“An attack … will come from Gaza”: MBN talks to an Israeli general and intelligence analyst on how his prediction of the October 7 attacks was ignored, and why he believes the IDF should continue to run Gaza
Yossi Kuperwasser, an expert on Israeli intelligence and security, spoke to MBN’s Andres Ilves this week. Kuperwasser, a brigadier general in the Israeli reserves, is the head of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security. He is a former Director General of the Israel Ministry of Strategic Affairs and ex-head of the Research Division of Israel Defence Force (IDF) Military Intelligence.
In the interview, he explored the myriad Israeli intelligence failures that led to the country being taken by surprise by the Hamas-led attacks from the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, while offering a blunt assessment of Gaza’s future.
What went wrong
“A lot of things went wrong, both in the intelligence and the operational readiness and the general approach to the Gazan challenge. All of that was wrong, deeply wrong,” Kuperwasser said, adding that the Israeli intelligence community had “a complete misunderstanding of Hamas … It’s not that we didn’t know what was going on. We knew almost everything. We didn’t know the date and the exact way they are going to act, although we did have the plan.” Kuperwasser faulted Israel’s intelligence community for “confirmation bias above everything else. Whatever comes in, if it’s in line with what you think about the enemy, you attribute to it a lot of importance. Whatever comes in and it’s in contradiction with what you think about the enemy, you say, ‘No, that is not important. It’s just nuisance and noise.’ That’s exactly what happened to all the people. The problem was that there was a groupthink.”
A prediction ignored
Kuperwasser said he had warned months earlier that an attack from Gaza was imminent. It was ignored. “I wrote a paper in June 2023, four months before the war, and I said, ‘Yes, there is a chance of an attack, and it’s not going to come from the north. It’s not going to come from Iran. It’s going to come from Gaza. You should be aware of the fact that the terror attacks are going to come from Gaza’ … I said, ‘Let’s initiate a military operation to disarm Hamas.’” But, he added, “the response I got from those who I sent the paper to was ‘What’s the problem with you? Don’t you know Hamas is deterred?’”
The future
The brigadier general said, emphatically, that continuing myopia on the part of the Israeli intelligence community means that the country is not out of the woods: “[October 7th] can happen again. Definitely, it can happen. Actually, it did happen several times since October 7th, we had many strategic intelligence mistakes. For example, nobody thought that the [Syrian dictator Bashar al-] Assad [regime] is going to fall the way it fell. Many other small issues, smaller issues, but also of strategic importance were not foreseen by the intelligence [services] … The failure of imagination can cause a terrible result. And these people that were in place didn’t have the capability to imagine.”
Looking ahead to the future of Gaza, Kuperwasser had this to say: “I don’t know how long exactly, but for a certain period of time, the IDF should be in charge” of the enclave. As he puts it, “The problem in Israel is that we want to have a free lunch. I understand why people want to have a free lunch: it’s cheap and it’s tasty. But it’s difficult to get it. We want to see a new government in Gaza without making sure that we control the Gaza Strip, really, and that this new government will come and take care of security business while we are out. It’s wishful thinking. I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
He argues for an alternative view of governance in Gaza: “We might think of a regional government, not the same person ruling over all of Gaza, but somebody ruling over the area of Rafah, somebody ruling over the area of Khan Yunis, somebody ruling over the area of the central refugee camps and Deir al-Balah, somebody ruling over the area of Gaza [City] and somebody ruling over the northern parts … so they would not have national aspirations.” When asked who would appoint these individuals, Kuperwasser spoke of an international body that would “appoint them.” As long as candidates for leadership positions “are not Hamas, [and] they have no terrorist past, they can assume [the posts]. It would have to be approved by us, but we don’t want to appoint them.”
Andres Ilves
Andres Ilves is Senior Director for Strategic Initiatives at MBN. His career as a journalist and writer includes two decades at the BBC and Radio Free Europe.
