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- [00:01]
Yaakov Katz
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- [00:32]
Thomas Small
7th October 2023 an event whose brutality and historic consequences will long be remembered. But how did Israel, the Middle East's most feared intelligence state, fail to see an attack that had been rehearsed in plain sight? Yaakov Katz is the former editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post and co author of While Israel Slept. As he shows on October 7, Hamas did not merely break through Israel's border, it broke through an entire system of assumptions that Hamas was deterred, that technology could replace human intelligence, and that the Palestinian issue could be managed rather than solved. In this conversation, Katz explains how Israel possessed pieces of the Hamas plan, yet failed to understand them, why its billion dollar border barrier solved the wrong problem, how the tunnels beneath Gaza became a hidden military city, and why Benjamin Netanyahu's strategy of containment, Palestinian division and political survival helped make disaster inevitable. I'm Thomas Small, this is my Conflicted Convers conversation with Yaakov Katz. Hello Yaakov. Thank you very much for coming on to Conflicted. It's a great privilege to meet you, sir.
- [02:10]
Yaakov Katz
It's a great privilege to be with
- [02:11]
Thomas Small
you, Thomas Yaakov, you've come on the show to discuss your excellent new book, a book you co wrote along with Amir Bachbat, While Israel Slept How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East. I enjoyed the book. I learned a lot. I appreciated it. Such a pretty balanced perspective. You lay out the facts as best as you know them. You, of course are Israeli and you support the Israeli perspective. So there's a certain, you know, what's the word? It didn't read like a polemic, but it read like you were defending, you know, the Israeli perspective in this conflict. But I thought it was very judicious and I learned a lot. So thank you for writing it.
- [02:53]
Yaakov Katz
Thank you for reading it.
- [02:54]
Thomas Small
If you wouldn't mind, could you start by describing the afternoon of the 6 October, the day before the terrible Hamas attack against communities in southern Israel? Because, you know, reading your book, I was pretty surprised by the events of that afternoon the day before.
- [03:17]
Yaakov Katz
As was I, by the way. I have to say, when October 7th happened, that morning, 6, 29am when the Hamas attack commenced. Rockets. And then a mad dash by. In the beginning, several hundred, and then eventually several thousand people who ended up crossing into Israel and invading and ransacking and ravaging the borderline communities and killing so many people and taking so many hostage. Before that, it seemed like it was out of the blue, like there was no warning, there was no indication, no one knew anything. It was such a shock to the system, such a surprise that the Israeli military, the vaunted idf, was caught so off guard that something must have happened. There must have been some mistake, some miscalculation. In the initial months after the war began, people spoke of a, of a mole from within, of some sort of conspiracy, of a. Someone who shut off some system or turned the lights off on a, on a, on a warning alert system, whatever it might be. Of course, none of that was true. What really happened here was a complete breakdown of all intelligence, defensive measures, any assessment, any capability that a military is meant to have in terms of defending itself and being aware and preparing for such an attack was just gone and missing. And when we went for that deep dive to understand really, just from a purely journalistic perspective, what happened, how did the mighty Israeli military, the same military, Thomas. Right. That we all have read about and been in awe of just even the last couple years, the pager attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon, right. Being able to infiltrate a terrorist group with pagers loaded with explosives, set them off at the same time. I mean, it's the stuff of James Bond movies.
- [05:17]
Thomas Small
I mean, certainly even the most kind of outspoken anti Israeli critics, you know, would normally think of the IDF as this kind of, you know, unstoppable military behemoth.
- [05:28]
Yaakov Katz
Correct. Exactly.
- [05:30]
Thomas Small
And to the extent that a lot of people assume, you know, there's a lot of that conspiracy theory going on, like a lot of people assume they must have known about the attack in advance, they must have allowed it to happen in order to give them the pretext they needed to, you know, destroy Gaza and stuff. I mean, that's the degree to which people are, find it hard to believe about these failures.
- [05:48]
Yaakov Katz
So we, we went into this deep dive to understand how could this have happened. And we were both. I was for about 10, 11 years a military reporter myself, and then became the editor of a newspaper. Amir continues to cover the military so very from a close perspective. So we know the military well and we were shocked ourselves, just as everyone was. So we need to understand what happened and, and going into that, what we discovered and, you know, now by now, the world knows is that there were tons of signs. There were indications that something was amiss. There were pictures, images that the, the female spotters, the surveillance soldiers who are stationed along the border, whose job is to look at computer screens and in their area of surveillance and see if anything's out of the ordinary. They were seeing things out of the ordinary. There were indications throughout the night that between the 6th and the 7th of Hamas preparing underground bunker systems for its top commanders to descend into. That could only happen in the event of an attack by Israel. Why else would they need to go down to their bunker system? And why would they fear that there's an attack from Israel coming, unless they're planning something? They were uncovering rocket launchers, the underground rocket launchers that they have. Why would they be uncovering them if not to use, if not to fire them? And looking back even farther, Israel had, had, had gotten its hands on basically the, the, the, the playbook, the manual of what Hamas was planning to do and what it eventually did, one to one. It was a, an operation that in Israeli military intelligence, they called Jericho Walls. It was a book that was put together by Israeli intelligence analysts that basically said, we think Hamas is planning this. This was several years before October 7th. And then when we spoke with the Defense Minister at the time of October 7th and said, did you ever hear Jericho Walls? He had never heard of it. Only months later was he made aware that actually military intelligence had its hands on this document and had this insight into what Hamas had been planning in principle. So when you look at all of that together, what you really see is a colossal failure, one that really still and unfortunately has yet to happen, but in my view, demands accountability and demands a commission of inquiry to really understand, to learn those lessons so that something like this can never happen again.
- [08:30]
Thomas Small
Yeah, you say in the book that a unit, 8200, if that's how you say it, a female analyst of this, of this intelligence unit kind of raised the alarm about Hamas activities along the border, clearly training for something like the Jericho Walls attack, which military intelligence had sort of uncovered or at least put together. And yet she was ignored. And again and again, you see how many times in the, in the year, let's say, preceding the 7th of October, different choices could have been made to prevent it and to prevent everything that followed, including, you know, as I said at the beginning, all the way up to the afternoon of 6 October, some key decisions were taken that that meant the disaster the following day was not prevented. So what, you know, what about that Afternoon.
- [09:20]
Yaakov Katz
I think what we see here just before the afternoon itself is a paradigm, a belief system almost. That's kind of how I've always looked at it.
- [09:30]
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Right.
- [09:31]
Yaakov Katz
And I know you're a man of. Who comes from the belief systems themselves, but what I've tried to explain to people is that for. For, let's say, people who are real believers in God as an example, Right?
- [09:45]
Thomas Small
I am a real believer in God, as it happens, yes.
- [09:48]
Yaakov Katz
So there, There are people who, no matter what happens, you always will interpret it through the prism of, Of. Of your belief. Something good. A very simplistic level, of course, God is rewarding me. Something bad, God is punishing me. But it's always some sort of divine kind of directive. So too, in intelligence, as strange as this sounds, you can have belief systems like that. So when you believe so deeply that your enemy is deterred, that your enemy does not want war, that your enemy prefers quiet and economic prosperity and, and wants more of its people to enter into Israel for work, and wants to continue to get the $30 million in monthly payments they've been getting Qataris and cash to. To, you know, feed the economy of Gaza, then everything that you see is looked at through the prism and what we call in Hebrew, the conceptia. The concept. The idea. So the idea being Hamas is deterred. Hamas does not want war. So if you then see senior Hamas commanders who you've never seen before on the border, why would they be there? You say to yourself, no, they're just taking a look. Or if you see people training, as you mentioned, in mock IDF bases and outposts and Hamas armed terrorists raiding those bases that they've created inside Gaza and then grabbing people and throwing them over their shoulder and stuffing them in a car and kidnapping them as part of a drill. You say to yourself, one second, who are they doing this against if not drilling an attack one day against an Israeli base? But then you say yourself, no, that's just for internal domestic show. They want to give a raison d', etre, why they're still needed, blah, blah, blah. Again, everything interpreted and digested based on this belief system. That's what happened here, unfortunately.
- [11:46]
Thomas Small
Yeah. You say there were three, really three levels of failure. The first one being a strategic failure based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Hamas's intentions, as you've just laid out. And at one point you say that the Israeli leadership almost projected their own priorities onto Hamas over time, you know, believing Hamas was becoming more pragmatic. Which kind of reminds me of President Trump's relationship with The IRGC at the moment he seems to believe, frankly, despite all the evidence, that the IRGC will make a deal, you know, based on the President's own scale of priorities. But I just reading that part of the book, I did think, you know, what about Israel? Because was it, you know, just pragmatic in the years leading up to the 7th of October, maybe geopolitically it was in terms of, you know, regional integration, the Abraham Accords, the long vaunted relationship with Saudi becoming closer, et cetera. But in terms of the Palestinian file, you know, can't we see to some extent even you know, in Israel, you know, the rise of settlements in the west bank and that kind of increasingly right wing turn of the various governing coalitions as a sign that Israel was kind of also adopting an increasingly non pragmatic position? Do you know what I mean? I'm not trying to get at anything, but I just wondered if it's true that Israel was like being pragmatic and projecting pragmatism onto to Hamas or if there was something else going on like the idea that Hamas is an asset to some extent because it keeps the Palestinians divided.
- [13:25]
Yaakov Katz
So I think there's a couple of things to break down right on, on the one hand you're right, that was the strategic failure. There were then tactical failures, right? There was the, the, the, the lack of the defensive measures, the fence, the border, the, the, the multi layers, the electronic warning systems, all that broke down. And the other tactical failure was the soldiers deployed along the border who are there were not capable in stopping. And where was the IDF to come, the reinforcements to stop. But to your question about what was really behind this strategy, I think there were three key drivers here. Driver number one was let's keep this quiet, let's contain this. It's our smaller enemy, we have bigger fish to fry. We're dealing still with Iran and its pursuit of a nuclear capability. Remember, this is all before the 12 day war in June of 25 and of course the war that's on and off as we're speaking. So we have Iran to deal with and we need to be focused with our limited resources and assets and intelligence collection and Air Force, etc. Number two, we also have Hezbollah, which is the bigger enemy. The one with 150,000 rockets and missiles capable of penetrating and reaching anywhere inside the state of Israel. Second driver is that life is good in Israel. Things are okay. It's, it's the economy is growing, right? Growth, economic growth is up 4 or 5% every year. The shekel against the dollars is so strong. Tourism is, is through the roof. The year of 2023, we had the largest number of tourists who came to the State of Israel since its founding. I think it was close to 3 million people up until October, of course, when the war began. So the investments, the economy, the growth of the country, everything is looking good. So why would I want to break that? So occasionally I got to hit them on the head. They hit us on the head. But it's working. This system of cycles, of rounds of violence every two years. Why do I have to do anything out of the ordinary? And then there was the third. And I think, and you said it just now, and I totally agree with this, is that there was an ideological element here. This current government, which is still in office here in Israel. They came into office in January of 2023. But the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, has basically been the Prime Minister since March or May of 2009, uninterrupted, except for 18 months between 2021 and 2022. So he's been here for up until 23. He was the prime minister pretty much for 14 years, uninterrupted. And his policy very much is, was and still is adamantly opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state. We don't have to agree with him. We could agree with him. We could get into this if you want to, but set it aside for a moment. This is his policy. And therefore, when you have a reality, because the best argument, whenever somebody would come and say, bibi, give the Palestinians a state, make some agreement with them in the west bank, pull out of those settlements, give them an opportunity. He would say, but what do you want from me? They're divided among themselves. You have Hamas and Gaza. Hamas violently took over Gaza. Let's remind our listeners, in the summer of 05, Israel pulled out of Gaza in what was known as the withdrawal, the disengagement removed its settlements, removed its military positions back to international border, handed it over to the Palestinian Authority. In the summer of 2007, Hamas violently took over Gaza, kicked out the Palestinian Authority, and ever since then was in charge with totally disconnected from Fatah, otherwise known as the pa, the Palestinian Authority, and the President, Mahmoud Abbas. So BP would always be able to say to everyone, what do you want from me? They don't even talk to one another. They don't get along. What? We're talking about two states, we're actually talking about three states. So, you know, let them get their house in order and then come talk to Me. So to your point, it suited him
- [17:38]
Thomas Small
because he didn't want to give them a state. So that was great for him.
- [17:41]
Yaakov Katz
Exactly. So as when you use the word asset, I totally agree with that. I think I use that word in the book, is that it was a political, diplomatic asset, because it was the best, most convenient excuse to say to the world, this is why there is no Palestinian state. It's got nothing to do with me, it's got to do with them. And that division helped this in a very strange, crazy way. It served the interest of this very right wing, ideologically driven Israeli government. I think in hindsight, stupid policy, bad policy. It blew up obviously in our faces on October 7, but you can somehow understand what the thinking was within this government.
- [18:27]
Thomas Small
The logic certainly makes sense given the priors. You understand why that policy was pursued. As you say, it certainly blew up in its face. I think at the end of this conversation, I'd like to talk to you about the degree to which you believe Benjamin Netanyahu is ultimately responsible. But let's, let's push that to the end. So, as I said, three levels of failure, strategic failure, misunderstanding Hamas's intentions, thinking that they were cool with the status quo. Operational failure, as you've pointed out, underestimating the scale of Hamas's plan, despite the intelligence that had effectively uncovered it. And really as far back as 2016, the then defense Minister Lieberman offered a classified assessment that Hamas would do something. And the description of that, as you make clear in the book, is almost exactly what actually happened on the 7th of October. So that was a massive operational failure and then as you said, the tactical failure. And I'd like to ask you, because obviously there was a tremendous amount of misplaced confidence in this billion dollar border barrier, the iron wall that the Israeli government had thought they'd erected to defend Israel from Hamas, and yet it failed. So how can overwhelming strength relative to an enemy actually become a liability in terms of military preparedness? Because it can kind of inculcate a kind of blindness, I think.
- [19:48]
Yaakov Katz
Yeah, I mean, I look at it as. Another book that Amir and I wrote together is called Weapon Wizards, which looks at the amazing development and innovation of the Israeli military and defense industrial based systems like Iron Dome that a lot of people are familiar with, that can intercept missiles. Israel's advanced. Israel was like one of the first, if not the first country to develop drones, satellites, you name it. And you look at the amazing technology and it's incredible. But and also in Israel you have this culture of innovation under fire to do it in times of war to very quickly, rapid pace, be able to create systems and solutions to problems that in other militaries, if we take the United States or Western armies in Europe would take years for them to be able to get there because of just the culture and the bureaucracy and red tape. All great. But what that also does to an extent is it creates this reliance, this over reliance on technology. Technology makes you feel safe. Technology makes you feel like you got everything under control. You mentioned the unit A200 before. A200 is Israel's equivalent of America's NSA, the National Security Agency. So it's the greatest, largest SIGINT signal intelligence collection agency. It listens, it eavesdrops, it, it intercepts phone calls and emails and WhatsApp messages and, you know, you name it. They. They were listening to everything in Gaza. They were listening to all those conversations. They were intercepting those communications. So they were reading and hearing what just reinforced the belief that Hamas does not want war. Now when we looked at it though, we said, okay, but what about human intelligence assets? How many did you have in Gaza? And the answer, tragically was zero.
- [21:45]
Thomas Small
This is shocking. Shocking. I mean, when I read it, I just thought, you know, so unit 504 is the IDF branch responsible for human intelligence. You know, they recruit agents from among the enemy and gather intel from behind enemy lines. Right. And unit 504 had almost no human agents inside Hamas on the 7th of October, you know, when I read that, I thought, not only how can that be true, but almost like a conspiratorial thing, like, surely it can't be true. Surely it can't be true.
- [22:16]
Yaakov Katz
But you know what I've come to learn about conspiracies? Not that I've ever investigated this too much, but ever since writing this book, book, because you do go down something of a rabbit hole and also people you talk to, you. Just getting back to that, I go back to the metaphor again of the belief system in God, because it just, to me is always. It works. Is. It's such a shock to the system when there's such a crisis of faith that you say to yourself, it can't be. There has to be something else that happened. It can't be real. And that's where conspiracy theories come from. It can't be that the whole system broke down. But, but you really. That's. We looked like we met with the 504 guys. And it's a fascinating story we tell in the book of how a member of the team of the Unit was actually at the Nova festival, the music festival that was taking place down south, and they scrambled to try to save one of their own and then found themselves going back into Gaza and they had totally had no presence there. Now this dates back to when Israel had pulled out of Gaza in 2005 and no longer really had boots on the the ground, but we had more agents in Iran, far away, much more dangerous than we had in Gaza itself. It was a whole just a wrong structure of priorities and system. And it was fed by the fact that we can hear everything, we can see everything, we're intercepting everything. We're behind big walls with remote control guns. If anyone comes close, we want watching them. We have drones and satellites and three layers of offense, including an underground iron wall in case they try to come across the border through a tunnel. We're safe. We're totally safe. But you know what the crazy part is, is that you spent that billion dollars on that barrier. You stopped the tunnels from, from being used to cross into Israel. How many people crossed in on October 7th in a tunnel? Zero. They all just blew a hole and came across the ground. And then you ask yourself another question. You had thousands of people who came across the border, definitely hundreds, who knew that this was coming. Not one of them was on your payroll. You didn't. You hadn't recruited a single guy even. Not the top Hamas guys, the mid level guys, the guys who were going to be running across the border who could just call you up and say, hey, I'm coming, get ready. I mean, that itself was so shocking. And I think that over reliance on technologies, what we've seen actually since the war, since October 7th and this war that broke out, was a shift back to the basics, if we could call it that, the old school way of doing things. Now we're in this process, I think, where the military is trying to find the right equilibrium, that right balance between still having the best technology, but also not forgetting, you know what, what? I'll tell you what one Marine, US Marine veteran said to me. You know, in the Marines, you're taught you just man the, man the line, right? You stand at the border and you just look across. Where were those people? How come they weren't just on the border watching?
- [25:32]
Thomas Small
Well, you know, I mean, when I read that, you know, because there was this incredibly advanced remote control border gun system across, you know, the Gaza border. And when I read that like basically on the 7th of October, Hamas disabled the cameras and the communication systems, you know, just kind of immediately rendering this this very sophisticated remote controlled system, just useless. And you do think surely this sort of thing could have been planned for something. It is surprising. Now we we've had Elizabeth Zerkoff on the show a couple of times. I'm sure politically you would disagree with her about a lot of things. But one thing she said was that though a lot of people have this idea about Israel, about the Israeli government, the Israeli military, that they're like super genius 4D chess playing great strategists all the time, she said, look, that's not true. They are as kind of chaotic at times as any other 21st century liberal democracy with populist elements and stuff. Like it's just not true what people think. So that kind of helped me, I guess, to understand how these huge mistakes could have been made. If you kind of prevent yourself from thinking of Israelis as just omnicompetent super intelligences and remember that they're just human beings as well. In the run up to, you know, the years running up to 7 October, Israel had adopted a strategy really of managing and containing its enemies rather than like decisively confronting them in the face of their growing capabilities. And this led to what in the book is called the containment trap. What is the containment trap? Yaakov.
- [27:19]
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- [28:48]
Yaakov Katz
The containment trap is basically the term that we used to try to explain what Israel's whole approach and policy was vis a vis the Gaza Strip and Hamas. So you, you know, you know, we think about it today in the post October 7th reality. It sounds crazy, right? What Israel tried to do. Because if I, it's like I say to people now, if I tell you that the war in Gaza, Israel is going to pull out and it's over. And the way to keep the quiet is we're going to ask the Qataris or the Saudis or whoever it is to send suitcases of cash every month to Hamas to pay them off. People would say, are you out of your mind? I mean, that's how you want to fix the problem. But that's what we did for a bunch of years and up until October 7, as critical as I was in the book of that policy, if you asked me on October 6th, hey, is it working? I'd say, yeah, it's a great policy. It's working. We have quiet, right? Hamas doesn't want war. We're able to avoid a conflict. Why should we go to a bigger war? The idea was that, yes, we know Hamas is there. We know they have weapons. We know that their weapons are intended to be used against us, right? It's no secret what they want to do. They make it very clear. They make videos, they give speeches, they call for the elimination of the state of Israel. They've been attacking Israel for decades. There have been rounds every two years. They've kidnapped soldiers, they've held their bodies, etc. Etc. But what Israel said is one second, I could go to a big war. It will last a long time. I'll have to conquer all of Gaza. There will be claims of genocide against us. We'll be accused of disproportionate response. Everything that we've seen happen since October 7th, and people will say, why are you doing this? Or. Or I could say they want economic prosperity. We'll help them. We'll allow in some workers. When workers come into Israel to work and they cross the border, they make Israeli salaries. They bring that back to Gaza. It will be a boon to the Gaza economy. The Qataris are offering to give $30 million in cash every month that will go out in payments to needy and poor Palestinians in Gaza. Let's agree to that as well. We'll hopefully be able to remove, remove some of the bans and the restrictions and limitations on imports and exports. You got to Keep an eye, of course, on dual use products. But let's try to open up Gaza to the world. Let's do what we can. Because Hamas seems to be moderating itself. It seems to understand that war is not going to serve itself, that type of thinking. And Thomas, you said before how Trump has been working with the irgc, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran, and his efforts to keep on trying to make that deal really resonated with me because I think that what we saw here too, you know, is Israel is a country that is very Western in its culture, in its DNA, and in the way people, you know, we're a Democrat, we're a liberal democracy. At the end of the day, in our system of government, we tend to also fall into that trap, which I think Donald Trump has fallen into to some extent in thinking that our enemies are like us and our adversaries think like us and they have value systems like ours. But what we learned on October 7th, and I say definitely in the, in the, you know, three years since, is that they do not. They might look like us, right? People, human beings, but their value systems are completely, completely different. And when you talk to them, even if it's in the same language, it's a different reality that they are seeing than one that we are seeing. And that recognition comes with a big price tag because what it ultimately means for Israel, and this is the most painful conclusion I came to from working on this book, is that war is not going away anytime soon and that we will continue to be within this reality. And that's a tough one. It's a tough one as a citizen of the country. It's a tough one. As the father of children that I'm raising here, knowing that this will be their lives as well, it's hard.
- [33:05]
Thomas Small
Huron conflicted for many years now. My co host, especially Eamon Dean, who's a Saudi and was in Al Qaeda, left. Al Qaeda became a double agent inside MI6. We kind of started the podcast because he felt really called to explain to people as best as he could just how truly heartfelt are the beliefs that radical Islamists have, that jihadists have, you know, Hamas is in that confraternity. And he always knew that, look, the west is blind to the difference, the real divide between themselves and the jihadists that they are fighting, but not fighting intelligently. That was his whole perspective and zooming out historically, talking about the containment trap. Another thing that unconflicted, we've been very critical of in the Iranian context of the containment camp within Western Policymaking as regards Iran. And there's something similar there on the larger level as to what happened over Those years before 7th of October in, in Israel, where the idea was, let's contain Iran, let's engage with Iran through efforts like the jcpoa. Let's, let's give them some of their assets back, let's try to integrate them into the economy, into the global economy. And all the while, Arab allies, Israel, other allies, were seeing Iran grow in strength, its capabilities were increasing year upon year, while the containment camp was happy ish, you know, to just let the status quo sit. Well, you think, okay, they're getting stronger, we're not getting stronger, we're actually getting weaker relative to them because we are being lulled into the sense that this containment strategy is working. So there, there are strange, eerie similarities between that larger geostrategic view and what Israel was, you know, doing. As regards Hamas. I wonder if you would talk about Operation Protective Edge a bit. So this is a war or a kind of, I don't know what you call, do we call these things war of a battle that, that broke out in 2014, one of these.
- [35:03]
Yaakov Katz
I, I think it was a war in Israel. They, it's interesting culturally, they referred to all of these operations up until October 7th as operations. They don't want to call them wars, even though something that lasts 51 days is a war. But put that aside.
- [35:21]
Thomas Small
So it's a war. Operation protective edge, 67 Israeli soldiers were killed and almost 500 were wounded. And during that war back in 2014, now the IDF gave a presentation sort of game, planning a proper invasion of Gaza, dealing with the situation in an old school military way, and predicted that a full conquest of the territory to deal with Hamas would cost about 500 soldiers lives. And so it didn't happen. I guess Benjamin Netanyahu and the Cabinet said, no, we're not willing to do it. Now you argue that Hamas learned a lot from Operation Protective Edge.
- [36:00]
Yaakov Katz
Operation Protective Edge, without getting too much into history, began there was tension in the west bank and then it spilled over into Gaza and Hamas began to attack and fired rockets and, and then as Israel responded only from the air. In the beginning it was very hesitant to send in ground forces. Now just give it more perspective. Israel pulls out in 2005 from Gaza, the summer of 2006. In June, Hamas tunnels under the border, attacks a tank along the border and kidnaps a soldier by the name of Gilad Shalit, takes him into Gaza, holds onto him for five years. In the immediate aftermath, the of, of that attack, Israel does send ground forces into Gaza, eventually does pull out, does not come back with the soldier himself. 08:09 at the end of December of 2008, Israel launches another operation because of rocket fire called Cast Lead. Sends ground troops in. But then other operations, 2011, 2012 and of course 2014, they don't want to send ground troops in. And Hamas is watching and seeing this hesitancy now. Where does it come from? Comes from two places. Number one is, what's the point? We're not going to take over all of Gaza, we're not going to reoccupy Gaza. We've pulled out of Gaza, so why send troops in? Number two, it's very unpopular politically, socially, of course, no one wants anyone to die. But when soldiers start to die, it's not something that goes well for any politician. And in the Israeli political system. We saw what happened when Israel pulled out of Lebanon in 2000 after an 18 year presence there, and how the whole country galvanized against the government at the time and held them to task for the fact that soldiers were just being picked off. And what was the purpose of this operation? So again, that's lingering there in the background. And when 2014 happens and this war begins, for the first few weeks, Israel does not cross the border, just hits them from the air. Only after Hamas crosses into Israel through tunnels that it had dug along the border, tries to kidnap, doesn't succeed, but kills a bunch of soldiers. Only then are there these cabinet meetings where Benjamin Ateno is under immense pressure. You mentioned Avigdor Lieberman before. He's one of them. Naftali Bennett, who later becomes Prime Minister, he's another one who's pushing and pushing and pushing. The Prime Minister send the troops into Gaza. The Prime Minister doesn't want to do that. Every time there's an opportunity for some sort of ceasefire that the Egyptians are proposing or someone else is proposing, he's grabbing it, trying to end this war without having to send the troops in. Hamas is watching this, they're seeing this, they're understanding, they're sensing that hesitancy. Eventually Israel does send troops, and very limited, just about a kilometer to two into Gaza just to try to destroy the tunnels that were built along along the border. But it doesn't go farther. And Hamas sees this and says to itself, Israel is scared. Israel doesn't want to get its hands or its boots dirty. It doesn't want to get caught up in a long, drawn out conflict. It doesn't want to lose casualties. We can take advantage of that state of mind. We can play on that. And I think that is what partially fed into this belief by Hamas, because you have to say to yourself, when they crossed in October 7th with so many people, kidnapping 252 people, murdering almost 2,000 people, what did they think to themselves? Did they think that Israel wouldn't retaliate? Did they think that Israel wasn't going to respond in a very aggressive way like it responded? So there's two schools of thought where we don't have the Hamas leaders are no longer alive to be able to ask them the question. But there's pretty much two, two schools of thought. One is they were surprised themselves of their success. They didn't realize how dramatic Israel's failure would be. And the success itself surprised them. I hear that. But there's another school of thought here also as well, and maybe they're both combined into one is that they thought that Israel really was deterred, that Israel wouldn't retaliate the way it did, that they really believed that either Israel itself would be scared to send troops on the ground, that the Americans would stop Israel from doing it, that they would be able to negotiate, that this would give them more leverage. And to say that they were 100% wrong, I can't say that because Israel's ground offensive, people tend to forget, did not start immediately. October 7th is when the attack began. Israel only sent troops into Gaza at the end of October. So for about three to almost four weeks, the government was really debating. And Netanyahu himself, and we get into this in the book, also was hearing from different people, don't do it, don't go in. Don't fall into the death trap. I think that was. People didn't understand, it was a mistake. But, but the, the scope of what Hamas had done demanded an aggressive response by Israel. But there was still people who thought, don't go in there.
- [41:01]
Thomas Small
Well, there is a third possibility which you sometimes hear, which is that Hamas's attack on 7th October actually was inviting an aggressive response which that they felt might suit their purposes. You know, and as we've seen Israel's global reputation being hit so hard as a result of the decisions they took after the attack. Maybe there's some salience to that idea. Of course all three can be true. But what you reveal in the book is that across the teens, as Hamas realized at the time at least, that the Israeli government wasn't going to aggressively pursue military objectives in Gaza, it allowed Hamas to kind of get ready, really for a future Israeli invasion. So I sort of think they did, they did know that it was coming because they placed explosives throughout urban areas, they acquired advanced anti tank weaponry, and of course they expanded and deepened the Gaza tunnel system. And this was really sobering reading in the book, the chapter on the Gaza tunnel system, of course I know about it, you've heard about it. But just like the details of just how vast it was, but how little understood by the IDF at the time of the war. That's again shocking that as IDF soldiers after the ground invasion following the 7th of October attacks, as they're entering these tunnels and really properly mapping them, truly mapping them, they're like, holy shit. They're like, there's like more than two times of these tunnels than we thought.
- [42:37]
Yaakov Katz
You know, you mentioned protective edge in 2014. So what happened there? That was a wake up call as well. Hamas starts popping out of tunnels inside Israel, cross border attack tunnels. And Israel says, hold on a second. So the war ends in the summer of 2014. We got to deal with this tunnel situation and they put all their efforts on it. They created the best of the best minds, sonar experts, geologists, physicists, you name it. All together they create a system, still highly classified, that can detect when a tunnel is being dug, where it is being dug, and even what tool to some extent is being used to dig it. A shovel, jackhammer, whatever it might be, a bulldozer. It was so sophisticated that it was able to pinpoint where these tunnels are being dug. And Israel could bomb and destroy the tunnels along the border. Then we invested in building this fence, this wall, this underground wall to block tunnels if they even tried. And there were some that got through. Now we knew there were tunnels inside Gaza, no secret. You see it in their videos. Israel had operated inside Gaza in the previous years. It was known that there were tunnels inside Gaza. But for Israel, it was kind of a mix of two things. On the the one hand, we know there are, they're there, but why do we care? Beyond the fact that occasionally if they know we're coming for them, they'll descend into the tunnels. It'll be harder for us to get to the bad guys and to be able to attack them. But no one ever thought that we would be in a massive ground offensive in Gaza, that we'd be going door to door, house to house, tunnel to tunnel, or that we would have 250 hostages inside these tunnels inside the Gaza Strip, that we want to maybe go find them. So October 7th happens and we know some tunnels, but there's a tunnel system under Gaza. That's the New York subway and the London underground put together.
- [44:36]
Thomas Small
Incredible.
- [44:37]
Yaakov Katz
Hundreds of miles. Hundreds, hundreds of kilometers. Everywhere is a tunnel. Every home has, has, has a shaft and a to a tunnel. Every school, every UN compound, every mosque, it's a whole subterranean city. There's Gaza of above and Gaza of below. And we're blind. The Israeli military has no map of these tunnels, has no indication. You know, people think, for example, okay, if I see a hatch, I found the tunnel. No, no, you found an entryway to the tunnel. The tunnel could go in 10 different directions, could spin off, could have offshoots and branches. You have no clue what you've discovered. So you. Even if you destroy the hatch, that doesn't do anything because they can just build a new hatch somewhere. If there are people down there, they'll dig out. Maybe there's five other hatches and entryways to these tunnels. So how do you then go in there? How do you map it out? What skills do you use? How do you fight in a tunnel? If you encounter the enemy down there, how do you then destroy a 10 mile long tunnel? How do you destroy it? What type of explosives? No one in the world, Thomas, has ever encountered a military challenge like this. And you actually saw during the war, Israel's grasping for straws to try to figure out, okay, what do we do? How do we now destroy? So someone came up with an idea. Well, Gaza's on the coast of the Mediterranean, will pump seawater into the tunnels. It didn't work right, because the water just was swallowed up by the sand. We'll send people down there and we'll line the place with tnt. Okay, great. That takes a long, long, long time, right? First you gotta clear the tunnel, then you gotta go down into the tunnel, then you gotta bring the explosives to the tunnel.
- [46:26]
Thomas Small
I mean, I can't imagine reading that chapter. I thought I was playing like Doom or Quake, you know, those old 3D games from the 90s. Cause it just sounded terrifying. I mean, I can't imagine what it was like, not just to be one of the soldiers, to be one of the hostages, but even just to be one of the Hamas soldiers down there. I mean, it's like a kind of hellscape down there. Terrible.
- [46:46]
Yaakov Katz
It is. It's unimaginable. And I can't even imagine it myself what that world is like to live underground, to not have daylight, to not breathe fresh air. It's a horrific reality. And obviously what the hostages went through and what soldiers went through But I mean, even for Hamas fighters, you say to yourself, the dedication and determination that they must have to be able to withstand and go through this, that ideological drive that they have speaks volumes of just the radicalization that exists there.
- [47:22]
Thomas Small
Staying with the tunnels for a second, I wonder if we could discuss Operation Guardian of the Walls. So this was about two and a half years before the 7th of October, May 2021. I think this operation really, I mean, again, when I came across it in the book, I was like, gosh, what? As we like to say, unconflicted, what a shit show. And it really revealed, not just like the, you know, the lack of preparedness and all the stuff we've talked about, the containment trap, all that stuff, but a kind of fraudulence, a kind of chicanery in the Israeli government, the kind of willingness to exaggerate success, which, of course, it seems in retrospect, handed to Hamas something like a strategic win in the end. So in May 2021, Israel deploys ground forces near the Gaza border and in English, announces, issues an announcement suggesting that they have actually invaded. So tell us the story.
- [48:26]
Yaakov Katz
Back in the summer of, well, May of 2021, Hamas decides to launch missiles into Jerusalem on Jerusalem Day. So on the day that Israel celebrates and marks the reunification of Jerusalem during the Six Day War of 1967. And Israel responded aggressively, as expected, but like we spoke about before, only from the air, no troops sent in on the ground. And that just reinforced once again the Hamas belief that we can do what we want because they'll just hit us from the air. But then something else happened during this war. It's mostly remembered, unfortunately, because there were violent clashes that broke out inside Israel in the mixed Arab Jewish cities of Lod, of Haifa, of Ako and others. Because of Israel's response, response in Gaza, some of the Israeli Arabs rose up and there were major clashes. And that was a really low moment for the country and terrible. Let's remember that 20% of Israel's citizens are Arab. But what also happened was towards the end of this war or this operation, Israel launches an attack against something called the Metro. The Metro was supposed to be. And I actually was so blown away by this operation. After it happened, I did this series of articles. I was then the editor of the Jerusalem Post newspaper. I did personally a series of articles looking at this precision strike capability that Israel had developed and evolved over the years. And one of the stories was about the Metro. And I met with the air force commanders and the intelligence commanders. And really to understand how this Brilliant operation took place. What it claimed that it had done was it had mapped out this 15, 20 kilometer long tunnel system in Gaza where senior Hamas commanders were believed to be holed up, where hundreds of Hamas fighters were believed to be waiting for the idf.
- [50:27]
Thomas Small
This is the Metro.
- [50:28]
Yaakov Katz
The Metro, as they called it, obviously getting its name from, you know, the underground. Exactly, exactly. And the idea being. But it was under buildings, residential buildings, but the air force was so smart and so sophisticated that it hit the metro from different angles with just the right amount of munition and just the right velocity and just the right warhead, that the buildings above ground did not collapse, but just the tunnels collapse themselves. And when the operation ended again in another tenuous ceasefire, like has happened so many times, the Prime Minister declared victory, the Chief of Staff declared victory. We have taken away from Hamas a strategic asset. The metro we've destroyed. We've killed so many people. But then when you later found out only a couple dozen or two were killed, that the system itself was. Yeah, maybe they had destroyed 10, 15 kilometers of a tunnel, but there are hundreds and hundreds of kilometers of tunnels we now know. So what exactly happened back there? And I think that what we then understood was that people like Sinwar, Muhammad def. The leaders of Hamas, were watching this reaction inside Israel, and they're saying to themselves, one second, what is going on with these people? Either they don't know what's happening. Either they're totally living disconnected reality, or they're lying to themselves for some other reason. I think part of it was political necessity. At the time. They actually knew that the success was not as good as they thought it was, but they had to tell a good story to the people of Israel. But whatever it was, that combination made Sinwar say to himself, they really thought they won this. I mean, they didn't do anything to us. And that led to a. I would say a confidence that he found that made him believe, I can pull this off.
- [52:27]
Thomas Small
Yeah, I mean, it's strange. You know, they were there. The troops were there. On the border of Gaza, the Israeli troops. An announcement was made that they had invaded when they had not, hoping that
- [52:42]
Yaakov Katz
it would draw Hamas fighters into the
- [52:44]
Thomas Small
tunnel, that Hamas fighters would go into the metro, and then they attack the metro. But Hamas just kind of called the bluff. Didn't. Didn't, you know, respond as the IDF had expected. So not very many Hamas fighters were killed. And then the government says that many were killed, and it was a great success. So, as you say, Hamas was like, well, these people, they're not serious about war. Actually, they're not. They don't even when they say they've invaded, they haven't invaded. Like they're not going to do it. It's a really, the whole thing, you realize what a kind of clown show to some extent it was. And, and that's, you know, even during Naftali Bennett's premiership, as you make clear in the book, even though he did portray himself as shifting policy against containment and stuff, it doesn't seem to be as true as he said that the whole political and security establishment is implicated in these mistakes that led to the 7th of October. But as a sort of final question really, should we ultimately blame the strategic and tactical failures that resulted in the 7 October attacks on the man who has presided over Israeli politics and power for 17 years now, in a way for almost 30 years, Benjamin Netanyahu, is he to blame? And like Golda Meyer and it was always Benjamin Netanyahu's biggest fear that he would be forced to do a Golda who was so embarrassed in 1973, should he have taken some responsibility? Because so far not much forthcoming from that quarter.
- [54:22]
Yaakov Katz
First of all, Benjamin Netanyahu is definitely the person who bears the most responsibility. Without a doubt, he is the Prime Minister. He is the buck stops here. As the famous saying goes. He was the man who set the policies back when he returned to to become the Prime Minister. He had served for three years in the 90s. He came back in 09. He was the one who created the containment policy, the divide, the Palestinian policy, the Qatari money policy, the. It was his making and as such he bears the brunt of responsibility. Now it is true. He's not the one who's following daily offense in Gaza. He's not an intelligence agency. That's, that's the idf, that's the Shin Bet, that's the Mossad. They did not get collect the intelligence. They missed the warning signs. They did not alert him, as he has said. Right. He said, no one called me in the middle of the night to tell me what was happening on October 6th. No one gave me a heads up. And he's 100% right with that. And those tactical mistakes of course come with responsibility and accountability. The Chief of staff has stepped down. The head of the, the Southern Command, the heads of intelligence have all been replaced, as should happen after such a failure. But what's interesting is the one place where not a single person has taken responsibility and held him, him or herself accountable is the Israeli government. The government that was in office a year almost before October 7th, was there on October 7th and has continued since October 7th. October 7th. I have serious problems with that. I think that we have a serious problem in our country with a lack, I say, a vacuum of accountability that just does not exist here. And you know, should Netanyahu have stepped down immediately after October 7th? Personally, I think pretty quickly after October 7th, I think the government should have dissolved and I think that Israel should have gone to a new election. I think he should have gone home. I think this was a failure of such proportion that it, it doesn't make sense that somebody should stay in office. But with that said, there is a difference between military personnel and the elected government of, of a country and ultimately the Israeli people. We're talking a couple of months before we do go to an election and we do go to vote. And the Israeli people will have an opportunity to make up their minds and to decide. And Netanyahu is up for reelection, wants to get reelected. He will have to make a case to the Israeli people that even despite all the failures, he is deserving to remain in office. I find that to be a bit far fetched personally, but that there is an argument that people listen to and, and are convinced by and good for them. That's the democratic system. But I think we will have this moment. And by the way, I'll just say one last thing on that, Thomas, is that if he is reelected, if he somehow gets a majority, that says something also about not just him as a politician, but it says something about the Israeli people and kind of how they're thinking about the failures, but the opportunities that came in wake of those failures, whether the Prime Minister should still pay a price for them or not.
- [57:48]
Thomas Small
Well, Yaakov Katz, the book is While Israel Slept How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East. Dear listeners, it's well worth reading. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Yaakov. Now for our Conflicted Community members, the conversation will continue because we're going to be asking Yaakov two questions which our members most wanted him to answer. If you want to hear those answers, along with receiving our exclusive Q&As and Intel Insider reports, you can join the Conflicted community for just four pounds 99amonth. The link is in the episode description. We'd love to welcome you to the community if you are a subscriber, if you are a dearest listener, just hang on through the credits and Yakov will answer your questions. Yaakov Katz, thank you so much for coming on Conflicted.
- [58:40]
Yaakov Katz
Thank you.
- [58:43]
Thomas Small
That was Yakov Katz, former editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post. His new book, while Israel Slept, is available from all good booksellers. And remember, for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including extended conversations and queues. And as with my co host, Eamon Dean, check the show notes for details on how to join the conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a Message Heard Production. Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced and edited by Thomas Small.