Israeli officers admit Shin Bet failure on October 7

OCCUPIED PALESTINE, Dec. 27 (YPA) – Security experts and former leaders of the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) revealed major intelligence failures during Hamas’s “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” on October 7, 2023, describing what happened as “an intelligence failure worse than what happened in the 1973 war.”

This came in the documentary “Infiltration from Within,” broadcast by Al Jazeera on December 26, 2025, which showed that the failure was not an isolated event, but part of a long series of infiltrations that affected the agency, from planting spies within its ranks to the inability to accurately read Hamas’s intentions.

Avner Barnea, the former Shin Bet counterintelligence officer, confirmed that the agency did not have any accurate information about Hamas’s movements, and that the warnings detected on the night of the attack were misinterpreted as drills, even though Hamas had been preparing for the attack for more than two years.

For his part, he described what happened as a “catastrophic failure in intelligence and technical operations,” stressing that the blow to the agency’s reputation was severe, despite subsequent attempts to repair it through operations such as the Pager attack in Lebanon.

The documentary showed that the Shin Bet was not impenetrable over the past decades, showcasing the stories of spies from the bottom to the top who influenced the agency’s plans and operations against international actors such as the Soviets and Poland.