On the night of October 6, 2023, Israeli intelligence agencies detected unusual activity in the Gaza Strip.
The information raised concerns but did not produce an assessment that a large-scale Hamas attack was imminent. Within hours, thousands of attackers would cross into southern Israel, overwhelming military positions and civilian communities.
More than three years later, Israel has a considerably clearer understanding of some of the operational and intelligence failures that preceded October 7.
Yet an important distinction remains between investigating how the military failed to prevent the attack and understanding how the country's broader security policy developed over time.
The Intelligence That Failed to Become a Warning
Investigations published by the Israel Defense Forces in 2025 found that military commanders had identified unusual indicators of Hamas activity before the attack.
However, those indicators were interpreted through years of intelligence assessments that underestimated the organization's intentions and capabilities.
One particularly consequential issue was the handling of Hamas's attack plan, known within Israeli intelligence as the "Jericho Wall" document.
The plan described elements of a coordinated assault on Israeli defenses. According to subsequent military findings, the information did not result in an adequate reassessment of the threat.
The Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security agency, reached similarly serious conclusions in its own investigation.
In March 2025, the agency acknowledged that it had failed to provide an effective warning and that a different response to the available intelligence could have prevented the attack.
These findings established substantial failures inside the security establishment.
But they also raised a broader question: why had the institutions responsible for national security developed such a flawed understanding of Hamas?
A Failure Built Over Years
In November 2025, an expert panel appointed by the IDF chief of staff reviewed the quality of the military's October 7 investigations.
The panel concluded that several of the investigations were incomplete or insufficiently rigorous.
It identified six central causes of the disaster, including mistaken strategic assumptions about Hamas, intelligence failures, inadequate preparation for known threats, organizational weaknesses and flawed decisions during the night before the attack.
Crucially, the panel concluded that many of the underlying failures had developed over several years and across multiple military organizations.
That finding suggests the disaster cannot be understood solely through the decisions of individual commanders during the hours before the attack.
An investigation limited to the immediate events of October 7 would risk missing the institutional assumptions and policy choices that developed long before the assault began.
Where Does Political Responsibility Begin?
Israel's elected government determines national security policy, while military commanders and intelligence agencies are responsible for carrying out their respective professional duties.
The relationship is complex.
Political leaders depend on intelligence assessments to understand threats, while security agencies operate within policies and priorities established by the government.
A comprehensive investigation would therefore need to examine several interconnected questions.
How did successive Israeli governments assess Hamas's strategic intentions? What assumptions guided policy toward Gaza? How were warnings presented to political decision-makers? And how did the government evaluate the military's readiness for a large-scale attack?
Such questions require examining documents, briefings, cabinet discussions and the interaction between political and security officials.
They also require distinguishing between decisions that were reasonable based on information available at the time and decisions that ignored credible warnings or reflected serious failures of judgment.
The purpose of an independent inquiry should not be to assume guilt in advance.
It should be to establish what officials knew, what they could reasonably have known and how their decisions affected national security.