Jerusalem:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday acknowledged for the first time that he would “have to give answers” for security lapses exposed in the deadly October 7 attacks by Hamas.

“We will examine in detail, we will get to the bottom of it,” said Netanyahu, who has faced a barrage of opposition and media criticism after Gaza militants breached Israeli border defences.

“The fault will be examined and everyone will have to give answers, including me. But all this will happen later,” the right-wing leader said in a televised address as the Israeli military prepares for a widely expected invasion of the Gaza Strip.

“As prime minister I am responsible for securing the future of the country,” he added.

Israel says 1,400 people, most of whom were civilians, died in the attacks.

Gaza’s Hamas government says that Israeli air and artillery bombing since October 7 have left more than 6,500 dead, including some 2,700 children.

With tens of thousands of Israeli troops massed at the Gaza border, Netanyahu said “we are raining down hellfire” with the air strikes and that “all Hamas terrorists are dead men walking — above ground, below ground, outside Gaza”.

“We are preparing the ground offensive,” Netanyahu said.

“I cannot say when, how or how many, nor all the elements that we are taking into account, of which most are not known to the public,” he added.

Netanyahu said Israel’s war cabinet, named after October 7, would “unanimously” decide the time of the offensive.

Israel has an army of about 165,000 and has called up 360,000 reservists, some on the Gaza border and others moved to the border with Lebanon, where the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement has been staging daily artillery attacks.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Tel Aviv:

The head of Israel’s Internal Security Agency (ISA), Ronen Bar, took responsibility for failing to foil Hamas’ brutal attack on October 7 in which more than 1,300 people died, but vowed to fight till the end for a decisive victory in the war.

Mr Bar, in his first comments following the surprise attack that has left everybody shell-shocked in Israel, said the ISA “failed to generate” a warning.

“Despite a series of actions we carried out, unfortunately, last Saturday, we were unable to create a sufficient advance warning that would allow us to thwart the attack. As the one who heads the organisation, the responsibility for this is mine,” Mr Bar was quoted by the local media as saying on Monday.

However, he emphasised that “there will be time for investigations. Now we are fighting”.

The intelligence officer noted that his organisation on the very day of the attack set up a special system, in cooperation with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), to locate, identify, and concentrate efforts to recover kidnapped and missing persons.

They also formed various dedicated teams according to the needs of the fighting at the time, he said.

“Our men showed bravery, courage, and fighting spirit. The forces deployed in the south moved from battle to battle, facing dozens of terrorists. We lost ten of our best men, many of us were wounded, and the servicemen lost their relatives. Countless stories of heroism have emerged, with workers striving to engage without hesitation,” the ISA (also known as Shin Bet) chief stressed.

“All of the organisation’s employees arrived at their units, task forces were created, dedicated teams were established. Everyone who carried a weapon went down to fight,” Mr Bar said.

“Our operators from Task Force Tequila went to fight, the investigators brought intelligence from captured terrorists, and the coordinators in the field went through the operations to collect intelligence,” he said.

The ISA head added that the “intelligence triangle has a purpose and is producing results”.

“We are in a war, not ‘another round’. ‘Another round’ is won with an image of victory and in silence, a war ends with a decision and a change in the situation. There is no border limit, there is no time limit. Until the end,” Mr Bar asserted.

Israel, which is known worldwide for its intelligence network, is devastated by the massive failure of its vaunted agencies.

The IDF Chief of Staff, Herzi Halevi, had also taken responsibility for failing to stop the attack last week.

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Saturday’s surprise attack on Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas may represent one of the biggest failures by Israeli intelligence since the Yom Kippur war of 1973.

The attack involved dozens of infiltrations by land and sea, together with rocket attacks – a sophisticated assault that involves the kind of planning and coordination that intelligence agencies are supposed to pick up on. Hundreds have been killed on both sides.

While Israeli officials have said for months that Palestinian militant groups were preparing for violence, the timing and scale of the attack appear to have caught Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by surprise. Israel and its ally the US – which contributed $3.3 billion to Israel in defense spending in 2022 – were already weighing who was most responsible and how it happened.

“It’s shocking to me that they were able to do it without Israel or the United States picking up on it,” said Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Failure to prepare. Failure to have troops along the border, failure of the fence along the border that they paid millions of shekels for.”

The attack is all the more shocking given that it comes 50 years after Israel’s failure to head off a surprise attack that Egypt and Syria launched on the Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur. That intelligence failure prompted the creation of a commission to figure out what went wrong and became the subject of countless books and scholarly articles.

Israeli officials said it was far too soon to know what went wrong, and rejected any comparison to 1973.

“Please don’t give Hamas the sophistication of the Yom Kippur War,” Israeli Defense Forces spokesman Richard Hecht said. “I know there are a lot of questions about the intelligence. Please stop asking. Right now we’re fighting. I’m sure there will be a lot of discussions about the intelligence down the road.”

Intelligence professionals typically distinguish between failures of collection, failures of analysis, and failures by policymakers to heed warnings from intelligence agencies. 

For starters, there was the simple fact that Israel was in the middle of a holiday. And already, questions are being raised about whether Israel’s army and intelligence services were distracted by domestic infighting.

Israelis have protested for months against Netanyahu’s efforts to strip power from the nation’s judiciary. The country is also in negotiations with the US and Saudi Arabia on a complex three-way deal in which Washington would offer security guarantees to Riyadh.

“The real problem here is likely that the Israelis simply did not believe that Hamas would risk a cross-border infiltration,” said Aaron David Miller, senior fellow at the Carnegie endowment for international peace and a former state department Middle East negotiator. “The lack of sufficient Israeli forces in that area was a grievous failure.”

The US Congress will need to ask tough questions, given that Israeli and US intelligence agencies should have been expected to detect an attack on this scale, according to a congressional staffer who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations. 

The failure is all the more striking given that Israel’s security services devote substantial resources to monitoring Palestinian society, including Hamas, through networks of human sources, as well as surveillance technology. 

Surprise Attacks
Surprise attacks have often galvanized massive responses by the targeted countries. Pearl Harbor and September 11 both heralded the start of new wars and major shakeups in the US’s security services. 

Within hours of Saturday’s attack, the Israeli Defense Forces had launched Operation Swords of Iron, carrying out air strikes against targets in the Gaza Strip. Prime Minister Netanyahu declared that Israel is “at war.”

CIA director William Burns canceled a keynote speech he was due to give on Saturday evening at The Cipher Brief Threat Conference in Sea Island, Georgia, in order to work on the crisis, according to conference organizer Suzanne Kelly.

At the conference, retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis, who was Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and regularly liaised with Israeli officials, described the incursion as a “shocking intelligence failure.” He said that while he was not surprised by Hamas’ decision to attack, he was “very surprised” by the tactics the group has adopted, including the speed, fatalities and taking of hostages, which he said would be “high-end bargaining chips.”

Emily Harding, a former CIA Middle East analyst, said the attack, which must have been planned for months, was especially surprising given how capable Israel’s intelligence services have become.

“It’s highly surprising the Israelis missed that planning,” said Harding, a senior fellow Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Time will tell what really happened – there will be months-long investigations to piece together what the IDF and Mossad knew and when they knew it.”

With assistance from Katrina Manson.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)