Inquiry Should Begin after Huge Intelligence Failure

Inquiry Should Begin after Huge Intelligence Failure

This post is also available in: heעברית (Hebrew)

inqury

The fact that the IDF did not know about the scope of the Gaza tunnels is a huge fail on the part of intelligence. All of the fine words coming from the TV commentators will not help us citizens.

This intelligence failure could have ended in an unimaginable catastrophe for the Israelis.

As the commentator Avi Issacharoff wrote for the website Walla, “as every child in Gaza and every junior officer in Military Intelligence knew that underneath the city of Gaza a network of tunnels has been dug which has required millions of dollars investment over the last five years, or in other words, underground Gaza .

The double failure is that the intelligence did not know of the size of the problem and the political leadership did not take it seriously even as the size of the problem became known.

There is little doubt that Hamas had another international helper with this huge project. You don’t need to be a skilled intelligence officer to understand  that this suspect is Iran.

Now it is clear that the offensive tunnels are just part of an entire industry of underground excavations beneath Gaza. Hamas has pre-prepared tunnels that allow the military wing to move freely from place to place around Gaza City without interruption, as well as bunkers  where command and control can safely go about their business. In the bunker system you can find the military  leadership and the polictical wings who remain unscrathed.

The army evaluated that there were approximately 15 tunnels during the last round of fighting. It’s currently known that  the  number is now more than double that, at almost 40 tunnels. Experts say there are many more and it will take months to uncover all of them.

There are a few obvious failures in the fighting in Gaza like the use the M-113 armored personell cariiers (APC) . Using these obsolete vehicles that are only lightly protected should also be investigated.

but what’s certain is that the tunnels requires instant and thorough investigation. Where were the defense minister and the heads of the army when this giant ground infrastructure was being built?

How is it possible that the Defense Ministry has not allocated resources for the development of a  tunnels detecting system?

Hamas’s plans, according to intelligence information that was collected during the fighting was to use the tunnels to make a major offensive across various locations this Rosh Hashanah.

In general, this catastrophe has been avoided but no thanks goes to  good intelligence but rather Israel going on a ground mission. Someone should pay the price of this huge failure.