Four Observations About 10/7, Israel, and the Hamas War

The world is about to get worse.

Artillery shells are lined up next to an armoured vehicle as Israeli soldiers take positions near the border with Gaza in southern Israel on October 9, 2023. (Photo by JACK GUEZ / AFP) (Photo by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images)

1. Looking Ahead

I don’t have any analysis to add beyond what Mona, Charlie, Ben, and Cathy have written. But I do have four observations.

1. The attack was a Hamas intelligence success. The first-blush reaction was to wonder how Israeli intelligence could have missed such a large, coordinated attack.

I would flip that around: The event is evidence that Hamas’s own intelligence capabilities are more formidable than we imagined.

There are many components to an operation like the 10/7 attack.

• Finance: You have to get the funding from somewhere.

• Force Management: You need to recruit, train, and assign personnel.

• Logistics: You need to amass the materiel, store it, and then get it to the staging areas in a coordinated and clandestine manner.

Each of these phases is ripe for penetration or leakage. We’re talking about hundreds of people, thousands of weapons, and millions of dollars. There are physical things in the real world which take up space. There are communications records. There are financial trails. Those are a lot of tracks to cover. (This is the best explainer I’ve seen about what was involved.)

And so I suspect that Hamas wasn’t just concealing their activity, but was actively creating a false intelligence picture for the Israelis.

If the success of this operation were due only to Israeli mistakes, that would, in a way, be good news. Failures can be tightened up. I am concerned that the success instead suggests that Hamas is more capable and proficient than we believed.

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2. War is non-linear. The future of any kinetic engagement is uncertain.