On Saturday, U.S. officials stated they had received no intelligence indicating Hamas was plotting an attack on Israel, causing some to question Israel’s apparent inability to detect precursors to the missile barrage.
In an interview with AWN, a senior US intelligence official expressed alarm over technology weak spots that could allow Hamas to plot terrorist strikes on Israeli towns undetected.
Indicators of a rise in hostilities had been tracked by US authorities for some time. However, US officials were not forewarned of a massive strike on this date by any tactical-level intelligence.
Whether there were missed indicators or whether Israel and the US failed to acquire any information that might have helped forecast the attack is now the focus of intelligence authorities in both countries.
Israeli and American authorities will create assessments “in the coming days to see whether there were things missed or if there was intelligence collected and misread, or if we have a completely dark area we didn’t know about,” the official said.
A high-ranking US military officer has stated that the US has not detected any recent preparations for an assault against Israel.
According to other US sources with knowledge of the situation, Washington would have shared any intelligence it had with Israel had it indicated an impending strike.
Throughout history, Israeli surveillance capabilities in Gaza have been unparalleled. US authorities have said that Israelis have some of the best ability to crack encrypted communications.
That’s why the US government was so surprised to find no signs of pre-attack planning on Saturday.
US intelligence officials are trying to learn more about the attackers’ use of encrypted messaging and training, as well as whether or whether this information is being shared with other groups.
Israeli authorities came out and said they were taken by surprise by the airstrike on Saturday.
It caught us off guard this morning. I’d rather not discuss past mistakes at this time. We’re at war now. Now we’re at war. Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, the foreign spokesperson for the Israeli Defence Forces, predicted on AWN that this would be a frequently asked issue after the occurrence.
Telling AWN’s Wolf Blitzer, “I assume the intelligence question will be talked about down the road and we’ll learn what happened there,”
When asked whether this was a failure of Israeli intelligence, Israel’s ambassador to the United States Michael Herzog admitted there was a “element of surprise.”
Questions concerning why intelligence wasn’t enough, though, were for the future, he said.
“We’ll get to that later,” he promised on AWN. “Like I said, we have to fight a war right now, and we have to win it. The time to find out what transpired will come later.
After Hamas leaders called for strikes elsewhere, US Homeland Security and the FBI stated they are paying closer attention to potential threats. While there is currently no evidence of any actual threats within the United States, officials are sending warnings to law enforcement agencies around the country in light of the possibility for threats, as they did during previous Israeli-Palestinian wars.