Could Israel Have Prevented Hamas's October 7th Attack?

A recent bombshell report in the New York Times reveals that Israel knew about Hamas’s attack plan for October 7th, 2023, codenamed “Jericho Wall,” more than a year before it happened. On this episode of Next Question, the journalists who broke the story, Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman, detail how this intelligence failure came about, including the dismissal of a female Israeli intelligence analyst’s urgent warnings that Hamas had devised a “plan to start a war” as “imaginary.” 

 

We now know that Hamas’s intentions as laid out in the Jericho Wall document were deadly serious, and Bergman and Goldman note that the attack followed the plan with “shocking precision.” They give insightful analysis of how a threat like Jericho Wall could be dismissed and what this grave misstep means for not only this conflict, but also for Israel's broader idea of itself in the world and for the trust in its powerful intelligence service at home and abroad.

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