Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence Directorate head Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva attends a conference of the Gazit Institute in Tel Aviv on Nov. 5, 2022. Photo courtesy of Tomer Neuberg/Flash90.
Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence Directorate head Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva has announced his resignation over his failure to prevent Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. Haliva decided to retire months ago following the intelligence failures that contributed to the massacre of some 1,200 people and the kidnapping of more than 253 hostages to Gaza, but asked IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi to postpone the announcement.
Haliva’s announcement comes after the IDF withdrew almost all ground troops from the Strip, leaving only one brigade remaining in the enclave.
“On Saturday, October 7, 2023, Hamas carried out a murderous surprise attack against the State of Israel, the consequences of which are difficult and painful. The intelligence directorate under my command did not live up to the task it was entrusted with,” Haliva wrote to Halevi.
Haliva, who served in the army for almost four decades, asked Halevi to relieve him of his duties following the conclusion of an internal investigation and after an “orderly learning and transition process.”
Earlier this year, Halevi announced an internal probe into the military’s failures leading up to Oct. 7, calling the investigation a “duty and not a privilege.”
In January, Israel’s Walla news site cited military sources as claiming that while the IDF was aware of Hamas’s repeated attempts to blow up the security fence on the Gaza border in preparation for the Oct. 7 attacks, it opted to dismiss the rehearsals as a “provocation.”
Hours before Hamas’s attack, IDF intelligence learned that hundreds of terrorists in Gaza activated Israeli SIM cards in their phones, the military censor cleared for publication in February. The activations were detected around midnight on the night of Oct. 6, some six and a half hours before thousands of Palestinian terrorists breached the fence.
In October, The New York Times reported that Unit 8200, the IDF’s signals intelligence unit, stopped listening to Hamas’s handheld radios a year before the attacks, deciding it was a “waste of effort.”
