Hamas got around Israel’s surveillance prowess by going dark
Facing one of the most sophisticated surveillance states on the planet, Hamas simply went dark. The militant group’s attack on Saturday caught Israel’s national security apparatus completely off guard — a shocking fact given the scope of the incursion, which included attacks by sea, air and land, and pushed deep into Israeli territory.
In theory, it shouldn’t have been possible. Israel’s intelligence services have a reputation as some of the world’s most sophisticated. And the Gaza Strip, a slice of land next to Egypt, is one of the most surveilled places on the planet. Phone lines are tapped. Satellites watch overhead. Informants keep tabs on the 2 million residents of an area just over twice the size of Washington, DC. Israel and the U.S. will need years to sift through all the failings that allowed Hamas to move with such surprise and to such deadly effect, killing hundreds of Israelis and capturing others. But already, a picture has begun to emerge of how the group’s fighters did it, according to current and former intelligence officials in the U.S., Israel and elsewhere.
While many questions remain unanswered, what’s clear is that Hamas went low-tech, avoiding Israel’s ability to tap its communications, and even, perhaps, exploiting the Israeli Defense Forces’ confidence that its missile attacks could be repelled or prevented.
“My suspicion is that Hamas was able to keep such a vast operation — which included many, many trainers, lots of operational training, and bringing in a vast amount of munitions — close-hold because they went very old school,” said Beth Sanner, former deputy director of national intelligence. “I suspect they never talked about it electronically,” Sanner said. “They broke it up into cells and did individual meetings. And each group was assigned to do different things. Very few people understood how each of the components came together as the whole plan.”
As dawn broke on Saturday, some 1,000 Hamas fighters burst through the technologically advanced fence designed to protect against threats from Gaza, fanning out across towns and villages. Children were shot in front of their parents. Hostages were dragged from their homes. Overhead, thousands of rockets rained down as other fighters entered the country on paragliders. A person familiar with Israeli intelligence operations said the success of the attack likely means that the country’s military intelligence, which has primary responsibility for monitoring developments in Gaza, lacked high-quality human sources inside Hamas’ leadership. It’s also possible that the group’s planning relied on encrypted technology, according to Andrew Borene, an executive director with Flashpoint and a former group chief at the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center. “I have a feeling there is also a component of clandestine communications using devices,” he said. Alon Arvatz, a former member of Israel’s Unit 8200, which is responsible for the military’s signals intelligence, said it’s clear that Hamas has been able to sidestep Israel’s ability to intercept phone and email communication. That includes some of the “perception techniques” Israel has used in the past, which he said might be based on computers or phones or anything that can be intercepted. “They obviously learned how the intelligence is being collected, and they learn how to avoid it,” Arvatz said.
