Sources familiar with the intelligence say that in the weeks leading up to Saturday’s devastating attack on southern Israel, the US intelligence community produced at least two assessments based in part on intelligence provided by Israel warning the Biden administration of an increased risk for Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
One report from September 28 warned that Hamas was planning to step up rocket assaults across the border, based on information gathered from a variety of sources. The CIA issued a broad alert on the possibility of violence by Hamas on October 5. The day before the attack, on October 6, US officials disseminated reports from Israel showing extraordinary activity by Hamas. These reports indicated what is now obvious: an attack was impending.
None of the American assessments, according to reliable sources, included any tactical information or indicators of the massive scale, scope, and savagery of the operation carried out by Hamas on October 7. There is no indication that Israel, the source of much of the intelligence used by the United States in its reports, was made aware of any of these evaluations.
According to the source, practically daily intelligence briefings for senior officials contain a list of “hot spots” that includes Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.
The intelligence community writes intelligence assessments to help policymakers make better judgements.
One of the people with knowledge of the intelligence added, “The problem is that none of this is new.” That’s the way things usually go between Hamas and Israel. What I imagine happened is that everyone saw these allegations and was like, “Yeah, of course.” But we can imagine how this will turn out.
Questions were raised as to whether the United States and Israel were sufficiently alert to the threat despite the fact that the assessments were part of a flood of high-level warnings sent to the Biden administration by its own intelligence agency and Middle Eastern partners over the past year.
An Arab nation’s top official said his nation warned the United States and Israel numerous times that Palestinian rage was approaching a dangerous level. The officer said, “But they never listened every time we warned them.”
A Middle Eastern envoy in Washington, DC, informed AWN that their country had alerted the White House and US intelligence authorities on multiple occasions about the growing arsenal of Hamas weapons and the simmering fury among Palestinians.
“The arms that exist in Gaza is beyond the imagination of anybody’s thinking,” the ambassador cautioned. “The arms that exist in the West Bank, via Hamas, are also becoming a real problem, and Hamas control of the West Bank is a real issue.”
“This in every meeting, every meeting in the last year and a half,” the ambassador continued.
And in February, CIA Director Bill Burns told a crowd at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service that he was “quite concerned about the prospects for even greater fragility and even greater violence between Israelis and Palestinians.”
According to a US official who spoke to AWN, “I would not come to the conclusion that the intel community was not tracking this from a strategic level.”
However, those strategic warnings did not aid US or Israeli officials in predicting what would happen on October 7, when over a thousand Hamas fighters flooded across the border into Israel in an operation that would kill over a thousand Israelis. One person familiar with the intelligence stated that most US and Israeli officials were expecting only another round of small-scale violence by Hamas, perhaps some missile fire that Israel’s Iron Dome would intercept.
“If we had known or if we know of a pending attack against an ally, we would clearly inform that ally,” Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Friday.
It is too soon to evaluate how the planning for such a huge attack was overlooked, senior Biden administration officials and current and former intelligence officials continue to assert, insisting that they are focused on the situation at hand.
Many current and former intelligence officials, as well as some lawmakers who had been briefed on US intelligence, disputed the idea that the United States was to blame for the lack of tactical warning of the attack, arguing that the vast majority of US intelligence reporting on Gaza came from Israel.
Israeli intelligence officials missed the boat on this one, but American officials did not. We trust the Shin Bet, the IDF, Mossad, and other agencies.
The New York Times also revealed that President Joe Biden was not told on the reports despite their availability.
Both the ODNI and the CIA declined to provide a statement. On Friday, despite AWN’s persistent demands for response, the White House remained silent.
