Latest news with #HamasOperatives
Japan Times
02-08-2025
- Politics
- Japan Times
Israeli military intelligence goes back to basics with focus on spies, not tech
Humiliated by the Hamas attack that devastated Israel 22 months ago, the country's military intelligence agency is undergoing a reckoning. The service is making profound changes, including reviving an Arabic-language recruitment program for high school students and training all troops in Arabic and Islam. The plan is to rely less on technology and instead build a cadre of spies and analysts with a broad knowledge of dialects — Yemeni, Iraqi, Gazan — as well as a firm grasp of radical Islamic doctrines and discourse. Every part of Israel's security establishment has been engaged in a process of painful self-examination since Oct. 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas operatives entered Israel from Gaza, killing 1,200 people and abducting 250 others — and setting off a brutal war in which an estimated 60,000 people have been killed, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, with many more going hungry. Yet even as debate continues about who was at fault and how much Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knew in advance of the attacks, the intelligence branch has accepted the brunt of the blame. The agency had a "fundamental misunderstanding' of Hamas ideology and its concrete plans, said a military intelligence officer, laying out the changes and speaking under standard military anonymity. While the service was aware of Hamas' scheme to capture military bases and civilian communities near Gaza, even watching militants rehearse in plain sight, the assessment was that they were fantasizing. Analysts concluded that the Iran-backed Islamist group was content in its role as ruler, pacified by foreign donations and well-paid work for some Gazans in Israel. The failure to meet the enemy on its own terms is one that Israel's security apparatus is determined never to repeat. "If more Israelis could read Hamas newspapers and listen to their radio,' said Michael Milshtein, who heads Palestinian studies at Tel Aviv University's Dayan Center, "they'd understand Hamas was not deterred and was seeking jihad.' The renewed focus on language and religious training represents what the intelligence officer calls "a deep cultural shift' in an organization where even top officers rely on translations. The aim, the person said, is to create an internal culture "that lives and breathes how our enemy thinks.' Yet Milshtein and others say that for this to succeed, it will require significant, society-wide changes. Although Arabic is offered in public schools, most Israelis study English instead. Silicon Valley looms large for ambitious young people, who learn little about countries only a few hours away. The challenge lies in convincing Israelis to focus more on the region — its cultures, languages and threats — and less on global opportunities. Israel grew comfortable and rich seeing itself as part of the West, the thinking goes, when it needs to survive in the Middle East. That hasn't always been the case. In the first decades of its existence, Israel had a large population of Jews who'd emigrated from Arabic-speaking countries. The nation was poor and surrounded by hostile neighbors with sizable armies, so survival was on everyone's mind. Many of these emigres put their skills to use in the intelligence service, including Eli Cohen, who famously reached the highest echelons of the Syrian government before he was caught and executed in the 1960s. (He was recently played by Sacha Baron Cohen in the Netflix hit "The Spy.") Today, Egypt and Jordan have peace treaties with Israel, and Lebanon and Syria are weak states with little capacity to challenge Israeli might. The supply of native Arabic speakers has dwindled. Israelis whose grandparents came from Iraq, Syria and Yemen don't speak Arabic, and Israel's 2 million Arab citizens aren't required to serve in the military. Some Arabic-speaking Druze do go into intelligence, but they make up less than 2% of the population. As part of the intelligence changes, the service is reviving a program it shut down six years ago which encourages high school students to study Arabic, and plans to broaden its training in dialects. The officer mentioned that eavesdroppers were having trouble making out what Yemeni Houthis were saying because many were chewing khat, a narcotic shrub consumed in the afternoon. So older Yemeni Israelis are being recruited to help. It's also channeling resources into a once-sidelined unit whose function is to challenge mainstream intelligence conclusions by promoting unconventional thinking. The unit's work is colloquially known by an Aramaic phrase from the Talmud — ipcha mistabra — or "the reverse may be reasonable.' More broadly, the service is moving away from technology and toward a deeper reliance on human intelligence — such as planting undercover agents in the field and building up the interrogations unit. This breaks with a shift over the past decade toward working with data from satellite imagery and drones, and goes hand-in-hand with another change that was made after Oct. 7. While the country's borders used to be monitored by sensor-equipped fences and barriers, the military is now deploying more boots on the ground. These new approaches will not only require more people, said Ofer Guterman, a former officer in military intelligence currently at the Institute for the Research of the Methodology of Intelligence, but people who are "more alert to different arenas.' Prior to the Hamas attack, he said, "there was a national perception that the big threats were behind us, except an Iranian nuclear weapon.' Now that that has been proven false, he believes that Israel needs "to rebuild our intelligence culture.' To explain what this might look like, he distinguishes between uncovering a secret and solving a mystery. At exposing a secret — where is a certain leader hiding? — Israel has been excellent, as shown by its wiping out of the Hezbollah leadership in Lebanon last fall. At unraveling a mystery — what is that leader planning? — it has lost its way. Acquiring the kind of knowledge needed for this requires deep commitment to humanistic studies — literature, history and culture. And he worries that Israeli students have developed a contempt for the rich cultures of their neighbors. That too, he says, has to change. At the same time, not everyone is persuaded that the planned changes are the right ones. Dan Meridor, a former strategic affairs minister under Netanyahu who wrote a landmark study of Israel's security needs two decades ago, says the wrong conclusions are being drawn from the Hamas attack. "The failure of Oct. 7 wasn't a lack of knowledge of the verses in the Koran and Arabic dialect,' he says. Rather, he believes that Israel is viewing its neighbors only through the lens of hostility. "It's not more intelligence that we need,' he added, "it's more dialogue and negotiation.'
Yahoo
07-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
IDF drone video reveals Hamas command center under Khan Yunis hospital
The IDF released footage showing a Hamas tunnel network used as a command center beneath Gaza's European Hospital, used to coordinate attacks and store weapons. The IDF released footage on Saturday showing a Hamas tunnel network discovered beneath the European Hospital compound in Khan Yunis, Gaza. According to the IDF, the tunnel served as a command-and-control center for senior Hamas operatives. The footage, distributed by the IDF Spokesperson's Unit, shows a complex underground infrastructure with multiple rooms that housed weapons, intelligence materials, and operational equipment. The tunnel was located directly beneath one of Gaza's largest hospitals, the IDF said, and was used by Hamas's military wing to coordinate attacks on Israeli forces. The footage was obtained during an operation carried out by the IDF's 36th Division, guided by the Intelligence Directorate and involving troops from the Golani Brigade, the Yahalom Unit, and special forces. During the searches, troops also discovered the bodies of several Hamas operatives in the tunnel. The identities of those killed are still under review. 'This tunnel system beneath the European Hospital highlights Hamas's ongoing use of civilian infrastructure for terrorist purposes,' the IDF said in a statement. 'Hamas cynically exploits hospitals to shield its military operations, putting civilians and medical staff at risk.' Hamas has a history of embedding its command posts and weapons stores within or beneath hospitals, schools, and residential buildings. The use of the European Hospital's underground areas as a Hamas command center, the IDF said, is further evidence of the group's strategy of using civilian areas as shields. The IDF said it remains committed to exposing and dismantling Hamas's underground network in Gaza, which it says is used to smuggle weapons, store munitions, and plan attacks. The newly released footage aims to illustrate the challenges faced by Israeli forces operating in densely populated areas. The IDF said additional details from the operation would be released as they become available.
