FALCON POWERS – Avi Dichter, the Israeli Minister of Agriculture and former head of the General Security Service “Shin Bet”, said on Friday that the Israeli intelligence failure in predicting the attack on October 7 last year was “extremely heavy”.
Dichter said in an interview with the Maariv newspaper: “The intelligence failure is extremely heavy, we are people who test ourselves according to the results, this is acceptable in the army, the Shin Bet, the police and the Mossad, and in the test the result cannot be worse than what we received on October 7.”
He continued: “No one in the State of Israel, not at the military level, nor the Shin Bet, nor the military intelligence, not even the fortune tellers, had information that Gaza was preparing for an attack of this magnitude on Israeli territory.”
Regarding the responsible parties for the failure, Dichter said: “The government, the army and the Shin Bet, these are the bodies that have a direct relationship with the failure, each from its own angle.”
He added: “With all due respect to the political leadership, at 6:30 in the morning (on October 7), the political leadership was not the body that could provide intelligence information, and did not know how to stand at the gate where the breaches were created in the fence when the attack began, there is a main body which is the army with all its forces, and there is the intelligence part of the Shin Bet and military intelligence.”
Dichter continued: “The fact that they occupied us within an hour speaks for itself, even on Yom Kippur (1973 war), the Syrians took some time to reach a settlement outpost on the Golan Heights.”
In describing the October 7 attack, Dichter said: “Every word will be appropriate for this: failure, negligence, disaster, terrible incident, dire consequences.”
He added: “There has been nothing like this since the establishment of the state, and I say this as someone who was in the Yom Kippur War (October 1973).”
He pointed out that he “does not know of any event in Israel and perhaps even outside the country where 1,200 people were lost in one day.”
He noted that the number of Israelis killed on last October 7 is larger than “the total number of casualties caused by the Second Intifada (2000-2005) during its six years.”
