Questions Remain About Leadership Failures in the Aftermath of Oct. 7

The Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas caught both the Israeli public and the Israeli intelligence community by surprise. However, the catastrophic intelligence failure of Oct. 7 did not emerge from a vacuum. It unfolded within an institutional architecture in which the Israeli prime minister holds unparalleled authority over the intelligence community: defining national priorities, approving special operations, shaping the division of responsibilities among agencies, and serving as the final decision-maker in issuing warnings and defining threats.

Yet despite this concentration of power, the mechanisms that translate prime ministerial responsibility into effective oversight, direction, and accountability remain structurally underdeveloped. The gap between formal authority and practical engagement—between responsibility and action—raises important questions about how a well-resourced intelligence system failed to anticipate and prevent the deadliest attack on Israeli civilians in decades.

Here, I examine unresolved questions surrounding the role of the state leader in the functioning of the intelligence community, with a particular focus on the period preceding the Oct. 7 attack. I argue that the failure was not only operational or analytical, but also a failure of leadership responsibility—or at least a failure of the system to ensure that leadership responsibility was exercised in a structured and accountable manner.

I begin by mapping the evolution of prime ministerial responsibility for intelligence oversight in Israel, drawing on historical precedents, legal frameworks, and past commissions of inquiry. I also identify structural gaps between the prime minister’s formal authority and the mechanisms available to supervise, direct, and challenge the intelligence community. Finally, I highlight unresolved questions regarding the prime minister’s involvement in defining the threat of reference, approving special operations, and adapting the division of responsibilities to a changing adversary and threats. 

The Legal and Institutional Authority of the Prime Minister

In Israel, the prime minister exercises unusually broad authority over the intelligence community. The Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service responsible for intelligence collection and covert operations abroad, and the Israel Security Agency (ISA), tasked with counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and other domestic security missions, are both directly subordinate to the prime minister. “Aman,” the IDF Intelligence Directorate, is institutionally part of the military. 

Unlike the U.S. system, the Israeli prime minister is not the formal commander in chief, yet his connection to military intelligence is central. Aman controls Israel’s largest intelligence collection units, responsible for strategic net assessment and conducting intelligence special operations. The prime minister’s authority is reinforced by statutory decision-making procedures that require cabinet and prime-ministerial approval for major intelligence and operational action.

Past commissions and legal scholars have consistently affirmed that the prime minister bears ultimate responsibility for the functioning of the intelligence community. The State Comptroller’s 1999 report, subsequent inter-service committees, and the 2005 approval by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon all reinforced the principle that the prime minister is responsible for defining the division of roles among between Aman, Mossad, and the ISA.

Yet this legal-institutional framework does not necessarily guarantee that authority is exercised effectively. How does a system that concentrates authority in the prime minister's hands ensure that this authority is translated into structured oversight, strategic direction, and accountability? This question lies at the heart of the Oct. 7 failure.

Failures of Oversight and Direction Before Oct. 7

Responsibility for Warning

In late 1948, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion assigned primary responsibility for national warning to military intelligence. Ben-Gurion believed that Israel would, for the foreseeable future, face adversaries seeking to defeat it through a rapid, decisive military blow. Effective national warning was therefore essential: Confronting such an attack required the mobilization of reserve forces, and timely warning was the only way to ensure their arrival on the battlefield in time. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reaffirmed this structure in 1975 and again in 1994, emphasizing the need for the statesman to challenge intelligence assessments and form an independent judgment.

The Oct. 7 failure raises fundamental questions about whether this responsibility was exercised. Several former senior military officials—including Amos Yadlin, Gabi Ashkenazi, and Shlomo Yanai—argued that after Hamas seized Gaza in 2007, it should have been treated as an “enemy state,” with Aman as the lead agency for national warning. Yet the intelligence community did not adapt its approach, and the division of responsibilities between the ISA and IDF remained unchanged. Instead, national warning remained primarily in the hands of the ISA, whose core mission focuses on counterterrorism in the domestic arena, leaving Aman in a secondary role. 

The ISA’s internal inquiry after Oct. 7 acknowledged this misalignment, recommending that the ISA should focus on counterterrorism while the military handles war warnings posed by military or semi-military forces. The ISA’s comparative advantage has historically been in domestic counterterrorism environments, where arrests, interrogations, and the use of special operational units are feasible. This helps explain why, in 2002, the ISA recommended that Israel retake areas of the West Bank hosting terrorist infrastructure.

The differences in professional specialization—and the division of responsibilities among agencies—are well -known and, at least regarding the ISA, well -defined in law since 2002. The ISA was responsible for intelligence in the Gaza Strip during Israel’s brief control after the 1956 Sinai Campaign and again after the 1967 Six-Day War, which made sense in the domestic counterterrorism context. 

Why this arrangement persisted after Hamas developed a substantial paramilitary force following Israel’s 2005 withdrawal remains an open question. It suggests that the prime minister may not have ensured that the division of responsibilities was updated to reflect Hamas’s transformation into a military-like adversary, which the military would have been more adequately equipped to handle than the ISA.

Historical precedent underscores the recurring challenge of translating concentrated executive authority into effective oversight. The 1972 Koppel Committee, established after the Munich attack, identified significant gaps between the prime minister’s formal responsibility and the actual supervision exercised over the ISA. Archival discussions from that period reveal efforts by senior ministers to limit the public impact of the committee’s findings—an indication of the political sensitivity surrounding questions of leadership oversight.

A similar pattern emerged in the months preceding the 1973 Yom Kippur War. According to declassified records, Prime Minister Golda Meir received highly sensitive intelligence directly from King Hussein and the head of Jordanian intelligence during their clandestine September 1973 meeting, as well as through other exclusive channels. Yet the Agranat Commission later noted that the political leadership did not sufficiently challenge the prevailing intelligence conception, even in the face of numerous alarming indicators. Given that Meir personally received exclusive intelligence and was aware of sensitive collection capabilities, she had more than enough basis to ensure that alternative interpretations were systematically examined.

Taken together, these episodes highlight a structural issue that predates Oct. 7: the gap between the prime minister’s unique access to exclusive intelligence and the absence of institutional mechanisms ensuring that such information is integrated, questioned, and acted upon within a structured oversight framework.

These precedents raise questions rather than conclusions. First, did the prime minister evaluate whether the existing division of responsibilities remained appropriate as Hamas evolved militarily? Second, were recommendations from former defense officials ever formally reviewed? And finally, did the political leadership ensure that the intelligence system adapted to the changing threat? 

Special Operations and Leadership Involvement

Special operations require the prime minister’s personal approval. This makes them a critical lens for assessing leadership responsibility.

The 1997 failed targeting killing attempt against Khaled Mashaal, Hamas’s' prominent official Khaled Mashaal in Jordan, illustrates the risks of political involvement in operational details. Although the Ciechanover Committee did not fault the prime minister’s decision to approve the operation, former Mossad officials—including Mishka Ben-David—argued that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s direct involvement contributed to the failure by pressing for rapid execution of the operation before the operational team was fully prepared, and by authorizing the attempt in Amman (a capital city of a neighboring Arab state with which Israel had a peace treaty, but where security procedures and counter-surveillance vigilance were consistently high). 

A similar pattern appeared in a more recent case: the September 2025 strike on senior Hamas leadership in Doha, an operation that immediately became public due to its diplomatic repercussions. As with the 1997 attempt in Amman, the political fallout of the failed operations was significant, resulting in Netanyahu’s public apology to Qatar’s prime minister during a visit to Washington, following pressure from President Trump.

These highly visible operations stand in sharp contrast to the November 2018 Khan Yunis incident—a covert operation designed to allow a special -operations team to enter Gaza covertly, replace intelligence collection devices, and withdraw without detection. Its exposure during execution—rather than afterward—compromised the mission and led to rapid escalation, resulting in casualties and the loss of sensitive equipment, documentation, and specialized vehicles. Unlike the Mashaal and Doha cases, where the visibility of the outcome was inherent to the nature of the operation, the Khan Yunis affair raises a different set of questions: not about failure itself, but about the mechanisms of oversight, learning, and adaptation at the political level.

The 2018 operation was designed to close a critical intelligence gap. Its exposure therefore raises strategic questions that extend beyond the tactical sphere: Did Israel, after the failed operation, ultimately find an alternative path to reduce the intelligence gap it was meant to address? Were lessons drawn about Hamas’s counterintelligence capabilities, given that the organization succeeded where other regional adversaries had not? And did the political leadership ensure that the implications of a trained, undercover Israeli unit being compromised were fully examined—not only in terms of operational security, but in terms of the broader strategic understanding of the adversary's capabilities?

These questions are critical to assess whether the leadership mechanisms responsible for oversight, learning, and adaptation functioned as they should have.

Structural Weaknesses in Warning, Operations, and Threat Definition

Defining the national attribution threat is a core responsibility of the National Security Council (NSC), operating under the prime minister’s authority. Under this framework, Israel’s leadership allocates its limited national resources by weighing the assessed likelihood of each threat against the cost of misjudgment. This benchmark also shapes the IDF’s force planning, preparedness, and operational priorities

The defense establishment knew of Hamas’s plan to raid Israeli communities and IDF bases as early as 2016. Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman warned Netanyahu that without a preemptive strike, the consequences would be “far-reaching, even more so than the results of the Yom Kippur War.” Updates to the plan were received in 2018 and 2022.

Former NSC head Uzi Arad warned against the politicization of intelligence operations, arguing that granting evaluative powers to elected officials' risks undermining professional processes. This concern is particularly relevant given that, for the first time, the NSC was headed by a known politician— Tzachi Hanegbi, a member of Mr. Netanyahu's party and political confidant—during the period preceding Oct. 7.

Indeed, despite warnings, the prime minister rejected Lieberman’s approach and pursued a policy that viewed Hamas’s rule in Gaza as an asset. This raises critical questions: First, was the known Hamas plan incorporated into the national reference threat? Second, did the NSC function effectively in defining and updating the threat? And finally, did political considerations influence professional assessments?

Implications for Democratic Intelligence Governance

The Oct. 7 failure highlights broader challenges in democratic intelligence governance. First, it points to the problem of concentrating authority without structured oversight. The prime minister holds sweeping powers over intelligence agencies, but Israel lacks a robust system of checks and balances comparable to those in other democracies.

Second, it suggests ambiguity in the division of responsibilities. The unclear boundary between the ISA and Aman contributed to gaps in warning, with structural issues requiring leadership intervention.

Third, failure highlights the risks of politicization of intelligence operations. Statements by former officials suggest that political considerations may have influenced threat perception, though definitive evidence remains to be examined by a formal inquiry.

Finally, Oct. 7 demonstrates that there is insufficient adaptation to evolving threats. Hamas’s transformation into a military-like organization required a redefinition of roles and priorities—a process that did not occur.

These issues underscore the need for institutional reforms that clarify leadership responsibilities, strengthen oversight mechanisms, and ensure that intelligence structures evolve with the threat environment.

Closing the Leadership Accountability Gap

Ultimately, the Oct. 7 failure raises a fundamental question: Can a democratic intelligence system function effectively when the leader who holds the greatest authority over it operates without structured oversight?

The gap between formal responsibility and practical engagement—between authority and accountability—lies at the heart of the failure. Until this gap is addressed through institutional reform, clearer division of responsibilities, and stronger mechanisms, the vulnerabilities exposed on Oct. 7 will remain unresolved.

While Israeli law grants the prime minister unusually broad authority over the intelligence community, it does not establish structured mechanisms to ensure that this authority is exercised through systematic oversight, critical engagement, or regular review. 

A state commission of inquiry must therefore examine not only operational and analytical failures, but also the role of the prime minister in directing, supervising, and adapting the intelligence community to a changing threat landscape. Only by confronting these leadership questions can Israel rebuild an intelligence system capable of restoring public trust and preventing future attacks.