Reviewed by NEAL GENDLER
Although Hamas is to blame for invading Israel Oct. 7, 2023, the authors of While Israel Slept blame Israel for letting it happen.
Israel’s failure began long before Oct. 6, say Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot, journalists covering Israel’s armed forces for more than 20 years. They provide a clear, compelling and easily read but damning account of wrong-headed decisions for decades.
“Israel was missing all of the signs, mostly because it believed that Hamas was incapable of such an assault,” they say. “The political and military leadership assumed that Hamas had been deterred and wanted quiet … and viewed everything through that prism.”
Katz and Bohbot say that “Hamas had put Israel to sleep, and the reports by the [observers] simply did not match the conceptzia” — the overarching conception and assessment of the IDF, intelligence agencies and government.
And they all “could not have been more wrong.”
The result, like Pearl Harbor, was a complete surprise.
Needlessly so. The authors say that when Israel’s Southern Command uncovered Hamas’ operational plan for a major raid on Israel in 2022, it “was dismissed as nothing more than a prop.”
Katz and Bohbot describe in detail early indications of unusual activity Oct. 6 and say who called whom and reported what. The question was whether intercepted messages and Hamas’ activities were just one of its periodic exercises.
But right before the invasion, not all Israel’s security officials were literally sleeping. At 4 a.m. Oct. 7, Shin Bet director Ronen Bar convened his top staff for a consultation and ordered his rapid response force to the Gaza border. Various military commanders were conferring.
Yet Israeli defenses were insufficient. Many soldiers were home on leave for Sukkot.
Hamas’ raid plan of 2002 was executed Oct. 7, 2023.
Katz and Bohbot find three levels of failure: failing to grasp Hamas’ intentions, underestimating Hamas’ scale, and mistaken faith in border defenses, expecting terrorist entry though tunnels.
“Everything and everyone were just wrong,” they say. No terrorist entered through a tunnel.
Forty-one page Chapter 3, “The Tunnel Blindness,” argues that Israel focused on blocking tunnels into Israel and building a below-grade wall to hamper new attempts but paid too little attention to tunneling within Gaza: more than 300 miles with different levels, living quarters and power — “an entire world built under the Gaza Strip.”
With the invasion, “the country was in a total state of shock,” they say. “It was like the Yom Kippur War all over again.” Then too, the conceptzia had been wrong.
The authors explain the initial fighting and recount the now nearly forgotten effort to encourage Gazans to evacuate the north — 70,000 phone calls, 13 million text messages and 15 million prerecorded voicemails. About 85 percent of those Gazans left before Israel entered, they say.
Captured Hamas documents show that while Israel focused on Iran and Hezbollah, Hamas “had built a large, professional, well-trained and brutal army right under the nose of the Israeli intelligence community.”
They also found 1,500 antisemitic books, one teaching children how to kill Jews.
Chapter 4 describes the birth and growth of Hamas; Chapter 5 gives the history and usual success of Israel’s targeted strikes.
Chapter 6, “Paying Terrorist Blackmail,” shows how Hamas was financed and built a large and rich investment network, and how Israel encouraged millions sent from Qatar under the illusion of improving Gazans’ lot to discourage militancy.
Captivating and retrospectively alarming, While Israel Slept ruthlessly exposes mistakes from which Israel might learn.
In “Preventing Another October 7,” Katz and Bohbot make five recommendations.
1) “Reform intelligence.” Israel relied too much on technology, not enough on human intelligence. Too much bureaucracy can keep information from reaching the decision makers, and open-source intelligence such as Hamas publications and videos needs more investment.
2) “Bolster the U.S.-Israel alliance.” Prime ministers prioritize this, but “during the war, some senior government officials actively undermined the U.S.-Israel alliance, painting President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris as anti-Israel and even antisemitic.” Endorsing Donald Trump before the 2024 election was a dangerous insertion into U.S. politics.
3) “Improve public diplomacy efforts.” I’m tempted to ask: “What efforts”? Israel has lacked competent public relations as long as I can remember — certainly since 1967.
4) “Prepare an exit strategy” and preempt serious threats.
5) “Strengthen national resilience.” The national division over Likud’s judicial changes projected an image of serious weakness and “was the opportunity Israel unwillingly handed to Hamas.”
Two more perhaps too obvious to include: When you have observers near a hostile border, arm them to defend themselves, and when they report suspicious or threatening activity, believe them.
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Neal Gendler is a Minneapolis editor and writer.
(American Jewish World, October 2025)
