Israel’s Shin Bet security agency has said it “failed in its mission” to prevent Hamas’ October 7 attack by ignoring repeated warning signs.
Shin Bet’s chief, Ronen Bar, said in a statement that if Shin Bet had “acted differently in the years leading up to the attack and on the night of the attack (…) the massacre would have been prevented.”
“As the head of the organization, I will carry this heavy burden on my shoulders for the rest of my life,” he said.
In a summary of an internal investigation published Tuesday evening, Shin Bet, officially the Israel Security Agency, said that a wide range of factors were responsible for Hamas’ ability to stage the catastrophic attack.
Among them, Shin Bet said, were Qatar’s years-long payments to Hamas. Those payments were blessed by Israel, whose government believed it was beneficial to drive a political wedge between Gaza and the West Bank.
Despite being made aware of Hamas’ plan for a broad offensive, known as “The Walls of Jericho,” in two different iterations in 2018 and 2022, the security agency failed to prevent the biggest terrorist attack in the country’s history.
The security agency received a sequence of signs that Hamas was preparing for an emergency, but decided the militant group were “not interested in escalation” and the plans were never perceived as an active threat, Shin Bet said.
The report summary says that the agency had huge gaps in “the recruitment and operation of human agents” in Gaza and that it was unclear where the Shin Bet and Israeli military responsibilities for detecting an attack from Gaza lay.
Hamas and its allies killed more than 1,200 people and took 251 hostage.
The investigation summary was published five days after an investigation by the Israeli military that highlighted gaps in intelligence gathering, flawed assumptions about Hamas, and “systemic” failures in the Israel Defense Force’s preparedness and response.
But Shin Bet says that it alone does not entirely carry the burden for the October 7 attack.
Shin Bet also blamed policies enacted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as contributing factors, setting off a political firestorm.
Among the factors that contributed to Hamas’ decision to launch the attack, the report summary said, were Israeli politicians’ visits to the Al Aqsa compound in Jerusalem, “the treatment of prisoners, and the perception that Israeli society has been weakened due to the damage to social cohesion.”
The source close to Netanyahu also accused the Shin Bet chief of failing to wake up the prime minister on the night of the attack, despite it being “the most basic and obvious decision imaginable.”
Netanyahu’s team has ramped up its criticism of the agency and Bar in recent weeks, especially after it was revealed that Shin Bet is investigating several people in Netanyahu’s office for inappropriately lobbying on behalf of Qatar’s government – something his office denies.
He removed Bar and the head of the Mossad, David Barnea, from the negotiating team engaging in indirect talks with Hamas.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid slammed Netanyahu for what he said was shirking responsibility for the devastating attack. “The prime minister continues to try to shift the blame onto others, this time it’s ‘they didn’t wake me up,’” Lapid said on X Tuesday.
“This country has been awake for 515 days, we still have hostages in Gaza. It’s time for you to wake up, apologize, take responsibility. This happened on your watch,” he added.
Israel’s former defense minister Benny Gantz also criticized Netanyahu for “throwing mud at the Shin Bet” instead of apologizing. “There is no leadership, no responsibility and there is no limit to cynicism,” Gantz said on X.