Who Is Accountable?

Nobody within Israel's intelligence services anticipated the scale of the attack on the Jewish State. Raw intelligence is by its nature opaque. Those tasked with analyzing what is coming in seldom see the whole picture because of specialization and volume of incoming material, such as signals intelligence that is now often heavily encrypted and very difficult to decode, even using supercomputers and AI (both of which Israel at this point has extremely limited access to, especially when contrasted with the United States). Then there is imagery intelligence which might have revealed clues to what was in the offing as well, which the Jewish State lags in when contrasted with nations with larger satellite programs as well. Israeli drones were monitoring, but we see Hamas employed drones as well. Finally, human intelligence failed in one aspect because Hamas had been so ruthless in executing anyone who might be working for Israel that those who might have credibly warned Israel in earlier times were terrified to inform despite Israel generously paying those who would sell out their own side to help protect the Jewish State. So should blame be laid at the top? Due to compartmentalization, no Israeli intelligence official was able to grasp the whole picture. The pieces they were seeing did not move them to pass information up to the Prime Minister, who has NEVER dismissed or underestimated the threat. Netanyahu is not an intelligence analyst who might have missed a clue in raw intelligence. He could only work with what he was given by professionals upon whom he is forced to rely. Tragically, even some of those were actively seeking to undermine their own leader, because they are in the thrall of the Left and/or because of personal ambitions. It is inconceivable that even they saw the invasion about to come and deliberately obscured that knowledge from Bibi, but with other agendas in their heads, they may have taken their eye off the ball of protecting Israel. I do not know what Netanyahu could have done that he did not, as even though he has had recent health challenges, he has always taken the security of the Jewish State and People as his top priority.