How Hamas outmaneuvered Israel: A detailed analysis of the October 7 defeat

On October 7, 2023, Hamas executed a devastating surprise attack that overwhelmed Israel’s defenses, killed over 1,200 people, abducted 251, and shattered the nation’s security assumptions in mere hours. This defeat—described by the Israeli military as a collapse of the Gaza Division—was not simply a tactical triumph but a strategic masterstroke enabled by profound Israeli intelligence and operational failures. A recent IDF investigation lays bare the systemic weaknesses that Hamas exploited.

Here's how Hamas turned Israel’s own intelligence culture, methodology, and structural flaws into weapons of its victory.

1. Exploiting a Flawed Intelligence Culture

Hamas’s success began with Israel’s intelligence culture, which the report condemns for its “hermetic” and “superior” self-perception. Aman, the IDF’s intelligence arm, operated under an assumption of near-omniscient “knowledge” and “certainty”, shunning proactive searches for “surprises” or gaps in its understanding. This overconfidence allowed Hamas to cultivate a deceptive calm—a strategic feint that lulled Israel into complacency. By pulling operatives back from the border and signaling restraint, Hamas fed Aman’s belief that it was deterred and focused on governance, not war. The refusal to question this narrative left Israel blind to the preparations unfolding in Gaza, a vulnerability Hamas exploited with lethal precision.

2. Turning Methodology into a Liability

The rigidity of Aman’s intelligence methodology was a second pillar of Hamas’s victory. Analysts clung to a pre-set view of Hamas as a “restrained actor,” dismissing contradictory data as anomalies rather than threats. This lack of “criticality, doubt, and debate” meant that signs of Hamas’s evolving intent—training for surface raids, amassing forces, shifting from tunnels to a broader assault—were filtered through a lens that couldn’t see beyond containment. Hamas understood this bias, amplifying it with disinformation that reinforced Israel’s misreading. The night before the attack, as unusual SIM card activations and commander movements surfaced, Aman rationalized them as routine, handing Hamas the element of surprise.

3. Capitalizing on Collection Blind Spots

Hamas’s operational secrecy thrived on Israel’s narrow collection strategy. The IDF investigation reveals that Aman relied heavily on limited intelligence sources—technical intercepts over human or cultural insights—reducing the weight of diverse inputs critical to understanding Hamas’s motives. This left gaping holes in Israel’s picture of Gaza, which Hamas filled with obfuscation. By keeping its plans off interceptable channels and embedding them in cultural or ideological contexts Aman neglected, Hamas ensured its buildup went unnoticed. The report’s note on “technological gaps” further underscores how Hamas outpaced Israel’s tech-reliant approach, moving forces undetected until the attack’s eve.

4. Preying on Professional and Doctrinal Weaknesses

Aman’s professional deficiencies provided Hamas with another edge. Gaps in routine assessments, warning models, and staff competency meant no robust system existed to flag Hamas’s shift from a defensive to an offensive posture. The investigation highlights a “decline in thorough familiarity” with Hamas’s diversity—its language, religion, and history—which obscured the ideological drive behind the attack. Hamas, meanwhile, honed a plan rooted in its Salafist-inspired “liberation” vision, training thousands for a coordinated assault. Israel’s doctrinal focus on rockets and tunnels misjudged this evolution, leaving the Gaza Division unprepared for the scale of surface incursions.

5. Leveraging Aman’s Misaligned Priorities

Hamas capitalized on Aman’s skewed priorities, which drifted from “reality clarification” to operational support and policy-shaping. This shift diluted focus on Hamas’s strategic intent, as Aman busied itself with tactical data for containment rather than long-term threat analysis. The overemphasis on technology eroded foundational research, allowing Hamas to plan under Israel’s radar. By October 7, Aman’s resources were stretched across operational tasks, not poised to detect the “blind spots” where Hamas massed its forces—over 5,000 fighters, per later findings—ready to strike.

6. Fragmenting Israel’s Intelligence Response

The sharp division of responsibility among intelligence units was a structural flaw Hamas exploited seamlessly. Without mandated overlap, Aman, the Shin Bet, and division-level intelligence operated in silos, missing a holistic view of Hamas’s preparations. Collection units leaned on division warnings rather than independent analysis, a stovepiping that let critical data—like raid training reports from Unit 8200—languish unheeded. Hamas’s decentralized execution, with waves of Nukhba elites followed by secondary fighters and unaffiliated mobs, overwhelmed this fragmented system, striking before Israel could consolidate its intelligence.

7. The Operational Execution: Chaos Meets Opportunity

When Hamas attacked at 06:29 on October 7, it unleashed a multi-dimensional assault—ground, air, sea, and fire—that shattered the Gaza Division within hours. The investigation’s broader context reveals how Hamas breached the border barrier at dozens of points, using engineering precision to disable surveillance and firepower. With Israel’s troop presence thinned by resource constraints and a focus on rockets , Hamas faced minimal resistance. The division’s collapse wasn’t just numbers—5,000 terrorists versus a skeleton crew—but timing and surprise, meticulously planned while Aman slept on the threat.

8. A Victory of Perception and Preparation

Hamas’s defeat of Israel wasn’t spontaneous; it was years in the making, as the IDF report implies. By feeding Israel’s “conflict management” delusion—assuming calm could be bought with economic levers—Hamas built a war machine under the guise of restraint. The investigation’s silence on Hamas’s internal calculus (due to classification) doesn’t diminish the outcome: a force trained, armed, and ideologically primed to overrun an enemy convinced of its own invulnerability. The October 6-7 night, with its missed signals and delayed responses, was merely the final act of a deception Israel never saw coming.

Israel’s Response: Too Late for October 7

The IDF’s reform steps acknowledge this defeat’s roots. Under Maj. Gen. Shlomi Binder, Aman is pivoting—retraining to prioritize warnings, fostering debate to break rigidity, and diversifying collection to close blind spots. These moves aim to prevent a repeat, but for October 7, they’re postmortem fixes. Hamas’s victory lay in exploiting a system too sure of itself, too narrow in scope, and too divided to act—leaving Israel reeling from a failure the report deems avoidable, yet devastatingly complete.