Captured Israeli soldiers at the beginning of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood (social networking sites)
A former Israeli military intelligence officer told the newspaper "Israel Today" that there is great concern that the Israeli army was exposed to deep counter-espionage operations from the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) before the outbreak of war.
The officer - whom the newspaper described as a veteran without mentioning his name - explained that the elite forces of the Hamas movement were in possession of information about sensitive and secret sites, and that this required Israel to know how this information reached the hands of the movement. The officer continued, "These are details that the leaders of the Israeli army do not tell even to their friends."
He stressed that this means a double intelligence failure for the Shin Bet (General Security), which should have collected information about Hamas' plans, but, as is known, failed to do so.
He continued, "The Shin Bet is also responsible for preventing counter-espionage, which means not allowing the enemy to collect information from inside Israel."
The officer did not rule out the existence of a superpower, as he described it, that had helped Hamas carry out espionage, and stressed the need to investigate the matter after the war.
"The investigating committee will have to ask where they got so much internal information about what was happening at the most secret Israeli army bases," he added.
At dawn on October 7, 2023, the Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip surprised Israel with Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood,” which included a land, sea, and air attack and infiltration by the resistance into several settlements on the Gaza Strip.
Since then, the Israeli army has launched a devastating war on Gaza, which as of Sunday left 28,176 martyrs and 67,784 injured, most of them children and women, in addition to thousands missing under the rubble, according to the Palestinian authorities.
The severity of the Israeli attacks intensified after the start of the ground incursion and the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands that accompanied it, amid mounting Arab and international fears and warnings about a significant increase in casualty numbers and a worsening famine crisis, in the event of an incursion into the southern Rafah governorate, which is crowded with displaced persons, which Israel announced its readiness to undertake.
It also caused massive destruction and an unprecedented catastrophic humanitarian crisis, with scarce supplies of food, water and medicine, and the displacement of about two million Palestinians, i.e. more than 85% of the Gaza Strip’s population, according to the United Nations.
Source: Al Jazeera + Anatolia