Effective intelligence requires the conversion of raw information into meaningful insights that aid in strategic and operational decision-making. The failure of Israeli intelligence regarding Hamas’s strategy of deliberately inflicting sexual violence on Israeli civilians was the product not only of insufficient information but also an inability to analyze the information available, identify patterns, and prevent errors arising from cognitive bias and methodological flaws. Today’s intelligence systems operate in a “post-truth” environment in which it is more difficult than ever to determine what information is reliable. Intelligence decision-making is not just a matter of accessing data but also of understanding its meaning and implications.
In the run-up to October 7, the Israeli intelligence system failed to identify gender-based violence as a strategic component of Hamas’s war plan. Information about Hamas’s worldview, which includes the oppression of women and the use of violence against women as a tool of psychological warfare, was available before the attack. There is ample evidence that other Islamist terrorist groups as well, such as ISIS, use rape as a tool to break resilience. Yet there was insufficient analysis by Israeli intelligence to conclude that this pattern might materialize in an attack on Israel. This failure indicates an inability to identify similar historical patterns and connect them to predictive models.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas deliberately and systematically used gender-based violence, including rape, sexual abuse, sexual torture, sexual mutilation, and murder in the course of sexual assault as a tool of psychological and strategic warfare against Israelis. These acts were not a random result of battlefield chaos but a conscious strategy specifically employed to harm the Israeli civilian population, undermine their sense of social security, and inflict terror on Israeli society. Despite documentation of similar patterns in previous conflicts, the Israeli intelligence system did not anticipate the possibility that Hamas would employ such tactics and did not prepare appropriate scenarios for prevention, deterrence, or real-time response.
For years, Israeli intelligence has relied on the assumption that direct and tangible threats, such as rocket attacks and suicide bombings, are the main dangers on which to focus. This approach has led to an underestimation of more indirect but equally destructive tactics, such as sexual violence aimed at spreading terror and weakening communities. Gender-based crimes used as a means of warfare are not only attacks on specific victims but strategic weapons aimed at undermining national security.
The Israeli intelligence system suffered from a fixed mindset that assumed sexual violence to be a side effect of battlefield chaos and not a pre-planned tool of warfare. In addition, the anchoring effect – the tendency to rely on previous assessments and ignore new information that contradicted them – led to a persistent perception that Hamas’s approach to warfare would not include gender terrorism. Despite clear evidence that similar terrorist organizations use such tactics, intelligence continued to assume that Hamas would focus primarily on kinetic attacks rather than psychological warfare based on sexual violence.
Another misunderstanding was about Hamas’s ideology, which is based on an extreme interpretation of Islam that promotes male domination and the oppression of women. While Israeli intelligence recognized these concepts in the context of Hamas as a ruling force in the Gaza Strip, it did not link them to the military-strategic dimension of Hamas’s fight against Israel. Hamas was perceived as a political entity, and the radicalization of its methods of operation was not identified. This is despite the fact that Hamas’s official statements over the years, as well as publications in its propaganda channels, have pointed to the humiliation of Jewish women as an approved act of “revenge” and symbolic conquest.
The Israeli intelligence system misinterpreted this evidence, as it was perceived as part of Hamas’s general religious discourse rather than as a tactical threat. Unlike intelligence models developed to identify conventional terrorist attacks, there was no analytical category that addressed gender-based violence as a strategic weapon of war. As a result, targeted attacks on Israeli women prior to October 7 were not identified as a unique risk but assimilated into broad categories of “Palestinian terrorism“ or viewed strictly through the lens of criminal justice.
This evidence could have been an early indication that Hamas might use rape and sexual violence as a tool to inflict terror. However, the Israeli intelligence system analyzed these elements primarily in the context of internal control of the Gaza Strip and not as an external strategic threat.
In addition, the understanding that the distribution of crime documentation can be used as a tool of intimidation in the digital space was not internalized by Israeli intelligence. In other words, Hamas’s willingness to use images and videos of its members’ rape and murder of Israeli women as a terrorist tool in the age of social media was not sufficiently analyzed or assessed.
Nor did the Israeli intelligence system integrate gender and criminology experts into its analysis of the Hamas threat. Such experts could have identified early patterns in the organization’s behavior, identified internal processes that legitimized gender-based crimes, and provided more in-depth warnings. Instead, intelligence analyses were conducted using traditional approaches to security threat assessment that did not take deep-seated trends in gender-based terrorism into account.
After the attack, Israel was met with widespread denial by Hamas, international organizations, and hostile media outlets of the incidents of gender-based violence committed by Hamas on Israeli citizens. Disinformation campaigns were instantly and effectively spread around the world and information from Israeli sources was met with increased skepticism, making it difficult to create an effective narrative. Israeli intelligence was not sufficiently prepared to fight in the perceptual arena, and that failure exacerbated the international community’s anti-Israeli response to Hamas’s crimes. The failure was not only in proving that the crimes had been committed but also in failing to quickly identify and call out Hamas’s deliberate efforts to sow distrust in the Israeli version of events. In the face of disinformation, the Israeli intelligence system failed to respond quickly enough, which allowed pro-Palestinian organizations to dominate the global discourse and undermine the credibility of Israeli reports.
This phenomenon, it should be noted, is not unique to the current conflict. In the Balkan and Rwandan wars, victims of sexual violence were also faced with denial and downplay campaigns by political actors.
Israeli intelligence operated on the assumption that the presentation of solid facts would be sufficient to establish reality in public discourse. It failed to understand that in the “post-truth” era, truth itself is subject to manipulation. Another failure was in understanding how Hamas’s disinformation fit into the preexisting narrative of anti-Israel groups. The intelligence services did not properly anticipate how international actors would exploit the attack to produce campaigns to deny the violence, even though this is a well-known tactic from past conflicts.
A paradigm shift in threat analysis is needed to recognize sexual violence and gender-based terrorism as an integral part of intelligence assessments. This expansion will allow for a deeper understanding of the long-term psychological mechanisms of a form of terrorism that aims to undermine social resilience. In addition, data collection and analysis mechanisms need to be strengthened by creating frameworks that map global patterns of gender-based violence so they can be applied to future threat assessments and identify risks in advance.
In an era of post-truth and disinformation, advanced strategies must be developed to deal with information manipulation and false narratives, moving from an approach that focuses solely on the presentation of facts to a proactive approach that confronts the effects of biased narratives and establishes a rapid intelligence and awareness response in the international arena.
The Israeli security concept must recognize that gender-based violence is not just a side effect of war but a strategic warfare tool in its own right. Changing the concept is essential for a better understanding of the fighting patterns of terrorist organizations and for more appropriate preparation for the future.
Lee Shpilrain Nahari is researching the international responses to gender-based violence on the seventh of October as part of her master’s degree at Bar-Ilan University. She is a risk management consultant at EBA & Co.
{Reposted from BESA site}
