Hamas Outmaneuvered Israel’s Surveillance Prowess by Going Dark
Monday, October 9, 2023
By Peter Martin, Katrina Manson and Henry Meyer
(Bloomberg) --Facing one of the most sophisticated surveillance states on the planet, Hamas simply went dark.
The
militant group’s attack on Saturday caught Israel’s national security
apparatus completely off guard — a shocking fact given the scope of the
incursion, which included attacks by sea, air and land, and pushed deep
into Israeli territory.
In theory, it shouldn’t
have been possible. Israel’s intelligence services have a reputation as
some of the world’s most sophisticated. And the Gaza Strip, a slice of
land next to Egypt, is one of the most surveilled places on the planet.
Phone lines are tapped. Satellites watch overhead. Informants keep tabs
on the 2 million residents of an area just over twice the size of
Washington, DC.
Israel and the US will need
years to sift through all the failings that allowed Hamas to move with
such surprise and to such deadly effect, killing hundreds of Israelis
and capturing others. But already, a picture has begun to emerge of how
the group’s fighters did it, according to current and former
intelligence officials in the US, Israel and elsewhere.
While
many questions remain unanswered, what’s clear is that Hamas went
low-tech, avoiding Israel’s ability to tap its communications, and even,
perhaps, exploiting the Israeli Defense Forces’ confidence that its
missile attacks could be repelled or prevented
“My
suspicion is that Hamas was able to keep such a vast operation — which
included many, many trainers, lots of operational training, and bringing
in a vast amount of munitions — close-hold because they went very old
school,” said Beth Sanner, former deputy director of national
intelligence.
“I suspect they never talked
about it electronically,” Sanner said. “They broke it up into cells and
did individual meetings. And each group was assigned to do different
things. Very few people understood how each of the components came
together as the whole plan.”
As dawn broke on
Saturday, some 1,000 Hamas fighters burst through the technologically
advanced fence designed to protect against threats from Gaza, fanning
out across towns and villages. Children were shot in front of their
parents. Hostages were dragged from their homes. Overhead, thousands of
rockets rained down as other fighters entered the country on
paragliders.
A person familiar with Israeli
intelligence operations said the success of the attack likely means that
the country’s military intelligence, which has primary responsibility
for monitoring developments in Gaza, lacked high-quality human sources
inside Hamas’ leadership.
It’s also possible
that the group’s planning relied on encrypted technology, according to
Andrew Borene, an executive director with Flashpoint and a former group
chief at the US National Counterterrorism Center. “I have a feeling
there is also a component of clandestine communications using devices,”
he said.
Alon Arvatz, a former member of
Israel’s Unit 8200, which is responsible for the military’s signals
intelligence, said it’s clear that Hamas has been able to sidestep
Israel’s ability to intercept phone and email communication. That
includes some of the “perception techniques” Israel has used in the
past, which he said might be based on computers or phones or anything
that can be intercepted.
“They obviously learned how the intelligence is being collected, and they learn how to avoid it,” Arvatz said.
If
taking its communications dark helped Hamas circumvent eavesdropping,
then going underground — literally — may have helped thwart Israel’s
surveillance satellites.
Hamas has excelled
for years at hiding its weapons stockpiles in tunnels or underground,
according to a person familiar with US intelligence on the group. As a
result, Israel has hit its above-ground depots time and again from the
air to no avail, the person said.
The tunnels
appeared to have aided the execution of the attack. Instead of seeking
to dig underneath the sensor-equipped underground wall that Israel
completed in 2021, “they chose the alternative of digging up to the
obstacle and then popping out by surprise,” said Israeli military
analyst Eado Hecht. “They sent a mass attack that overwhelmed the system
beyond its capacity to react quickly enough.”
Hamas’
planning was also probably helped by the growing sophistication of its
own intelligence apparatus. Its capabilities have expanded dramatically
since it seized control of Gaza in 2007, according to a May 2023 study
in the journal “Intelligence and National Security.”
The
group’s Military Intelligence Department has devoted significant
resources to observing the border with Israel, running agents in the
country and listening to the Israeli Defense Forces’ tactical
communications. As a result, Hamas has amassed knowledge on Israeli
weaponry, training and troop deployments, according to the study.
Hamas
“had very good intelligence that the Israeli border was lightly manned,
that it could be overrun, that they would able to get close enough to
detonate explosives and get through the fences, wires and checkpoints —
that’s the key,” said Kenneth Katzman, the Congressional Research
Service’s former top Middle East expert. All of this information would
have allowed Hamas to “map out this type of assault,” he said.
The ability of Hamas to plan the attack and hide its intentions must also be set against Israel’s own shortcomings.
Israel’s
government faces charges that its national security establishment was
distracted by domestic infighting. Many Israelis have protested for
months against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to strip
power from the nation’s judiciary.
The Times
of Israel reported Monday that Egyptian intelligence had repeatedly
warned Egypt that Hamas was planning “something big,” but that Israeli
officials chose to focus on the West Bank instead of Gaza. Bloomberg
News hasn’t independently verified that reporting.
There’s
also the possibility that Israel grew too confident, in part because
its technological sophistication lulled it into a false sense of
security. Two years ago, the Israeli Air Force posted an article on its
website entitled, “Exclusive: The IDF’s Ability to Strike Rockets Before
They’re Launched.”
The article outlined a
scenario that failed to repeat itself on Saturday as thousands of Hamas
rockets overwhelmed Israel’s air defenses. Throughout the 2014 Gaza war
against Hamas, the IDF struck “hundreds of terrorists who were caught
firing rockets at Israel. Many of them were struck right before
launching, others were targeted after the act,” according to the
article.
Israel also appears to have
misunderstood the intent, motivations and capabilities of Hamas in
failing to anticipate the possibility off a cross-border raid, according
to Sanner, the former deputy director of national intelligence.
“They
failed in the imagination of how all of these events that were
happening came together as a much greater whole,” Sanner said.