” policies for past, inadequately managed investigations of discrimination and to apprise OCR of every discrimination complaint it receives until the conclusion of the 2025-2026 academic year. It also agreed to conduct a “climate” survey to measure students’ opinions on the severity of discrimination on campus, the results of which will be used to “create an action plan” which OCR did not define but insisted on its being “subject to OCR approval.”
In Thursday’s statement, Walberg denounced these and other similar settlements, which were spearheaded by a US presidential administration that refused to recognize anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, as little more than a pantomime.
“These so-called resolutions utterly fail to resolve the civil rights complaints they purport to address. The department is shamefully abandoning its obligation to protect Jewish students, faculty, and staff, and undermining the incoming administration,” he said.
Nothing short of a revolution of the current habits and ideas which constitute the current higher education regime can prevent antisemitism and extreme anti-Zionism on college campuses, the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce has previously argued. An overturning of the current order, it wrote in a report published before the winter holidays, would involve reforming aspects of the campus culture which do not appear immediately connected to the issue of antisemitism. Fostering “viewpoint diversity,” for example, would prevent echo chambers of ideological zeal which justify hatred and violence as a means of overcoming one’s political opponents, the report said. It also argued that restoring “academic rigor,” undermined by years of dissolving educational standards for political purposes, would guard against the reduction of complex social issues into the sloganeering of “scholar activism,” in which faculty turn the classroom into a soapbox.
In lieu of so momentous a change, the report encouraged the executive branch of the US government, which is awaiting the arrival of a new administration headed by President-elect Donald Trump, to enforce colleges’ applying Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to incidents of antisemitism and punish those that do not by, for example, freezing their access to federal funds.
Nearly two years of an epidemic of campus antisemitism unlike any ever seen in the US is what has caused Walberg and his committee colleagues to be suspicious of resolutions which maintain the status quo in American higher education. Since Oct. 7, 2023, anti-Zionist activity on college campuses has increased by 477 percent, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — a trend which has resulted in Jewish students being spit on, assaulted, and pelted with hate speech not uttered openly in the US since the 1950s at America’s most prestigious universities. Holding them accountable, the committee has said, has been difficult due to their ability to mobilize their immense legal and social capital against any action which threatens their power.
“Rather than treat the antisemitic hate plaguing their campuses as a serious problem, they handled it as a public relations issue,” the committee said in its report, citing one example of the corruption it identified. “Penn [University of Pennsylvania] administrators [tried] to orchestrate media coverage depicting members of Congress as ‘bullying and grandstanding’ and Columbia Board of Trustees leaders dismissing congressional oversight on campus antisemitism as ‘capital hill [sic] nonsense.’”
Moreover, it added, university leaders have heaped opprobrium on those who investigate campus antisemitism and openly wished that the Democratic Party would win a majority in the US Congress, an outcome they believed would quell any further inquiries into the matter.
“The findings expose a disturbing pattern of defensiveness and denial among institutions,” the report concluded. “Rather than confronting the severity of the problem, many institutions have dismissed congressional and public criticism and abdicated responsibility for the hostile environments they have enabled. This refusal to acknowledge or address the issue has allowed antisemitism to root and thrive in spaces that contravene the values of this great nation.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post US House Education Committee Chair Denounces Biden Admin’s ‘Toothless’ Campus Antisemitism Settlements first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Israeli Defense Chief Orders IDF to Plan for Hamas Defeat if Hostage Talks Fail
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz looks on, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
JNS.org — Defense Minister Israel Katz has instructed the Israel Defense Forces to urgently develop a plan for a decisive victory over Hamas in Gaza if a hostage deal is not finalized before US President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated for a second term on Jan. 20.
“If the hostage deal does not materialize by the time President Trump takes office, Hamas in Gaza must face complete defeat,” Katz stated in a release issued by his office on Friday.
The statement emphasized that Israel must avoid being drawn into a prolonged war of attrition, which would be costly and fail to deliver a strategic victory or end the conflict in Gaza. Katz called for a plan ensuring Hamas’s total defeat, which the IDF is expected to present during upcoming security assessments.
During a meeting on Thursday night attended by IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi and other senior officials, Katz reiterated that securing the release of the hostages remains the top priority of the defense establishment. “Everything must be done to bring them home,” he said.
Katz also instructed the IDF to identify potential challenges to implementing the plan, such as humanitarian concerns, and to leave those decisions to the political leadership. He emphasized that discussions on Gaza’s political future are irrelevant to the current military strategy, saying that no Arab or other party would assume responsibility for Gaza’s civilian affairs while Hamas remains intact.
Israeli forces target Hamas leadership, kill key terrorists
The IDF and Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) announced on Thursday the elimination of key Hamas figures involved in attacks on Israeli forces.
In a series of airstrikes, Osama Abu Namos, the commander of the “Sabra” Battalion in Hamas’s Gaza City Brigade, and his deputy Mahmoud Al Tarq were killed. Both men were responsible for directing attacks on Israeli troops and civilians.
Additionally, Mahmoud Shaheen and Hamada Diri, company commanders in the battalion, were eliminated for their roles in coordinating attacks and supplying weapons.
The IDF and Shin Bet affirmed their commitment to continuing operations against Hamas terrorists.
The post Israeli Defense Chief Orders IDF to Plan for Hamas Defeat if Hostage Talks Fail first appeared on Algemeiner.com.