An Israeli report reveals that an agent whom the Shin Bet had recently recruited in the Gaza Strip conveyed to the agency information about the Al-Qassam attack on October 7th, including the possible date of the attack, last summer, that is, months before the surprise operation.

Israeli Channel 12 revealed, this evening, Wednesday, that the Shin Bet received information last summer from an agent operated by the agency in the Gaza Strip about the Hamas movement’s intention to carry out the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation in “the week following Yom Kippur,” which fell on September 25. The past, in a new chapter of Israeli intelligence failures that accompanied the Al-Qassam attack.

According to the report, the Shin Bet received information from a “third party,” meaning that the agent operated by the agency in Gaza received information from a first source and transmitted it to the Shin Bet agent, stating that the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas movement, are about to carry out a large-scale attack on Israeli army camps in the vicinity of Gaza Strip in the week following the so-called "Yom Kippur".

The operation, which the Qassam Brigades called “Al-Aqsa Flood,” was carried out on the seventh of last October, which was represented by a large-scale and sudden attack on Israeli military sites and towns in the “Gaza envelope,” the day after the “Simchat Torah” holiday, that is, about two weeks after the so-called “Simchat Torah” holiday. 

The Channel 12 report stated that “months before the surprise Hamas attack, the Shin Bet received concrete information about Hamas’ intention to carry it out, including the planned date of the attack,” and explained that the information came from “a human source (agent) operated by the Shin Bet in the Gaza Strip, who reported that 'Hamas is planning a large-scale move in the week following Yom Kippur.'

According to the report, the information reached the Shin Bet from a “human source,” through an agent known as “Mubwa” (a word in Hebrew that means “the source of water in the earth or the source of things”), which is a professional term given by the Shin Bet to a person who brings information from other sources. 

The channel stated that this means that the Shin Bet agent did not hear the information directly from its source, but rather received information from someone who told him that he had heard about the Qassam Brigades’ plan. According to the report, the client operator transferred the information to the relevant authorities in the agency, but this information was not classified as “important information.”

According to the channel’s report, the hypothesis among Shin Bet officials is that if Hamas actually intends to carry out the attack, then supportive warning information must arrive in the period preceding the scheduled date of the attack. As a result, according to the channel, “the information was not conveyed to the higher levels in The agency and did not reach the head of the Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, in time.”

The channel said that the Shin Bet had recently obtained this information as part of the agency’s attempt to study the reasons for the agency’s intelligence failure in anticipating and predicting the attack of last October 7. The channel confirmed that the information had reached the Israeli side months before the attack, specifically last summer, and was "buried under piles of other information."

The channel quoted Shin Bet officials as saying that the aforementioned agent was “recruited relatively recently, and is not an old source, and the extent of his reliability was not clear either.”

The Shin Bet commented on the report that the agency “is focusing at this stage on the fighting. The Shin Bet is prepared to conduct in-depth and comprehensive investigations in order to draw lessons, and in this context all information that was available will be examined. In any case, focusing on one specific piece of information does not reflect the intelligence picture at that time".