The Lessons Israel Failed to Learn From the Yom Kippur War

The parallels are blindingly and painfully obvious. A surprise attack against an Israel caught largely unaware; an invading military force; the timing, a holy day in early October; the victims, an unsuspecting population forced to scramble for underground bomb shelters and mobilize for war; the mistakes by an intelligence apparatus that is the envy of the world.

But the surprise attack that took place in Israel this past weekend is arguably worse than the one that launched the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Hamas, a guerrilla organization that controls the Gaza Strip, has already killed many more Israeli civilians in the first days of this war than Egypt and Syria, sovereign nations with national armies, killed during the October war 50 years ago. Hamas struck targets deep inside Israeli towns. The magnitude and sophistication of this past weekend’s attacks—carried out in multiple locations and involving thousands of fighters—imply that this offensive was in the works for several months, if not longer. And intelligence gathering should have been easier in Gaza, where Israel is reputed to have massive surveillance systems, than it was in Egypt and Syria in the early 1970s. How could Israel have missed the planning of this assault? The first explanations put forth by experts and journalists suggest that the problem was largely a matter of intelligence collection. Perhaps Israel over-relied on signals intelligence and other electronic sources, and Hamas learned to circumvent detection—for example, by to disable systems along the border. Another possibility is that Israel lacked enough, or credible enough, human intelligence sources within the inner circle of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, or access