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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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Meta Boots Anti-Zionist Columbia University Group From Instagram
Pro-Hamas Columbia University students march in front of pro-Israel demonstrators on Oct. 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Photo: Roy De La Cruz via Reuters Connect
Meta Platforms, Inc. has banned the infamous Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) anti-Zionist student group from its platforms, a decision that the company says is irrevocable.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD is responsible for spreading pro-Hamas propaganda, assaulting Jewish students, and disrupting academic study at Columbia with unauthorized demonstrations and property destruction. Its behavior, among other factors, drove the Trump administration’s cancellation in March of $400 million in federal contracts and grants awarded to Columbia.
CUAD first reported that Meta shuttered its Instagram account on Monday, denouncing the measure as being part of “a long and concerted effort from corporations and imperial powers to erase the Palestinian people.” Meta later justified the decision to Jewish Insider, explaining that CUAD had forced the company’s hand by ceaselessly transgressing the platform’s terms of use of agreement. Meta forbids groups which advocate violence to operate on Instagram, and CUAD has used its account to call for toppling the Israeli and US governments. Additionally, its Instagram account has been essential for promoting unlawful demonstrations CUAD continues to hold at Columbia University and for sharing resources that have helped its collaborators avoid punishment.
Meta told Jewish Insider that the group won’t be allowed back.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD’s activities have been described as a threat to the civil rights and security of Jewish Columbia University students.
Last April, CUAD members commandeered a section of campus and, after declaring it a “liberated zone,” lit flares and chanted pro-Hamas and anti-American slogans. When the New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrived to disperse the unlawful gathering, hundreds of CUAD members and their affiliates reportedly amassed around them to prevent the restoration of order. During ensuing clashes with law enforcement, one student screamed “Yes, we’re all Hamas, pig!” while others shouted, “Long live Hamas!” and filmed themselves praising the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the US-designated terrorist group.
In September, during the university’s convocation ceremony, the group distributed a pamphlet which called on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s movement to destroy Israel. Several sections of the document were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose was to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
In February, CUAD committed infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete. Numerous reports indicate the attack may have been the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, the Free Beacon reported, ADP distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts.
Following two occupations of administrative buildings at Barnard College, Laura Rosenbury, the school’s president, denounced the group as a paranoid hate-organization.
“They [CUAD] operate in the shadows, hiding behind masks and Instagram posts with Molotov cocktails aimed at Barnard buildings, antisemitic tropes about wealth, influence, and ‘Zionist billionaires,’ and calls for violence and disruption at any cost,” Rosenbury wrote in an op-ed published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. “They claim Columbia University’s name, but the truth is, because their members wear masks, no one really knows whose interests they serve.”
Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Tlaib Set to Headline Terrorist-Connected Palestinian Event in New Jersey
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) speaking at a press conference at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, March 11, 2025. Photo: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) is set to headline a conference that is also hosting a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization, according to documents obtained by The Algemeiner.
The Palestinian American Community Center (PACC) in New Jersey will hold its annual conference, titled “Grounded in Action: Exploring the Power of the Palestinian Diaspora,” from Thursday through Sunday. Wisam Rafeedie, a self-admitted member of the PFLP, will address the conference virtually on the 4th day of the event.
According to PACC’s website, the conference “is a call to recommit ourselves to amplifying and supporting the Palestinian voices and advocates who have long been at the forefront of our struggle.” PACC also calls on members of the Palestinian diaspora “to leverage our unique positions and power” to “push for meaningful action.””
Tlaib is scheduled to headline the event’s “Youth Day,” in which she will host a reading and signing for her new children’s book, Mama in Congress, alongside her son Adam Tlaib. According to Harper Collins, the book’s publisher, Mama in Congress will chronicle Tlaib’s journey from Detroit to the halls of the federal government. The book will also detail Tlaib’s supposed efforts in working toward “justice for all” in Congress.
The conference will include several workshops educating attendees on “resistance,” “solidarity,” and “collective struggle.” The event will also feature a session stressing the importance of “centering Palestinian prisoners.”
This is not the first time that Tlaib has come under scrutiny for attending a pro-Palestinian conference tied to terrorists. Last May, Tlaib came under fire for speaking at the “The People’s Conference for Palestine,” which also hosted Rafeedie among other individuals connected to terrorist groups. During that event, Rafeedie praised Hamas, the terrorist group that runs Gaza and murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages on Oct. 7, 2023, as a “resistance” against Israel. He defended and downplayed Hamas’s atrocities, saying that “Zionists lie like they breathe.”
“This is not a struggle between Hamas and Israel. Hamas is part of the resistance of the Palestinian people. The core issue is between the Palestinian people and the project of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing,” Rafeedie said.
Rafeedie also called for the complete destruction of Israel and the replacement of the Jewish state with a “democratic” Palestine.
“There is no longer a place for the two-state solution for any Palestinian. The only solution is one democratic Palestinian state on all Palestinian land, which will end the Zionist project in Palestine,” Rafeedie continued.
Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman elected to the US Congress, has positioned herself as a fierce and outspoken critic of Israel. Since entering office, Tlaib has repeatedly accused the Jewish state of implementing an “apartheid” regime in the West Bank and turning Gaza into an “open-air prison.”
In the year following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, Tlaib has sharpened her condemnations of the Jewish state. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, she hesitated to release an official statement acknowledging the mass slaughter, abductions, and rapes perpetrated by Hamas. Less than two weeks after the invasion, Tlaib introduced a “ceasefire” resolution between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group. In November 2023, the House of Representatives voted to censure Tlaib over her anti-Israel rhetoric.
The progressive firebrand has also condemned Israel’s defensive military operations in Gaza, accusing the Jewish state of committing a full-scale “genocide” against the civilians of the enclave. She has also peddled the unsubstantiated claim that Israel has purposefully inflicted mass starvation against Palestinian civilians and urged the Biden administration when it was in power to impose an arms embargo on Israel. Simmering with anger over the Biden administration’s support for Israel, she refused to endorse former Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed presidential bid.
Tlaib’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
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Driver Charged for Brooklyn Car Crash Killing Jewish Family Has History of Claiming CIA Follows Her
An overturned auto in a car crash flipped on its roof landing on a mother and her three children, killing two children on March 29, 2025, in Brooklyn, New York. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
A Brooklyn woman who was charged for a car crash on Saturday that killed a Jewish woman and her two young daughters has alleged in the past on social media that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is following her, a claim she also made to first responders after the fatal accident.
Miriam Yarimi, 32, is facing multiple charges, including three counts of second-degree manslaughter, three counts of criminal negligent homicide, and four counts of second-degree assault. Yarimi — a Brooklyn resident and wigmaker who is also a Jewish mother herself – was transported to NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn in stable condition. She was then moved to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, according to reports.
The car crash killed Natasha Saada, 32, and her daughters – 8-year-old Diana and 6-year-old Deborah. Saada’s son Philip, 4, was injured in the crash and hospitalized at Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park in critical condition. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrested Yarimi, a single mother who has a young daughter, and she is awaiting arraignment in connection to the crash that took place Saturday afternoon at an intersection on Ocean Parkway off Quentin Road in Midwood. Police said she was driving with a suspended license at the time of the crash.
“This was a horrific tragedy caused by someone who shouldn’t have been on the road,” said Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. “A mother and two young children killed, another child fighting for his life, a family and a neighborhood devastated in an instant. The NYPD sends its condolences to the family of the victims.”
Yarimi, who shares custody of her daughter with her ex-husband, reportedly told first responders with the Jewish-led volunteer ambulance service Hatzalah that she was “possessed” and that she believes the CIA was pursing her.
She has made similar claims about the CIA many times on Instagram, a former customer of hers told The Algemeiner on Tuesday. The source, who wishes to remain anonymous, purchased a wig from Yarimi several years ago and has been following her on social media for a number of years. Yarimi has 16,000 followers on Instagram and screenshots of her since-deleted posts, obtained by The Algemeiner, confirm she previously believed that the CIA is tracking her.
“It’s very convenient to plead insanity. But it’s not new. She is actually insane. This is [an] old topic,” the former client told The Algemeiner. “She thinks that she’s been followed by CIA for a long, long time already. She truly believes that CIA is spying on her … But only people who follow her [on social media] and know her for a long time would know this. She’s sick.”
In one since-deleted Instagram post, Yarimi wrote in part about the CIA: “They have control of EVERYONE here in this world BESIDES ME … when I went to Miami, it all clicked … once they knew that I knew, they followed me around the hotel, dressed up as young parents with a doona [stroller] and disco outfits like I was stupid and didn’t know who they were … if anything they stuck out like glue.”
“It was the government, blackjack, and the CIA who manipulated everyone and took control of everyone’s mind but because I was the catalyst and the sacrificial lamb so they did their best to break me,” she wrote in a separate post that has also been deleted. “They experimented (abused) me and that’s when they cloned my daughter and I so when I die, they could reinsert me into the crowd and make me into another person.”
Yarimi previously had a highlight on her Instagram page where she talked about demons and the CIA, but it has since been deleted, her former customer told The Algemeiner. Yarimi also wrote on her Instagram Story once that she believes Hollywood is trying to clone people to look like her.
“Why do you think most of the girls in Hollywood have similar features to me like Rita Ora & Jane the Virgin etc,” Yarimi once wrote on Instagram, as seen in a screenshot shared with The Algemeiner. “Wake up, this is not just happening in Hollywood. This is happening right here in the Jewish community in Brooklyn.”
Not long after she uploaded the Instagram posts, Yarimi was admitted to a psychiatric ward and when she returned to social media, she spoke about the experience, the source told The Algemeiner.
“After the above posts she was locked up for two weeks in a psych ward. She’s very public. She went live when paramedics broke into her house and took her. She came back online two weeks later and spoke about her psych ward experience,” Yarimi’s follower said. “And it was saved in her [Instagram] highlights as well … It was horrible.”
The Algemeiner has seen a copy of Yarimi’s Instagram video that shows police drag her out of bed after she refused their orders to get up by herself. In the clip, three police officers are seen in her bedroom and a fourth is standing by the doorway.
Another longtime Instagram follower of Yamini’s described her as “delusional” when speaking to The Algemeiner, and confirmed that Yamini has spoken online repeatedly in the past about how she believes the CIA is tracking her.
In December 2024, Yarimi won a $2 million settlement from the city of New York after she filed a lawsuit claiming that former NYPD Officer George Mastrokostas repeatedly raped her for several years after falsely arresting her.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD Deputy Chief Richie Taylor attended the funeral for Saada and her daughters on Sunday in Brooklyn before their bodies were flown to Israel for burial. Saada is survived by her husband, Sidney Saada, her sons Philip and Jacob, her parents and three siblings. Adams called the crash “a tragic accident of a Shakespearean proportion.”
“A mother going for a simple stroll on a sunny day was struck and killed. As we pray for their families and this entire community, the city mourns this loss,” he added.
Police said Yarimi was driving a blue Audi A3 sedan when she rear-ended a 2023 silver Toyota Camry with TLC plates that was carrying four passengers – a mother and three children. NYPD Commissioner Tisch said the force of the crash caused the Toyota Camry to be pushed aside, while the Audi moved forward, crashing into Saada and her children as they were crossing the street before the car overturned. Saada and her two daughters were pronounced dead at the scene. The driver of the Toyota Camry, a 62-year-old man, was hospitalized in stable condition. The four passengers inside his car sustained minor injuries and were also hospitalized, according to Tisch.
Yarimi’s car had 99 parking and camera violations between August 2023 and March 2025, including 21 speed camera tickets and five red light tickets, Eyewitness News ABC 7 reported, citing a website that tracks vehicle violations using city data. She had nearly $10,500 in fines and a car with the same license plate as Yarimi’s still has $1,345 in unpaid fines, the news outlet also revealed.
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