Intelligence failure

The 7 October attacks revealed serious shortcomings in Israel’s awareness of the threats it was facing.

The Israel Hayom newspaper pointed out that just months before the attacks, the army had reduced the number of its troops stationed in Gaza before transferring them to the West Bank. It called this a “massive intelligence failure”.

Senior Israeli army officials said the decision was based on information that Hamas had no plans to escalate its fight with Israelis because it was keen to keep borders open to the thousands of Gazans crossing into Israel each day to work.

And yet, all the time, the detailed planning for 7 October was underway. “Where was the intelligence, and why did it take so long?” the daily Hebrew-language paper asked. It also listed other “difficult questions that the investigative committees must answer”.

Electronic army

The importance of Hamas’s Cyber Force has increasingly grown in the past few years. It was officially recognised on 13 October 2022, although it is thought to have been operating without acknowledgement for around eight years before that.

The announcement of its existence came, in part, to honour its founder, an engineer called Jomaa Tahla. He was killed in Israeli air strikes in May 2021.

Hamas described him as a martyr who “worked to establish, rehabilitate, and develop” the Cyber Force.  They said Tahla set up the Cyber Force in 2014, saying that “he was the one who came up with the idea of establishing the electronic Quds Army.”

The al-Qassam Brigades acknowledged that the recruitment operations are based on “the idea of mobilising as much talent as possible at the level of the Arab and Islamic nations, talent that has experience in the cyber field” to launch cyberattacks against Israeli interests and systems. 

It went on to list examples of its success:

  • A large-scale cyberattack on military bases, sites, security installations, and sensitive targets that affected 30,000 targets during the May 2019 aggression.

  • Hacking a siren system and activating sirens in various areas of Israel.

  • Hacking and tapping the frequencies of Israeli army radio signals on the Gaza border several times.

  • Hacking into the device of the director of the cyber department of Israel Aerospace Industries.

  • Pirating security and military data and information in a size of 19 gigabytes.

  • Hacking the Egged bus network system.

The Israeli military acknowledged that it had faced qualitative attacks, and in 2018, it confirmed that phones belonging to dozens of its soldiers had been hacked.