Feb. 28: How Israel Failed to Understand Hamas

Trump and Vance feud with Zelenskyy; USAID's terror funding; Portrait of a Squirrel

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A note to readers: Due to an editorial miscommunication, earlier today, we mistakenly sent a draft version of the newsletter that was not ready for publication. We have unpublished that version on Substack, but you may still see it in your email inbox. This is the Feb. 28th edition of The Scroll. We apologize for the error — PM

The Big Story

The Israel Defense Forces on Thursday released the results of four interrelated probes into the overlapping Israeli military and intelligence failures leading up to, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks. The probes covered:

1. The development of the IDF’s perceptions of Gaza over the past decade

2. The IDF’s intelligence assessments of Hamas from 2014 to the present

3. The intelligence and decision-making processes on the eve of the attack

4. Military operational and command-and-control failures on Oct. 7 and immediately after

The IDF has set up a Hebrew-language website where it will publish the results of each probe here, and The Times of Israel has also published English-language articles on the IDF’s findings, which you can find linked here. We’ll briefly review each probe in turn.

1. At a high level, there was, as Norman Samuels observed in Tablet soon after the attacks, a failure of the Israeli Konceptsia—the set of strategic concepts that the Israeli leadership uses to order and process information—about Hamas. For nearly a decade leading up to the attack, the IDF came to believe that Hamas not only lacked the organizational and military capabilities to plan and execute a large-scale attack but also was uninterested in doing so. Instead, the defense establishment believed that conflict with Hamas could be “managed” via deterrence and material inducements, such as “improved civil conditions” and economic growth in Gaza. As TOI writes (emphasis ours), “The IDF failed to understand that Hamas was serious about destroying Israel, as it openly stated.”

2. The IDF probe found that the military had for years gathered intelligence indicating that Hamas was planning a large-scale ground offensive into Israel but dismissed these reports believing “Yahya Sinwar was a pragmatist who was not seeking a major escalation with Israel,” according to TOI. In reality, Sinwar believed that Israel could be militarily defeated, and under his leadership, Hamas had drawn up plans for a ground invasion—to be spearheaded and livestreamed by the Nukhba Forces—as far back as 2016. The plan became official in 2019, and Hamas decided to launch it in the “near future,” in 2022. As has been previously reported, Israeli intelligence obtained a leaked copy of the invasion plan, then known as “Jericho’s Walls,” in 2022, but dismissed it as unrealistic.

3. The short-term intelligence failures mirrored the long-term intelligence failures, with the IDF collecting relevant intelligence in the immediate run-up to Oct. 7 but failing to integrate it into decision-making, due to the aforementioned flaws in the Konceptsia. Most of the specific warning signs remain classified—though we know, for instance, that Shin Bet detected Nukhba Forces members activating Israeli SIM cards on the evening of Oct. 6. Yet in a series of overnight meetings and calls from Oct. 6 to 7, Israeli military and intelligence heads, including the IDF’s then chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, judged that Hamas’ actions were “routine” and that no attack was imminent. The report notes, however, that even if the IDF had judged that Hamas was preparing to launch an attack, the scale of Oct. 7 was an order of magnitude larger than what the IDF and Shin Bet regarded as the worst-case scenario.

4. The intelligence failures were matched by operational failures on the day of the attack. According to the probe, it took months for the IDF to recognize that its Gaza Division was “defeated” for at least 10 hours on Oct. 7. At 6:29 a.m., about 5,000 Hamas operatives stormed southern Israel, quickly overwhelming the 767 troops stationed along the border, who had received no intelligence warnings about an imminent attack. While the IDF rapidly diagnosed the invasion and began flooding troops to the Gaza and northern border areas, the defeat of the Gaza Division created a de facto informational blackout, in which the IDF possessed a limited picture of the battlefield and was unsure where to deploy troops.

While many of these findings were previously reported, the probes, taken together, offer a comprehensive portrait of the cascading failures that allowed Hamas to stage such a successful operation—all of them downstream from the underlying failure to understand Hamas and its intentions. It is a mistake, the IDF concluded, for Israel to seek to “manage” the conflict with Hamas, and in the future, the IDF should prioritize eliminating threats over achieving limited periods of quiet.

This conclusion, of course, cuts to the heart of the problem with the current cease-fire deal—which, if it proceeds to the end to all hostilities as outlined in phase two, would inevitably leave Hamas with a significant presence in Gaza and with enhanced prestige from having survived the Israeli onslaught. On Thursday, however, The Washington Free Beacon reported that Israel intends to “resume the Gaza war in four to six weeks with overwhelming force.” According to the report:

Incoming military chief of staff Eyal Zamir has, at the direction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Israel Katz, started developing the plan, according to several current and former Israeli officials with knowledge of high-level discussions. Under the plan, Israel will deploy more troops to Gaza than it has to this point in the war—over 50,000—before relocating the civilian population to humanitarian zones and waging a ruthless ground campaign against Palestinian terrorists across the rest of the strip.

“We’re going to see four to five divisions simultaneously attack in the north, in the center, and in the south, to occupy every area and clear out the enemy,” said Hezi Nehama, a former Israeli colonel who co-authored the Generals’ Plan, an influential proposal for a staged siege of Gaza. “It will look different than what we saw in the war until now.”

We haven’t seen the report confirmed elsewhere yet. But if true, it is a good sign that the Israeli leadership has learned some lessons from Oct. 7 and that it is prepared to take advantage of having a friend in the White House.

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The Rest

→President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance held an extremely tense meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy at the White House on Friday, which ended in mutual acrimony without the signing of the minerals deal that Zelenskyy had traveled to Washington to finalize. The first 40 minutes of the meeting were curt but relatively professional, but in the end, things went off the rails. After Trump explained that there was no point in insulting Russian President Vladimir Putin while trying to cut a deal with him, Vance jumped in to say that the Biden strategy of “thumping our chest” had failed and that the United States needed to move forward with “diplomacy.” At that point, Zelenskyy interjected to argue with Vance about the impossibility of diplomacy with Russia; Vance shot back that it was inappropriate to “litigate” such matters in front of the press. After some back and forth between the two, a visibly angry Trump jumped in to tell Zelenskyy “you don’t have the cards right now” and that “you’re gambling with World War III.” In a statement released after the meeting, Trump wrote that Zelenskyy “is not ready for Peace” and had “disrespected the United States of America.” “He can come back when he is ready for Peace.”

All three leaders audibly raised their voices throughout the meeting. Seeming to acknowledge that he needed to make amends for the tone of the meeting, Zelenskyy posted the following message to X:

You can watch a video of the final 15 minutes of the meeting here:

→The Biden administration ditched the first Trump administration’s U.S.Agency for International Development vetting reforms and sent large sums of money to Middle Eastern countries that ended up going to terror groups, The Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman reports. USAID’s former Acting Chief Operating Officer Max Primorac said at a Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency hearing that he pushed for a more intense vetting process for grants sent to countries with terror presences, but that the Biden administration ditched those processes. Gregg Roman, the executive director of Middle East Forum, said his group identified $122 million that ended up supporting “radical organizations” if not outright bankrolling terror cells. For example, USAID gave a $125,000 grant to the Islamic Relief Agency, which, according to Roman, has al-Qaeda links. According to Influence Watch, the Islamic Relief Agency also has connections to several antisemitic figures, including the Islamic Relief’s former USA chairman, Khaled Lamada. USAID money also went to Jammal Trust Bank in Lebanon, which the U.S. Department of the Treasury later designated as a sponsor of Hezbollah.

→Last week, we highlighted reporting by Pirate Wires’ Ashley Rindsberg on a pro-Hamas propaganda network active on Reddit, Wikipedia, and other social media sites, which contained a passing mention of @zei_squirrel. Now, in a follow-up article, Rindsberg looks at the Squirrel herself (squirrelself?). As he writes:

Zei_Squirrel is a super-soldier in the Israel-Palestine information landscape. But her significance goes beyond geopolitical propaganda and provides a rare glimpse into not just online propaganda tactics and methodologies, but how individual operators use a combination of disruption, radicalization, personal charm, online celebrity, resource coordination, and sheer manpower to achieve clear-cut strategic objectives on the digital battlefield.

Squirrel’s MO mostly consists of accusing others of being “deranged Zionists freaks” guilty of sex crimes and lying through her teeth about her internet behavior; she accuses Rindsberg of inventing her connection to accounts she very clearly owns and operates. Ho hum.

The bigger issue with the Squirrel, of course, is that she’s a primary information source on the Middle East for “independent” journalistic luminaries such as Ryan Grim. As we reported last March, Grim and his then colleagues Jeremy Scahill and Daniel Boguslaw uncritically cited @zei_squirrel’s tweets three times in their purported takedown of The New York Times’ exposé on Hamas’ sexual assault on Oct. 7.

To read the rest of the article, click the link below

https://www.piratewires.com/p/portrait-of-a-digital-propagandist?f=home

→As part of a surprise extradition of jailed convicts with ties to violent cartels, Mexico sent 29 major cartel capos to U.S. authorities, likely as a gesture of goodwill toward the Trump administration as the threat of tariffs looms. Some of the cartel members are aging leaders who led international cocaine and heroin operations; others are younger leaders who have trafficked fentanyl into the United States in more recent years, according to Reuters. One of those leaders is Rafael “Rafa” Caro Quintero, co-founder of the now- defunct Guadalajara Cartel, whose rise to power was semi-fictionalized in the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico. Quintero will be arraigned today in a Brooklyn federal court. Another high-profile sicario member handed over was Antonio Oseguera Cervantes, whose brother—Mexico’s most wanted drug lord, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes—founded the legendarily brutal Jalisco New Generation Cartel. U.S. authorities have placed a $15 million price on any information that could lead to the capture of Nemesio. Reuters managed to report the handoff before either Mexico or the U.S. authorities officially announced it.

→Age of the Day: 113

That was the age of the oldest Holocaust survivor, Rose Girone, who passed away Monday on Long Island, according to The New York Times. In 1938, Girone was eight months pregnant and living in Breslau, Germany, when her husband was captured and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Girone secured passage to Shanghai, where she ended up living in a bathroom in the Shanghai Ghetto, which until 1941 was the only place in the world to offer unconditional refuge to Jews fleeing the Holocaust. When the Japanese occupied Shanghai, they forced 23,000 of the city’s Jewish refugees to be held within the Shanghai Ghetto until they left Shanghai in 1945, making the area one of the poorest and most overcrowded neighborhoods in the world, according to the Shanghai Jewish Center. Girone moved to the United States after the war and supported her daughter and herself by knitting. Despite her hardships, she was known to say, “Aren’t we lucky?”

→Sources told the New York Post that the FBI has obstructed the investigation to solve the mystery around Donald Trump’s shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks. A veteran private investigator who was hired to look into Crooks shortly after the Butler shooting, Doug Hagmann, had his team conduct a geofencing analysis of cell phones and tablets not belonging to Crooks that were found with him at his home, at the rifle range where he took target practice, at the rally, and at Bethel Park High School, where he graduated in 2022. From this, he concluded that Crooks didn’t act alone and that the shooting required coordination and was likely handled by more than one person. There have been other irregularities throughout the investigation: e.g., a toxicology exam was never performed on Crooks’ body before it was released to his parents. Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins, who has also investigated the Butler shooting for months, had not heard about the geofencing data but downplayed its importance and told the Post he believed Crooks acted alone.

→Attorney General Pam Bondi released several binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” into the hands of notable right-wing influencers at the White House Thursday. Among the influencers given the documents were Jack Posobiec and Chaya Raichik, who runs the LibsofTikTok account, according to CBS News. Unfortunately, the Epstein files released are said to be a major letdown, with little new information available about the Epstein case presented within them. Bondi issued a statement later in the day saying that the files include information that had been leaked, but never formally presented by the authorities. One of the influencers to receive the documents, Liz Wheeler, said that Bondi told the group during the meeting that the FBI and prosecutors of the Southern District of New York failed to turn over documents she ordered them to produce. Among those angered by the milquetoast leaks was Rep. Anna Paulina, a Florida Republican who leads the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, who said that neither she nor anyone on her task force reviewed the documents:

→New York Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi Thursday asking whether she was being investigated for a livestream in which she allegedly shared tactics illegal migrants can use to avoid deportation by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raids. The letter demands clarification following border czar Tom Homan’s statement earlier this month that he had referred Ocasio-Cortez’s livestream to the Justice Department to investigate whether or not it broke the law. In the letter, Ocasio-Cortez says that Homan’s threats represent political intimidation and a threat to her First Amendment rights.

“Educating the public about their rights is a key part of our responsibility as elected officials,” wrote Ocasio-Cortez. “A government that uses threats of DOJ investigation to suppress free speech is a threat to all.”

Bondi has not yet responded to the letter.

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