The events of October 7 shattered Israel’s sense of security, but the latest revelations about what Hamas knew, and how they prepared, make one thing undeniable: Israel cannot move forward without an immediate, independent state commission of inquiry.
This week, a new report exposed just how deeply Hamas had penetrated Israel’s security landscape. In the initial hours of the October 7 attack, its terrorists infiltrated Israel and were able to disable Israel’s most advanced Merkava 4 tanks by using a secret internal shutdown button, a detail so highly classified that even many in the IDF spent months trying to figure out how Hamas knew that it existed.
We now know how. For five years, Hamas waged an unprecedented intelligence operation built almost entirely on social media. They monitored nearly 100,000 Israeli soldiers, infiltrated private accounts and WhatsApp groups, and collected millions of data points. They built full-scale replicas of IDF bases. They mapped outposts down to the angle of cameras, the location of armories, and the timing of patrols. They trained their Nukhba units with VR simulations so accurate that one Israeli officer admitted Hamas “knew the base better than I did.”
In the months after the attack, many were trying to grapple with how such a catastrophic intelligence failure was possible and pushed all kinds of conspiracy theories to resolve the traumatic cognitive dissonance we were all grappling with.
But this wasn’t some “inside job” as some conspiracy theories imply. It was an intelligence failure rooted in something far more mundane and far more dangerous: arrogance. Israel saw Hamas planning, saw their training and mock raids. The female soldiers stationed by the Gaza border as observers saw Hamas’s activity and warned for months that something was wrong.
Just 'another Hamas drill'
Even more so, on October 6, a hundred Israeli SIM cards were activated inside Gaza, and the Shin Bet, Israel’s intelligence agency, knew about it and thought it was just “another Hamas drill.” Throughout the early hours of October 7, senior Israeli commanders were in constant communication about the peculiar activity in Gaza and were concerned enough to schedule a follow-up conversation for 7:00 a.m.
Hamas’s invasion began at 6:29.
These weren’t small oversights: they were systemic failures that demand national accountability. And yet, it has been over two years and Israel still has not conducted a state commission of inquiry. While there has always been tension between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his government and members of Israel’s current judiciary, all of that is simply ego, corruption, and interests that have nothing to do with the safety and security of the Jewish state. The public of any other Western democracy would have never tolerated such a long period for an official commission after the worst terror attack in that nation’s history.
Last week, Netanyahu’s government signaled plans for an internal, cabinet-controlled review, one that would lack independence, subpoena power, and public credibility. This is not the way forward and Israelis across the political spectrum understand how unacceptable that is.
A proper inquiry is not about assigning blame to a single leader or party. It’s about exposing the policies (like the years-long Qatari cash transfers) that helped entrench a terror organization we mistakenly believed we could “manage.” It’s about understanding how warnings were ignored, how assumptions hardened into dogma, and how a containment strategy devolved into complacency.
A state commission of inquiry won’t rewrite the past or fix what happened, but it can prevent Israel from repeating it. It can rebuild the trust of a traumatized Israeli public – and it can ensure that no future government, Left, Right, or Center, ever again underestimates an enemy who has told us, plainly and repeatedly, exactly what they intend to do.
Israel cannot afford another failure built on wishful thinking. The time for an independent state inquiry is not after the war, not at someone’s political convenience, not someday.
It is now.
The writer is a co-founder and CEO of Social Lite Creative, a digital marketing firm that specializes in geopolitics.