Hamas double agent tricked Israel into ignoring Oct. 7 warnings

When called by his handlers hours before the invasion, the man said nothing was happening, so signs of the imminent attack were ignored.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A Hamas double agent fooled Israel’s intelligence agency into downgrading the indications it had of an imminent major terrorist attack from Gaza just prior to the Hamas-led invasion on October 7, 2023, Channel 12 reported on Tuesday.

When the Shin Bet internal security agency handlers called their source hours before the attack, he claimed that nothing was happening on his side of the border.

Since the source was supposedly on a high enough level within the terror organization to know if an attack was imminent, his reassurance lulled the agency into ignoring contradictory signs they had received and not even calling some other agents they had in Gaza for confirmation, the report said.

The weight that the security agency attributed to the agent’s words, as well as the absence of any warning from him in subsequent hours, directly weakened Israel’s preparedness for the attack in which 1,200 people were massacred and 251 taken hostage.

After the fact, the Shin Bet questioned his allegiance.

He was captured by IDF forces during the war and brought to Israel for interrogation, where he admitted that he had fed Israel false information while working for Hamas.

According to a report published on Sunday by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, Hamas’ intelligence agencies scored a major victory over its Israeli counterparts prior to October 7th, in part by using a number of double agents to reassure Israel that the terror group was still deterred from attacking the Jewish state.

The report cited a senior Hamas military official who said that it had uncovered a large Israeli spy ring in Gaza back in 2017 and convinced some of them to instead covertly gather intelligence on their erstwhile bosses, including information on the Shabak’s operational methods, and identities of other agents.

The official, Jasser Barghouti, claimed that these men were also used on and prior to October 6 as part of the “Al Aqsa Flood” plan in order to skew Israeli intelligence assessments – to great effect.

One of the major problems revealed in the investigations into the intelligence failures that led to the greatest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust was the security agency’s over-reliance on technological tools (SIGINT) to gather information on their enemies rather than human sources (HUMINT).