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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.
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ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Officially Sanctioned by Trump Admin, Banned From Entering US

International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan speaks during an interview with Reuters in The Hague, Netherlands, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
The United States has imposed sanctions on International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan in accordance with an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, the US Treasury Department confirmed on Thursday.
Khan was sanctioned by the US after spearheading the ICC’s issuing arrest warrants for Israeli leaders over their role in the ongoing war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
The White House announced on Monday that Khan would be the first member of the ICC to be issued personal sanctions, and both the White House and Treasury Department noted on Thursday that he has been added to the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List.
Khan’s assets in the United States are now frozen, and he is banned from entering the country. The announcement came on the heels of Trump’s executive order last week to punish members of the ICC for targeting Israel.
Trump’s order lambasted the ICC for its “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel.” Trump stated that the ICC “abused its power” to pursue an unsubstantiated and politically motivated criminal case against Israeli leaders.
The ICC responded to Trump with a forceful condemnation, stressing that the court produces “independent and impartial” work.
“The court stands firmly by its personnel and pledges to continue providing justice and hope to millions of innocent victims of atrocities across the world,” the ICC said.
Trump signed the executive order after Senate Democrats blocked legislation to sanction the ICC in January. The bill ultimately failed by a vote of 54-45, with Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) being the sole Democrat to vote in favor of punishing the ICC. Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) criticized the bill as “poorly drafted and deeply problematic.” The House had passed the legislation.
In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the ongoing war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
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Boston Judge Dismisses Hate Crime Charges Against Harvard Students for Assault of Jewish Peer

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
A Boston Municipal Court judge has dismissed hate crime charges against two Harvard University graduate students who allegedly assaulted a Jewish student at the school in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, The Harvard Crimson reported on Wednesday.
As previously reported, an anti-Israel demonstration escalated to apparent harassment when Ibrahim Bharmal, former editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, and Elom Tettey-Tamaklo were filmed encircling a Jewish student with a mob that screamed “Shame! Shame! Shame!” at him while he desperately attempted to free himself from the mass of bodies.
Antisemitism on Harvard’s campus skyrocketed after the Oct. 7 atrocities. Harvard stood out as a hub of pro-Hamas support for the terrorist group’s massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages in the deadliest single-day attack on Jews since the Holocaust. While Hamas’s brutal treatment of civilians — which included rape, torture, and beheading of children — shocked the world and led to international condemnation, it emboldened pro-Hamas Harvard students, and later, Harvard faculty to target Jewish and pro-Israel members of the campus community with harassment and intimidation.
Following the Oct. 2023 mobbing of a Jewish student, Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo were charged by the local district attorney with assault, battery, and violations of the Massachusetts Civil Rights Acts, a hate crime statute that forbids the obstruction of “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege” — to which they pleaded not guilty.
The hate crime charge was dismissed on Monday by Judge Stephen McClenon. The students will still face one misdemeanor count of assault and battery each.
According to The Washington Free Beacon, Bharmal has been continuously rewarded with new and better opportunities since allegedly assaulting the Jewish student. Harvard neither disciplined him nor removed him from the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, a coveted post once held by former US President Barack Obama. As of last year, he was awarded a law clerkship with the Public Defender for the District of Columbia, a government funded agency which provides free legal counsel to “individuals … who are charged with committing serious criminal acts.”
Antisemitism in the US surged to catastrophic and unprecedented levels in 2023 — the year in which Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo’s alleged crimes took place — rising a harrowing 140 percent, according to a 2024 audit conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
The ADL recorded 8,873 incidents in 2023 — an average of 24 every day — across the US, amounting to a year unlike any experienced by the American Jewish community since the organization began tracking such data on antisemitic outrages in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all spiked by double and triple digits, with California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Massachusetts accounting for nearly half, or 48 percent, of all that occurred.
The last quarter of the year proved the most injurious, the ADL noted, explaining that after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, 5,204 antisemitic incidents rocked the Jewish community. Across the political spectrum, from white supremacists on the far right to ostensibly left-wing Ivy League universities, antisemites emerged to express solidarity with the Hamas terroistr group, spread antisemitic tropes and blood libels, and openly call for a genocide of the Jewish people in Israel.
Such incidents occurred throughout the US. In California, an elderly Jewish man was killed when an anti-Zionist professor employed by a local community college allegedly pushed him during an argument. At Cornell University in upstate New York, a student threatened to rape and kill Jewish female students and “shoot up” the campus’ Hillel center. In a suburb outside Cleveland, Ohio, a group of vandals desecrated graves at a Jewish cemetery. At Harvard, America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious university, a faculty group shared an antisemitic cartoon depicting a left-hand tattooed with a Star of David dangling two men of color from a noose.
Other outrages were expressive but subtle. In November, large numbers of people traveling to attend the “March for Israel” in Washington, DC either could not show up or were forced to scramble last second and final alternative transportation because numerous bus drivers allegedly refused to transport them there. Hundreds of American Jews from Detroit, for example, were left stranded at Dulles Airport, according to multiple reports.
In another case at Yale University, a campus newspaper came under fire for removing from a student’s column what it called “unsubstantiated claims” of Hamas raping Israeli women, marking a rare occasion in which the publication openly doubted reports of sexual assault.
Harvard University recently agreed, on paper, to be part of the solution for eradicating antisemitism from its own campus.
Last month, it settled two antisemitism lawsuits, which were merged by a federal judge in November 2024, that accused school officials of refusing to discipline perpetrators of antisemitic conduct. Legal counsel for the university initially discredited the students who brought the legal actions, attempting to have their allegations thrown out of court on the grounds that they “lacked standing” and “legally cognizable claim” even as it proclaimed “the importance of the need to address antisemitism at the university,” according to court documents.
With the settlement, which came one day after the inauguration of President US Donald Trump — who has vowed to tax the endowments of universities where antisemitism is rampant — Harvard avoided a lengthy legal fight that could have been interpreted by the Jewish community as a willful refusal to acknowledge the discrimination to which Jewish students are subjected.
“Today’s settlement reflects Harvard’s enduring commitment to ensuring our Jewish students, faculty, and staff are embraced, respected, and supported,” Harvard said in a press release. “We will continue to strengthen our policies, systems, and operations to combat antisemitism and all forms of hate and ensure all members of the Harvard community have the support they need to pursue their academic, research, and professional work and feel they belong on our campus and in our classrooms.”
Per the agreement, the university will apply the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to its non-discrimination and anti-bullying policies (NDAB), recognize the centrality of Zionism to Jewish identity, and explicitly state that targeting and individual on the basis of their Zionism constitutes a violation of school rules.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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US Democratic Voters Overwhelmingly Sympathize With Palestinians Over Israelis: Poll

Voters line up for the US Senate run-off election, at a polling location in Marietta, Georgia, US, January 5, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar.
Democrats in the US widely sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis, according to a new poll.
The Economist/YouGov poll, which was conducted from Feb. 9-11, found that 35 percent of Democrats indicate their sympathies “are more with” Palestinians, and only 9 percent say they are more sympathetic toward Israelis. Meanwhile, 32 percent of Democrats responded that their sympathies are “about equal” between both Palestinians and Israelis, and another 24 percent were not sure.
Notably, Democratic “sympathies” toward Israelis have dramatically declined in the past two months, coinciding with the transition of the Trump administration into the White House. On Dec. 21, according to the poll, 21 percent of Democrats sympathized more with Israelis and 25 percent sympathized more with Palestinians. On Jan. 18, two days before US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Democratic sympathy for Palestinians climbed to 27 percent. During that same timeframe, sympathies for Israelis plunged to 18 percent among Democrats.
Republicans are far more sympathetic toward Israel than Democrats are, the poll found. Sixty percent of Republicans expressed sympathy with Israelis this month, while 6 percent expressed more sympathy toward Palestinians.
In October 2023, in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages throughout southern Israel, 73 percent of Republicans indicated more sympathy for Israelis and 3 percent indicated more sympathy for Palestinians. As for Democrats, 34 percent had more sympathy for Israelis immediately following the Oct. 7 massacre, and 16 percent had more sympathy for the Palestinians.
Overall, although a plurality of Americans still supports Israel, sympathy for the Palestinians seems to be gaining steam. American sympathy for Israelis remained virtually unchanged from Jan. 18 to Feb. 8, dropping slightly from 32 percent to 31 percent. However, sympathy for Palestinians spiked from 15 percent to 21 percent within the same three-week span. According to the poll, American support for Palestinians has climbed to its highest level since 2017.
Trump’s recent proposal to vacate Palestinians from Gaza and build a “Riviera of the Middle East” is unpopular with the American public, according to the poll. Only 19 percent of Americans support the plan, the poll found. The policy proposal suffers from weak support among American liberals, with only 6 percent of Democrats supporting it and 74 percent opposing it. In contrast, Trump’s suggestion to relocate Palestinians into neighboring Arab states enjoys substantially greater support among Republicans, with 39 percent agreeing with Trump’s proposal and 33 percent disagreeing with it.
The growing partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a major flashpoint in the 16 months following the Oct. 7 terror attacks. Democratic lawmakers have become increasingly critical of Israel’s approach to the Gaza war, potentially reflecting shifting opinions of the Democratic electorate regarding the Jewish state. Although Democrats have repeatedly reiterated that Israel has a right to “defend itself,” many have raised concerns over the Jewish state’s conduct in the war in Gaza, reportedly exerting private pressure on former US President Joe Biden to adopt a more adversarial stance against Israel and display more public sympathy for the Palestinians. In November, 17 Democratic senators voted to impose a partial arms embargo on Israel, sparking outrage among supporters of the Jewish state.
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