While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East
By Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot (St. Martin’s Press)

In the past two years, Israel demonstrated its formidable military and intelligence prowess by dismantling Hezbollah’s threat from Lebanese territory and conducting what appears to be a successful strike against Iran’s nuclear program. How, then, are we to understand Israel’s egregious security failure in the years, months and days before October 7, 2023, when Hamas managed to infiltrate Israel, massacre some 1,200 people and take hundreds of hostages back into Gaza?

Journalists Yaakov Katz, former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, and Amir Bohbot, military and defense correspondent for Walla, a leading Israeli news website, are well positioned with their expertise and relationships with key insiders to provide us with an authoritative narrative of what went wrong.

It started with a fundamental strategic misreading of Hamas’s genocidal aspirations by government leaders, the Israel Defense Forces and the Mossad, the authors explain. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, more than any other Israeli leader, designed a policy to contain, not designed a policy to contain, not confront, Hamas. This approach was based on a belief that the terrorist group could be bought off with massive amounts of money. “The IDF’s focus was on maintaining quiet while preparing for a possible standoff one day with Iran and Hezbollah,” the authors write. “There was no operational plan for a full-scale offensive in Gaza, and no detailed strategy of what to do in the event of a war.”

Netanyahu saw the destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons program as his life’s mission. He and many other Israeli officials regarded Hamas as a lesser threat and lower priority. Unlike in Iran, Israel had placed no spies on the ground in Gaza to report on Hamas’s plans. This turned out to be a fatal mistake.

One chapter deals with the birth of Hamas, which began in the 1970s as an Islamist religious and social service organization called Mujama al-Islamiya. Relatively quickly, it morphed into a terrorist army with tens of thousands of fighters and an arsenal of sophisticated missiles. The authors also point out that from the very beginning, Netanyahu saw Hamas’s existence as a useful counterweight to Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. Hamas’s extremism was problematic, but for Netanyahu, the writers posit, it served as a convenient rationale for never having to pursue negotiations toward a two-state outcome.

There were other disastrous tactical missteps en route to October 7. In a chapter titled “The Tunnel Blindness,” the authors explain how Israel was in the dark about how elaborate Hamas’s underground tunnel network was within Gaza. Instead, they focused solely on cross-border tunnels into Israel. Meanwhile, the high-tech security system established along Israel’s border with Gaza proved useless against the thousands of attackers who overwhelmed the border fence.

For years, senior policymakers in government and the security establishment dismissed clear signs that Hamas was preparing for a major attack. In the days just prior to October 7, Israeli officials waved off warnings of unusual and menacing activity in Gaza that came from various sources, including from Nahal Oz’s tatzpitaniyot (Hebrew for “observers”)—female IDF soldiers assigned to maintain surveillance at the border.

Avigdor Lieberman, defense minister in 2018, is one government official who seems to have read the situation correctly. That year, he pushed for a campaign to destroy the Hamas tunnels in a military offensive dubbed Operation Lightning. The IDF resisted, and the cabinet led by Netanyahu decided not to proceed. In response, a frustrated Lieberman resigned. In hindsight, the authors note, Operation Lightning might have made the war against Hamas significantly less challenging.

In the years leading up to October 7, the authors point out, numerous security officials warned Netanyahu that his government’s divisive judicial reform initiative, regarded by many as a threat to Israel’s democracy, made the country vulnerable to Hamas and other enemies. To protest the initiative, a significant number of senior officers and reservists even threatened not to serve in the army.

The authors do not mince their words regarding what they consider Netanyahu’s decision to prioritize his political survival over national interest. “His fear that members of his coalition might abandon the government,” they assert, “caused him to delay decisions that could have expedited a hostage deal and cease-fire…allowing the war to extend unnecessarily.”

But the authors push back on accusations from human rights groups and the international community that the IDF has been indifferent to the large number of Palestinian civilian casualties. In fact, they observe that “IDF commanders were being criticized by Israeli parents who felt that soldiers’ lives were at risk by going into homes instead of just destroying the buildings from the air.”

The final chapter offers concrete recommendations to prevent another October 7, including intelligence reform, strengthening the American-Israeli alliance, improving public diplomacy, preparing an exit strategy in Gaza and strengthening national resilience.

Taken together, the details in While Israel Slept point to one recommendation that the authors don’t include, but that much of the Israeli population supports: that Israel convene a high-level national commission of inquiry, similar to the one organized in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Netanyahu adamantly rejects this idea, but the Israeli people are entitled to full disclosure.  

Martin J. Raffel served for 27 years as senior vice president at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.