EDITORIAL — The consequences of intelligence failure | The Freeman

The extent of the damage and casualties caused by the coordinated air, land, and sea assaults by Hamas militants on targets in Israel the other day is only coming to light; so far at least 700 people were left dead by the attacks, 250 of whom were killed when militants fired at a music festival.

At least 100 people, including foreigners, have also been taken hostage, but that number is expected to rise within the next few days.

It has been described as Israel’s “9/11”.

While this is not to congratulate Hamas, we cannot help but marvel at how they were able to plan and carry out this attack in total secrecy. An attack this big takes some time to plan. It also takes some time to organize and then to launch.

Radio silence was imposed; nothing was picked up on the internet or passed on by informants. Somehow Hamas was able to keep everything secret until they started firing.

Because it is a nation surrounded by enemies and because their people have endured centuries of discrimination, Israel takes its security very seriously. Both men and women are required to serve in the defense force and they have a strong intelligence community with a formidable espionage and counter-espionage system.

They are also regularly known to eavesdrop on Hamas’ dealings, which is a wonder why they didn’t see this attack coming. This means that somewhere in their intelligence community something went wrong.

Aside from dealing out their revenge designed to cripple if not totally eradicate Hamas and discourage other groups from carrying out the same attacks against them, Israel --as well as the intelligence communities of free nations in general-- must also figure out how the attacks were planned and done.

Because right now we are sure some terrorist groups who want to launch massive surprise attacks of their own are paying attention to Hamas’ playbook on planning and carrying out huge coordinated strikes.

Overall, this incident should also be a lesson to the world about the consequences of the failure of intelligence gathering.