After suffering a stunning setback when Hamas led an unprecedented surprise attack on the country nearly one year ago, Israel’s intelligence services have sought to restore their fearsome reputation with a wave of shadowy wartime operations.
Though much of their work goes unclaimed by nature, Israeli spy agencies have been tied to some of the most shocking losses for Hamas, Hezbollah and their regional power ally, Iran, since the beginning of the war in Gaza last October. These include the killings of Hamas and Hezbollah’s top leaders and other high-ranking officials, along with a growing series of murky actions that have manifested in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and within Iran itself.
As the conflict expands and deepens, with Israel opening a new land front against Hezbollah in Lebanon on Monday and facing a second wave of Iranian missile strikes on Tuesday, former officials tell Newsweek that Israel’s arsenal of covert tools will play an even more pivotal role—though not without significant challenges.
Michael Milshtein, a former adviser on Palestinian Affairs at the Israeli Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) and head of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate’s Department of Palestinian Affairs, told Newsweek that “the role of intelligence during the war is super important for several missions.”
These are “to identify targets, to understand what is the damage that was caused to the enemy and also to identify what are the goals of the enemy,” Milshtein, now head of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East and African Studies’ Palestinian Studies Forum, said. “All the prominent assassinations and accurate attacks are a result of good intelligence relayed on advanced sources.”
Yet he argued that “the problem on October 7 and even today regards the capability to understand deeply the logic and the plans of the enemies.” He warned that “there is a gap between the extraordinary operational capacities and the capability to analyze the logic of the other, which is still full of problems.”
Mistakes Were Made
As in the United States and many other nations, Israel’s intelligence community comprises different agencies that handle distinct yet sometimes overlapping duties.
These entities include the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations (Mossad), which deals with overseas affairs, the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet or Shabak), tasked with the domestic front, and the Military Intelligence Directorate (Aman), charged with military matters.
Controversy continues to surround responsibility for failing to detect the Hamas-led assault last October, with fingers pointing at various intelligence, military and political officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A number would go on to resign over the affair, including the chief of Aman and the head of Shin Bet’s southern district.
“The attack of October 7 is a major failure of Israel and starts with its army,” Avraham Avner, a former Mossad officer who went on to found the Spy Legends agency, told Newsweek. “When we left Gaza, we lost control and resources. It is important to note that the Mossad does not work in Gaza. We will investigate the failure and draw lessons for the future.”
Israel withdrew from a decades-long occupation of Gaza in 2005, handing control to the Palestinian National Authority, which is dominated by the secular Fatah party.
When Palestinian elections were held the following year, however, the Islamist Hamas movement came out on top, leading to a crisis in government followed by violent clashes that led to Hamas seizing control in 2007.
Since then, several wars and serious clashes have erupted between Israel and Hamas, though none nearly as deadly or long as the current conflict. Netanyahu has vowed to defeat the group entirely, render Gaza incapable of posing a future threat to Israel and return all hostages taken by the Palestinian assailants during their initial strike.
To achieve these aims, Aman and Shin Bet doubled down on intelligence gathering in Gaza, working with Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops to track down enemy positions, infrastructure and high-value targets.
As a result, scores of leading Hamas figures have been killed in Gaza, with the most notable claims being Al-Qassam Brigades commander Mohammed Deif and his deputy, Marwan Issa. However, the group has yet to confirm either of their deaths.
Meanwhile, nearly 41,700 people in Gaza have been killed throughout the conflict, according to Gaza officials. Around 1,200 people were killed in the initial Hamas attack against Israel, and 346 IDF personnel died during the ground offensive, according to Israeli officials.
Netanyahu has more recently added a fourth wartime goal, the return of tens of thousands of residents evacuated from northern communities as a result of rocket and drone fire from Hezbollah. The Lebanese movement began daily cross-border strikes in solidarity with Hamas just a day into the conflict.
Widely viewed as one of the world’s most powerful paramilitary groups and Iran’s most important ally, Hezbollah was long considered by Israel to be a more severe threat than Hamas.
“Gaza was not a high priority collection target whereas Hezbollah and Iran have been for decades,” John Hannah, who previously advised former U.S. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, told Newsweek. “Israel is a small country with limited resources, and hard choices inevitably have to be made on where to focus.”
“Israel assessed mistakenly that Hamas was deterred and, at any rate, largely incapable of launching a large-scale ground invasion,” Hannah, today a senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, said. “Incredibly, Israel may not have had a single human asset inside Hamas before October 7.”
Changing the Narrative
As the IDF advanced in Gaza, seizing the critical Rafah crossing to Egypt in May, Israel began to intensify strikes in Lebanon. At the same time, Mossad and Aman laid the groundwork for operations that would lay bare the level of infiltration dedicated to Hezbollah and Iran.
In July, the IDF announced the killing of the group’s top military official, Fouad Shukr, in an airstrike in Beirut. In an even more shocking development less than 24 hours later, Hamas Political Bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh was slain in a government compound in the Iranian capital of Tehran, where he was attending the inauguration of newly elected Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.
Israel never officially claimed responsibility for Haniyeh’s killing, but few doubted the Mossad’s footprint. Israel has for years been linked to covert operations within the Islamic Republic, particularly acts of sabotage targeting the Iranian nuclear program and assassinations of nuclear scientists.
But as Iran repeatedly promised revenge for Haniyeh’s slaying, another unclaimed blow bearing the hallmarks of Israeli sabotage was struck. Pagers, portable radios and other communications devices used primarily by Hezbollah suddenly detonated across Lebanon and Syria last month, killing dozens and injuring thousands, including Tehran’s ambassador in Beirut.
With Lebanon still reeling from the fallout, the IDF launched a new wave of airstrikes against the neighboring country.
Among the first high-profile targets to be slain was Hezbollah’s Redwan Force special operations unit chief Ibrahim Aqil. A week later, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah himself was killed alongside Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) General Abbas Nilforushan in one of the most intensive bombardments of the Lebanese capital to date.
Lebanese officials would estimate that more than 1,000 people were killed in Lebanon throughout the Israeli campaign.
Then, on Monday, the IDF announced it would begin its long-threatened ground offensive in Lebanon. The following day, Iran fired up to 200 missiles in a direct strike against Israel as a collective retaliation for the deaths of Haniyeh, Nasrallah and Nilforushan, the wounding of its envoy in Lebanon and other actions tied to Israel across the region.
While Iran warned against retaliation, plans to strike back are already being drawn up. Sima Shine, a former head of Mossad’s Research and Evaluation Division, said the response will be “based on the long years of gathering intelligence” that is ultimately subject to a political decision.
She told Newsweek that, based on recent victories in Lebanon, in particular, Israel’s intelligence strategy “is working.”
“Israel is a small country,” Shine, now director of the Institute for National Security Studies’ Iran and Shiite Axis research program, said. “In this case, it is an advantage because a lot of people know each other and the communication and the capabilities to cooperate even without any definition from the higher-ranking officers is there.”
However, the apparent shift in Israel’s intelligence performance over the past year has been surprising, even to her.
“When I’m looking at the intelligence community generally,” Shine said, “I think the most stunning element is how it could happen on [October] 7th and how it could happen later in Lebanon with the pagers.”
Maintaining the Myth
A core element of Israel’s spy power has always been the element of surprise.
“As a rule, the narrative about Mossad, Shin Bet and the Military Intelligence has very little to do with their actual abilities, as most of them are unknown,” Mishka Ben-David, an author and former Mossad officer, told Newsweek.
“On October 7, there was good intelligence that was misinterpreted,” Ben-David said. “The capabilities manifested during the last few weeks, including the infiltration in Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, are not new, though the decision to use them was not practiced before for various political and strategic reasons—such as avoiding a second front.”
Israeli spy agencies have a storied legacy of daring missions dating back to the earliest years of the nation founded in war with neighboring Arab states supporting Palestinian claims to the same territory.
Among the most audacious operations include Operation Thunderbolt, in which Israeli commandos stormed Entebbe International Airport in Uganda to recover the passengers of a civilian airliner hijacked by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations group in 1976.
All but four hostages were rescued, with just a single casualty on the Israeli side, Yonatan Netanyahu, the elder brother of the current Israeli premier who also served in the same elite Aman unit known as Sayeret Matkal.
Earlier that same decade, Mossad embarked on a wave of assassinations across Europe and the Middle East, targeting suspected perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre in which members of the Palestinian Black September organization killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches.
The total death toll of Israel’s retaliation, which came to be known as Operation Wrath of God, remains uncertain to this day but is believed to include between 12-20 people, at least one of whom was proven to be an innocent civilian.
Israeli spies have also managed to nab former Nazis, intercept war plans and identify nuclear sites for eventual strikes in Iraq and Syria, among other feats in decades past.
However, there were also significant failures before October 7 of last year.
One of the earliest setbacks was the thwarted attempt to stage false flag attacks in Egypt in 1954, ultimately resulting in the capture of Israel’s spy ring. Decades later, in 1997, Haniyeh’s predecessor, Khaled Meshaal, was poisoned by Mossad agents in Jordan, whose government forced Netanyahu to provide an antidote after identifying and detaining the spies.
In these instances, as well as several others, the plots were uncovered by external actors. Sometimes, however, as was the case last October, the error could be directly traced to the internal interpretation of the information provided.
“Intelligence plays an important and decisive role in war strategy,” Avraham said. “Israel has the intelligence, but sometimes you need to know how to analyze it and translate its meaning.”
“We had a similar failure in the 1973 war when the Mossad brought information from a very senior agent from Egypt, but the intelligence division of the Israeli army did not translate it correctly,” he added. “Some call it ‘conceptzia.’”
False Assumptions
Almost 50 years to the day before Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel, the joint Egyptian-Syrian operation against Israel in October 1973 would give rise to the term “conceptzia” in Israeli intelligence circles, describing the conception—or misconception—that a particular foe would not strike due to its perceived inability to cause significant harm to Israel.
Hannah also referenced the lasting influence of “conceptzia” in Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza. Specifically, he highlighted the IDF’s surprise at the extent of Hamas’ underground tunnel system and the initial difficulty in pursuing the group’s leadership, of which Haniyeh’s successor, Yahya Sinwar, remains alive.
“The fact that they were already at war compelled the Israelis to get very smart, very fast,” Hannah said, “but it was clearly a case of playing catch up.”
But even with a string of decisive wins, major challenges lie ahead as the Middle East teeters on the brink of regional war.
“While in Gaza, the war is practically over, the military power of Hamas was destroyed, and the intelligence challenge that lies ahead is the whereabouts of the hostages,” Ben-David said, “In Lebanon, there are many challenges still ahead: the location of thousands of long-range missiles and of the majority of Hezbollah’s military personnel.”
And it’s not just Hamas and Hezbollah. Recent events have demonstrated the growing willingness of Iran and its broader Axis of Resistance, which includes well-armed factions in Iraq and Yemen, to step up the fight against Israel.
The top risk identified by Milshtein moving forward is that Israel’s intelligence prowess, formidable as it has proved to be, may be stretched too thin across seven fronts to handle the most serious threats.
“The main strategic challenge is too many fronts and war that doesn’t end,” Milshtein said. “Today, Israel is still in two wars of attrition—the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, faces growing unrest in the West Bank, threats from Yemen, Syria and Iraq and, of course, the conflict with Iran, which I think is the most crucial for Israel.”
“In order to focus on this conflict,” he added, “we must end the other wars.”
Originally published by Newsweek.