While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East, by Yaakov Katz & Amir Bohbot (St. Martin’s Press, 336 pp., $31)
The Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, was an assault about 15 times as large, on a per capita basis, than the 9/11 attacks. When it was over, more Jews had been murdered than on any single day since the Holocaust.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
How did it happen? While Israel Slept, the account of two veteran Israeli national security reporters, Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot, should be required reading for those seeking to understand why the nation’s security failed and how to prevent another deadly incursion. This detailed exploration of the collapse of Israel’s vaunted intelligence, military, and political institutions prior to October 7 provides a depressing, often shocking explanation for how Hamas, the militant Islamist group that continues to rule Gaza, was able to murder more than 1,200 people, injure some 10,000, and take some 251 people hostage in a single day.
Katz and Bohbot interviewed hundreds of people who agreed to share their own stories and insights into the tragedy. The authors claim, counterintuitively, that Israel’s national security apparatus and political leadership failed not by overreacting to the October 7 slaughter but by failing to respond to compelling evidence, much of it public, that Hamas was planning a massive invasion. The government’s major strategic miscalculation, they write, was conceptual: Israel’s leaders continued to believe that Hamas was “contained"; that preemptive action was both unnecessary and unwise, since it might provoke a wider war; and that the Israeli-encouraged $1 billion Qatari infusion of cash to Gaza had successfully bought off Hamas. Israeli leaders believed that Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s de facto leader and the main architect of October 7, was satisfied with ruling the Gaza Strip.
Israel’s policy of “containment,” the journalists argue, produced a “dangerous complacency” about its enemies—and not just Hamas. Consecutive Israeli governments watched as Syria amassed vast quantities of chemical weapons throughout the 1980s and 1990s but took no action. They stood by as Hezbollah amassed weapons in Lebanon, “going from just 20,000 rockets during the Second Lebanon War in 2006 to over 150,000 by 2023, many of which were unleashed when the Lebanese terrorist group also began attacking Israel in solidarity with Hamas following October 7.”
Israel’s other major failures included an under reliance on human intelligence (Humint)—Israel did not have a single intelligence agent in Gaza on the night of the attack, the authors maintain—and a dangerous overreliance on technology for its defense. Hamas had no trouble neutralizing Israel’s supposedly impenetrable $1 billion “iron wall” along the Gaza border. “[T]he military was certain that the only way Hamas could cross the border was by tunnel,” they write. But on October 7, not a single terrorist who killed, raped, and burned Israelis crossed into Israel by tunnel. “Everything and everyone were just wrong.”
Israeli officials made another conceptual error: they overestimated the damage the IDF had inflicted on Hamas’s rocket launchers and tunnel entrances during the limited military campaigns in 2009, 2014, 2017, and 2021—“mowing the lawn,” as Israelis called it. Israel did little to stop Hamas from digging an “underground city” of 300 miles of tunnels beneath Gaza—which would become a “terror dungeon for 251 hostages.”
Though most Israeli officials assumed that Hamas had been neutralized, there were dissenters. A 2016 “top secret” paper by then-Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, a hardline right-wing politician, warned that Hamas was determined to bring the next conflict onto Israeli soil and, if possible, take hostages. The prescient document asserted that Hamas was also determined to increase its military force from 27,000 to 40,000 by 2020, which it did, and to launch a multifront campaign against Israel that would include Hezbollah. This also occurred.
Though the authors do not use this word, the October 7 slaughter was also the result of Israeli hubris—its unwillingness to believe that Hamas militants could inflict such devastation on the technologically sophisticated, militarily dominant Jews. This reminded me of the years after the Six-Day War in 1967, in which Israel’s leaders repeatedly underestimated Egypt’s and its Arab neighbors’ determination to reclaim the Sinai and reverse Israel’s impressive military victory. Israeli disdain toward the Arabs led to similar complacency, which, in turn, prompted the devastating 1973 Yom Kippur War, which Israel came close to losing.
While Israel Slept is especially critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Katz and Bohbot claim that he repeatedly refused to act preemptively against Hamas and helped orchestrate Qatar’s financial aid to Gaza, despite warnings by some security officials that Sinwar and other top Hamas leaders remained intent on destroying the Jewish state. Shin Bet director Ronen Bar, who repeatedly pressed for a more aggressive policy toward Hamas and a preemptive strike to kill its senior leaders, warned Netanyahu that Sinwar was driven by “opportunity and not fear.” Alerts of Hamas-directed attacks in the West Bank, for instance, increased from 60 a day in 2022 to 200 daily in 2023. Hamas leaders openly called for Israel’s destruction. Intelligence officials knew that Hamas’s military wing had been holding training raids on mock IDF posts and Israeli towns, recording themselves as they kidnapped men dressed as Israeli soldiers. But before October 7, such warnings fell on “deaf Israeli ears,” the authors maintain.
Some ominous reports—such as the doubling of Hamas phone calls and messaging in the days leading up to October 7—never reached senior intelligence officials, note Katz and Bohbot. Documents found after the invasion showed that Hamas had been preparing for such an assault for over a year: Israelis found detailed maps of the kibbutzim and nearby IDF bases as well as the precise locations of IDF commanders within the bases, weapons depots and medical clinics, and different squadrons of the Tel Nof Airbase. The terrorists had even identified dining rooms in which they intended to gather residents whom they would transfer to Gaza. Some of the roughly 20,000 Palestinians permitted to work in Israel had helped Hamas map out where Israelis lived in several kibbutzim, where they dined, and even which houses had pets. Hamas battalion commanders received authority to write fatwas, or religious rulings, “to justify rapes and the abuse of bodies and more that were inflicted on Israeli civilians and soldiers.”
The scale and depth of Israel’s intelligence and policy failures are stunning. Ten months before October 7, IDF chief of staff Aviv Kohavi confidently declared at an internal Aman conference that Israel’s “strategy of deterrence” had resulted in the “quietest and most stable” years in Gaza. Despite the exceptional heroism of many soldiers who rushed to the Gaza border on October 7 to try to save endangered Israelis, such misjudgments intensified Israelis’ sense of anguish and trauma, increased doubts about their government’s ability to protect them, and strengthened their desire for revenge and retribution in Gaza.
Israel’s inevitable counteroffensive was also troubled, the authors report. Just as Hamas and other terrorist factions in Gaza had painstakingly prepared for their pogrom, they had also meticulously rehearsed for Israel’s ground incursion, “fortifying themselves with an extensive network of tunnels, anti-tank missile units, snipers, and a substantial arsenal of mortar shells.”
Katz and Bohbot assert that Netanyahu, who prides himself as Israel’s “Mr. Security,” had to be forced to send ground troops into Gaza, even after October 7. The authors blame him for the disastrous decision to encourage Qatar to provide “aid” to Hamas. Israel’s intelligence agencies “paid little attention”—under both prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Netanyahu—to where the estimated $360 million a year in Qatari aid was going in Gaza. Israel learned only too late that Qatar’s cash bought not deterrence but the construction and reinforcement of over 300 miles of tunnels, some three levels and 40 to 65 yards deep.
For Netanyahu, Hamas was both a threat and a solution, the authors maintain: “Its existence and control of Gaza provided him with a constant excuse for explaining why it was impossible to advance toward a two-state solution, by which an independent Palestinian state would rule over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.” Far-right politician Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Finance Minister since 2022, was blunter about the political value of this strategy. “Hamas is an asset and the [Palestinian Authority] is a burden,” he tweeted in 2015. As long as Hamas ruled Gaza, the world would not pressure Israel to negotiate with the Palestinians. “Time and again,” the authors conclude, Netanyahu placed political survival above national interest.”
Despite their bitter criticism of Netanyahu and his government, Katz and Bohbot defend Israel against international criticism of its counteroffensive in Gaza. While Israel has been accused of “genocide” for its massive bombing and battles at schools, hospitals, and other civilian facilities, the authors say that Hamas deliberately built its most elaborate, heavily fortified “luxury” tunnels under such places and stationed the bulk of its fighters there. At Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, for instance, Israeli troops found more than 1,000 operatives at a Hamas base. While international organizations claimed that Israel has destroyed almost 70 percent of Gaza’s homes and buildings, the United Nations’ own satellite agency’s images show that the number is half that—35 percent—less than the percentage of structures destroyed or damaged during the U.S.-led operation against the Islamic State in Mosul (65 percent) or in Raqqa (70 percent).
The authors clearly doubt that Israeli-Palestinian peace is possible any time soon. They argue that, in the meantime, Israel must adopt a new defense strategy to prevent Hamas, Hezbollah, and its other enemies from reconstituting their military capabilities. “The next time the IDF sees a truck loaded with rockets driving into Gaza City, it needs to attack. The next time Hamas fighters are drilling assaults on Israel, the IDF need to attack; and the next time it sees people digging a tunnel, it need to destroy it,” they conclude. “Preemptive action” must become Israel’s new “pillar of defense.”