Immediately after the blackest day in
Israeli history, a consensus formed that we must wait until after the
war to investigate how Hamas was able to invade the country, slaughter
1,200 innocents and get away with 240 hostages. There’s a lot to
recommend this position.
We’re at war. Now is not the time for
action, not recrimination and trials for failed generals, security
chiefs and politicians. Good or bad, you go to war with the army and
leaders you have. People have jobs to do, and our job is to let them do
theirs.
While reasonable on its face, there is a
problem with delaying a reckoning. At least in some cases, it seems
clear that the people whose failures enabled the Hamas attack are not
capable of bringing us victory.
Case in point: Israel Defense Forces
Intelligence Directorate Chief Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva. In the weeks
since Oct. 7, more and more information has come out about why Hamas was
able to pull it off. All of the information points to Haliva and his
close subordinates.
The Field Observers unit at Nahal Oz base
suffered the greatest losses there during Hamas’s assault. The unit,
comprising female soldiers, is responsible for monitoring the footage
from security cameras along the Gaza border around the clock and
alerting forces on the ground and in the intelligence community to
anything suspicious.
Seventeen observers were killed on Oct. 7.
Seven were taken hostage. One, Naama Levy, was videoed barefoot, being
dragged from the trunk of a vehicle by her hair and pushed into the back
seat. Her hands were zip-tied behind her back. The seat of her
sweatpants was stained with blood, indicating she had been raped
violently.
Naama Levy was taken as a hostage
One observer, Ori Megidish, was rescued by
the IDF in early November. Another, Noa Marciano, was filmed in a
hostage video, first alive, and then dead. Her body was later recovered
by IDF forces.
Days after their friends were slaughtered,
raped and kidnapped, the two surviving members of the unit and a number
of former members started coming forward to tell their story. In
interviews with Channel 11, two women related that in the
months before the invasion, they were warning it was in the works. The
women saw Hamas terrorists training to take over kibbutzim and IDF
bases. They watched terrorists practicing taking hostages and blowing up
tanks. They saw terror commanders watching the drills. They saw spies
probing the fence for weaknesses. They saw it all and reported it all.
Rather than giving them medals, unnamed
top-level officers in the intelligence corps ordered them to stop. When
they continued reporting, the observers were warned that they would be
disciplined and removed from the unit if they kept raising their
concerns.
The observers weren’t the only ones
silenced. Rafael Hayun, a civilian hacker who monitors open intelligence
networks, worked for the IDF for years. The IDF provided Hayun with
equipment to monitor Hamas’s internal communications. In late 2019,
Hayun began reporting on Hamas training exercises involving invading
Israel, penetrating the security fence at multiple points, taking over
communities, committing mass murder and kidnapping. Over time, the
training became more intense and detailed. Hayun alerted the units he
was working with about Hamas’s activities in real time.
Five months before the assault, his
colleagues in the IDF were ordered to seize all of his equipment and
stop working with him. Around the same time, the IDF’s Intelligence
Directorate Unit 8200 signals intelligence unit also stopped monitoring
Hamas’s communications.
Hayun said that his military colleagues
told him the order to cut him off came from “senior leadership,” and
they had no explanation for the decision. Hayun told reporters he is
convinced that if he had been listening in the weeks before Oct. 7, the
invasion would have been prevented.
Hayun and the observers weren’t the only ones who recognized what Hamas was doing. As Channels 11, 12 and Haaretz
all reported, a tactical intelligence NCO and Hamas expert in Unit 8200
with 20 years of experience began providing detailed reports on Hamas’s
preparations for the invasion in May 2022.
In a series of three, increasingly
detailed and urgent reports over succeeding months, the NCO set out in
granular detail how Hamas was preparing a broad invasion of Israel that
included the invasion of IDF bases, border towns and kibbutzim. Her
reports included all aspects of the invasion that took place on Oct. 7,
including Hamas’s use of paragliders, pick-up trucks and motorcycles.
She detailed Hamas’s plans to massacre and kidnap civilians and
soldiers. She warned that their intention was to use provocations along
the security fence in the weeks leading up to the operation to get the
IDF used to breaches and so lull its commanders into complacency. She
even secured Hamas’s own training manual for the operation. She was able
to get the information in front of Unit 8200’s commander and a top
officer in the Southern Command. They apparently did nothing.
Convinced by his subordinate’s reporting,
her commander, an NCO with 30 years’ experience, canceled a family
vacation because he heard Haliva would be visiting their base. He
waylaid Haliva, and he and his subordinate presented her reports. Haliva
dismissed their warnings and detailed information as hot air. Hamas, he
insisted, was just pretending, to make an impression on its followers.
He did not communicate her report to either the head of Israel Security
Agency (Shin Bet) or the IDF Chief of General Staff.
The NCOs weren’t the only ones who saw what was happening. As Channel 11
reported on Tuesday, in May 2023, the Gaza Division’s intelligence
officer created a slide presentation titled, “The Walls of Jericho,”
setting out in detail how Hamas intended to bring down the security
fence and invade Israel at up to 60 separate points, invade the
division’s bases and enter civilian communities to commit mass murder
and seize hostages.
In a follow-up report from August, the
intelligence officer even explained that Hamas intended to carry out its
plan either on Shabbat or on a holiday when only a small cadre of
soldiers would be on duty. His work was dismissed as unrealistic and out
of line with Hamas’s true intentions by senior intelligence officers at
Tel Aviv headquarters.
At 4 a.m. on Oct. 7, due to warnings of
increased Hamas movement near the border fence, the senior security
leadership, including IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevy,
Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar, Southern Command Commander Maj. Gen. Yaron
Finkelman and Haliva’s assistant (Haliva was apparently asleep),
discussed the movements and decided to go back to bed. Bar sent a small
team of fighters to the border area, but that was all. The group didn’t
inform the Gaza division commander, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Instead, they agreed to speak again at 8
a.m. Hamas invaded at 6:30.
Since at least 2022, Haliva and his
colleagues in the Intelligence Directorate and the top echelons of the
IDF and the Shin Bet were convinced that Hamas was deterred. Hamas, they
insisted both in public statements and in intelligence briefings to
political leaders, was interested in providing economic prosperity to
Gaza. In one speech, Haliva spoke derisively of an unnamed political
leader (between the lines it was apparent he was referring to Netanyahu)
who had questioned his judgment.
“In one of the meetings, I don’t want to
divulge where, a closed, classified meeting, someone—I won’t say
who—said to me, ‘Intel Chief, your view is as good as mine.’ I
responded, ‘Look, I respect very much your position and standing, and
your leadership. But your narrative isn’t as good as my narrative,
because behind my narrative stand professionals,’” he said.
What Haliva failed to mention was his
habit of ignoring everything the professionals told him and not sharing
their information with his superiors.
All of this would be bad enough. But it
becomes even worse when seen in the framework of the 10-month insurgency
the Israeli left waged against the Netanyahu government. That
insurgency was led by Haliva’s family. His ex-wife and the mother of his
children, Shira Margalit, is married to Ilan Shiloah, a senior
advertising executive. Margalit and Shiloah stood behind much of the
political unrest that Israel has experienced since last year. Haliva’s
daughter spoke at anti-government protests. His son’s twitter feed is
filled with anti-Netanyahu invective.
Haliva reportedly did not share the
mountain of information his professional intelligence corps gathered on
Hamas’s plans. But he reportedly repeatedly warned Netanyahu that his
government’s legal reforms were emboldening Israel’s enemies and
increasing the likelihood of war.
In theory, all of this could be set aside
until the end of the war, except Haliva’s actions since Oct. 7 indicate
that he is still informed by his false narrative about Hamas. On the eve
of the ground invasion, Netanyahu addressed the public. He explained
that the war is Israel’s “second war of independence,” and that it
presents Israel with an “existential challenge.” In other words, Israel
has no choice but to win. Netanyahu defined victory as rescuing the
hostages, destroying Hamas as a military and political entity and
preventing it or any other terror group from rising in Gaza ever again.
Three days later, in his first public
remarks since Oct. 7, Haliva rejected Netanyahu’s description of the war
as an existential conflict. Speaking to graduates of the Intelligence
Corps officer training course, Haliva insisted, “It’s a war we have no
choice but to fight. It isn’t an existential war.”
The difference between an existential
conflict and a non-existential conflict is self-evident. You must win a
war for your state’s existence. You can fight to a draw for a lesser
conflict. An intelligence chief who publicly rejects the government’s
characterization of a war, whose poor professional judgment led to
catastrophe and who has a history of contemptuous insubordination simply
cannot be trusted to act in accordance with the government’s
directives.
Oct. 7 was not prevented because many
people in positions of responsibility failed the people of Israel. In
most cases, it is probably reasonable to wait until after the war to
part ways with them.
Haliva however, needs to go. Now!
Judge Paul Watford 
Gaza citizens turn out to cheer as Hamas fighters parade in an
anti-Israel rally at Al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on
May 28, 2021
