The worst mistake Israel made before October 7th wasn’t a failure of intelligence; it was a failure of imagination.
This has been one of the most painful realizations as findings from probes into the attack were released to the Israeli public this week. The IDF had warnings. The political echelon was told an attack was imminent. Hamas operatives were moving suspiciously. But too many Israeli leaders were trapped in their own assumptions, convinced Hamas was too comfortable in its rule or too afraid of Israel to risk all-out war. They believed Hamas would not act irrationally, that it would not sacrifice itself just to massacre Jews.
That assumption — the failure to take Hamas at its word — was catastrophically wrong.
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