(by Francesco Matera) The massacre of 7 October last, carried out by Hamas near the Gaza Strip, with an incursion of over a thousand militiamen, shocked not only world public opinion due to the cruelty of the scenes of murdered deaths, expertly published online by terrorists, but also the international Intelligence Community because it failed to predict what was happening in an area, Gaza, considered until yesterday to be the most controlled in the world.
Even though the evolution of the crisis is ongoing and still very fluid, American intelligence deemed it appropriate to draw up a report where the obvious shortcomings demonstrated in the field by the Tel Aviv 007s were analysed.
The existence of the "secret" relationship was revealed by the French newspaper Le Monde who had some revelations from certain American sources who asked to remain anonymous.
The report was provided by Washington to its counterparts England, France e Germany. The limits of Israeli and American intelligence on the Hamas dossier and the excessive use of technological surveillance in information activity are highlighted.
It is also stated that Hamas did not think it could accomplish such a feat very easily without encountering any resistance from the Israel Defense Forces. It is categorically excluded that Hamas was helped by other external actors (Hezbollah, Iran etc.). The American briefing underlines, with particular emphasis, that the political wing of Hamas, whose leaders are partly in Gaza but also abroad (Qatar), was kept out of the preparation of the armed attack. According to the Americans, the operational wing, the military one of Hamas, was the only one who knew about the attack. Only some leaders of the political wing were probably aware of the attack without knowing the details.
The Americans point out that it Shin Beth and Mossad, Israel's internal and external secret services, have agents infiltrated within Hamas but only in the political wing, thus remaining blind and deaf as regards the military wing of the terrorist group which was, however, continuously controlled, through sophisticated surveillance systems. The military wing of Hamas, however, would have used rudimentary means of communication such as the infamous "pizzini" of the Italian mafia to evade the most modern interception techniques.
The rigid separation between the political and military branches of Hamas could be, writes Le Monde, one of the keys to understanding a military operation that inexorably eluded one of the most powerful secret services in the world.
Then there is a non-secondary consideration: the attention of Israeli intelligence has been directed by politics more towards the West Bank than towards Gaza, which has recently been considered a lesser threat. The Shin Beth, in fact, was asked to concentrate its efforts on the security of the Jewish settlements and no longer on the coastal enclave, thus making things easier for Hamas.
The logistics and organization of the attack by Hamas would have remained within a very small circle of military leaders to limit the leak of information as much as possible. In essence, not everyone knew even if the military training in the improvised camps inside the Strip had alarmed the Egyptian secret services which, in unsuspecting times, had warned the Americans and Israelis that something big was cooking.
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