In Oct. 7 Report, Israeli Security Agency Puts Some Blame on Netanyahu Government

Israel’s domestic security service on Tuesday assumed responsibility for failing to heed warning signs of a planned Hamas attack before the militants’ devastating strike on Oct. 7, 2023. But the agency also faulted the Israeli government for policies it said had allowed Hamas to quietly amass weapons, collect funds and gain support, among other failures.

The conclusions from the Shin Bet, as the security agency is known, were published days after a similar inquiry by the Israeli military found that senior officers had vastly underestimated Hamas and misinterpreted early warnings that a major attack was coming.

The report published on Tuesday consisted only of a declassified summary, leaving an unknown amount of material undisclosed. But even the summary made the agency’s lapses clear.

Plans for a Hamas raid on southern Israel reached the desks of intelligence agents in 2018 and again in 2022, the summary said, but the agency did not treat the warnings as a meaningful threat. As a result, the agency said, it did not include it in scenarios exploring future confrontations with the militant group.

While the Shin Bet said that it took Hamas seriously, it acknowledged that it had not responded appropriately to early indications of attack plans, or to the later signs of impending bloodshed.

The Israeli authorities said they were publishing the findings, even as they kept parts of the report classified, in light of the gravity of the attack. About 1,200 people were killed that day, and some 250 people taken hostage, setting off the war in the Gaza Strip.

The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resisted an independent review of the events leading up to the deadliest day in Israel’s history. It has instead allowed each of the country’s security institutions to investigate itself, despite public demands for a commission of inquiry.

In a debate in the Israeli Parliament on Monday, Mr. Netanyahu said he supported the creation of a commission to investigate the Hamas attack, but suggested that such an inquiry would inevitably generate biased findings aimed at targeting him politically.

“I am not deterred by fabricated investigations and a political manhunt,” he said. “I will continue to insist on the truth. I will continue to demand a balanced commission of inquiry that will reach the truth.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s resistance to an inquiry and to calls for his resignation contrasts with the actions of some other Israeli officials.

The departing military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, who is resigning this month, has taken responsibility for what he called his “terrible failure” to prevent the attack. The Shin Bet chief, Ronen Bar, told the Israeli news media on Tuesday that he did not intend to resign until all the hostages taken from Israel were repatriated, but he acknowledged that the attack could have been prevented.

In its report, the Shin Bet also said it had failed to coordinate sufficiently with the military and to establish a clear chain of responsibility. “This is not the standard that we expected from ourselves and the public from us,” the agency said.

At the same time, the Shin Bet report, unlike the recent military one, directly pointed to government policies as contributing factors to the attack. It said that the government had allowed Hamas to accumulate arms and to raise money for its military wing through Qatar. And it pointed to government reluctance to undertake “offensive” initiatives, including targeting Hamas leaders in Gaza.

The agency also cited the treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention and “the perception that Israeli society has weakened.” Before the attack, Mr. Netanyahu advanced a plan to overhaul Israel’s judiciary, setting off protests nationwide, and many Israelis have blamed Mr. Netanyahu for the Hamas attack, citing domestic unrest as a factor that emboldened the militants.

The Shin Bet report echoes the findings of an article by The New York Times published weeks after the attack, based on interviews with Israeli, Arab, European and American officials, as well as a review of Israeli government documents and evidence.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office declined a request for comment on the Shin Bet’s findings. The Israeli news media reported that the office released an unofficial statement to a small group of local reporters that was “attributed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner circle.” That statement said the intelligence agency had presented “an ‘investigation’ that answers no questions” and did not correspond to “the magnitude of the organization’s enormous failure.”

The prime minister’s office laid out a series of failures by intelligence agents, including an assessment presented just days before the attack “definitively stating” that Hamas wanted to avoid a campaign against Israel. It accused Mr. Bar of falling short.

“The head of the Shin Bet did not see fit to wake the prime minister on the night of the attack — the most basic and obvious decision one could imagine,” it said.

Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.