Benjamin Netanyahu, struggling to hold onto power, is firing back against an array of evidence in Israeli and global media that he was alerted by Emirati and Egyptian officials—within weeks of the October 7 attacks—that Hamas was preparing a major assault. Although the Israeli prime minister reportedly asked the UAE to deny the accusations, a new article in Middle East Policy shows that Netanyahu had for years played down the threat from Hamas, and the institutionalization of his bias shaped how military and intelligence officials misinterpreted warning signs.
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As Hamas operatives escaped to Gaza with hostages seized on October 7, 2023—long before the latest round of accusations against Netanyahu—reports emerged that Israeli officials had previously detected clear evidence of planning for the attack. As Ruth Hanau Santini and Andrea Novellis remind us in their new Middle East Policy article, Israel had long since acquired a Hamas document outlining coordinated strikes through multiple border breaches, and in the summer of 2023, an intelligence unit officer cautioned that Hamas was conducting exercises consistent with that scenario. The authors, therefore, set out to understand the systemic roots of the failure to prevent October 7.
Hanau Santini and Novellis contend that military and intelligence analysts misinterpreted or ignored the signs due to a paradigm, which they term a conceptzia, that diffused throughout the Israeli state. The key beliefs included:
- Hamas was not driven by the political goal of liberating Palestinians
- instead, its governance of Gaza had made the group increasingly interested in economic gains
- Hamas could therefore be deterred through financial incentives and periodic military operations—“mowing the grass”—instead of political resolution.
“The implication of this conceptzia,” Hanau Santini and Novellis write, “was that funding from Qatar and the granting of work permits to Gazans would temper Hamas’s zeal and potential for violent struggle in favor of economic stability.” They continue:
In February 2020, Netanyahu dispatched Mossad Chief Yossi Cohen to Doha to ensure the Qatari cash transfers. The next year, he explicitly rejected intelligence warnings that these funds were being diverted to Hamas’s military wing. This continued even when intelligence warned otherwise, revealing the assumption behind the conceptzia: that conflict was manageable without addressing its root causes.
The article shows how the conceptzia spread to the military and intelligence apparatus. “The governing frame penetrated the Israeli bureaucracy through routinized incentives, prioritization rules, and technology choices that compressed interpretive diversity,” Hanau Santini and Novellis explain. This process “fostered a climate of groupthink and self-censorship,” and the authors present evidence that agencies like Shin Bet became reluctant to challenge the prevailing view. The confirmation bias lodged deep within the state held that the group “was effectively deterred by Israeli strategy, that it was focused on governance, and that its leadership was pragmatic and less committed to resistance,” the authors argue.
The final step in the process was the transmission of the prejudices into the standard operating procedures of lower-level analysts. Hanau Santini and Novellis contend that this was crucial to the missteps ahead of October 7:
In the months before the attacks, Israeli intelligence systematically downplayed Hamas’s preparations—including the creation of a central operations room and multiple large-scale military drills—as routine exercises. Even on the night of October 6, several signs of unusual activity failed to trigger early response because officials “believed they did not indicate an imminent attack.” Although Israel’s defensive posture was built on an “overreliance on having an early warning,” the conceptzia had created a system that was incapable of recognizing the significance of these warnings.
It remains unclear whether the Israeli public, in the October 27 elections, will judge Netanyahu to have been responsible for the failures to prevent the attacks—or if the prime minister will be rewarded for responding with wars on Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.
Middle East Policy, Fall 2026—Double Issue!
PROSPECTS AND EFFECTS OF PERPETUAL WAR
Open access!
The Stability-Instability Paradox and the Evolving Balance of Terror in the Middle East
Thomas Juneau
Open access!
Visions of Gulf Security in an Era of Uncertainty: Between External Alignment and Regional Autonomy
Rory Miller | Şaban Kardaş
Open access!
Russia’s Strategic Paradox: Short-Term Gains, Long-Term Risks from the Iran War
Namig Abbasov | Emil S. Aslan
Open access!
Iran’s Gas Sector in Conflict: Infrastructure Vulnerability & Market Implications
Umud Shokri
Open access!
Qatar and Iran: Market Access Under Geopolitical Conflict
Ahmet Hakan Özkan
The Scholar’s Dilemma: Rational Study of Irrational Wars
Annie Tracy Samuel
BREAKING THE CYCLE IN ISRAEL-PALESTINE?
Open access!
Israel’s Netanyahu Trap
Bulent Aras
Paradigm Lock-In and Strategic Surprise: Explaining Israel’s October 7 Intelligence Failure
Ruth Hanau Santini | Andrea Novellis
Beyond Symbolism: The Effects of Palestinian State Recognition
Dalal Iriqat
IRAN’S DOMESTIC ORDER & ALLIANCES
Russia and Iran: The Axis of Transactions Unraveled
Federico Manfredi Firmian
Open access!
Iran’s Revolutionary Situation and Digital Authoritarianism: 1979 vs. 2026
Mohsen Askari
Open access!
Rethinking Political Islam in Iran: Contestation, Authority, and Reform
Nagapushpa Devendra
Social Perceptions in Yemen: Fragmented Power and Everyday Survival
Anef Taher | Ahmed Alduais | Muhammed Al Khayyatt
JUSTICE AND RIVALRY IN THE LEVANT
Islamic State and the Subjugation of Muslim Women
Maha Ghalwash
Transitional Justice in Syria: Prosecuting Bashar al-Assad and Senior Leaders
Mariam Bin Ghaith
GEOPOLITICAL AND ECONOMIC SHIFTS
The Reconfiguration of Sunni Alignments: A Multi-Track Theory
Ahmed Khalfa
Open access!
Gulf Energy Transition: The UAE and Saudi Arabia
Ahmet Hakan Özkan
Saudi Arabia’s Economic Diversification and Geopolitical Risk
Osama D. Sweidan
TURKISH PERCEPTIONS OF THREAT
The Torturous Turkey-PKK Peace Process
Michael M. Gunter
Open access!
Strategic and Discursive Shifts in Türkiye’s Perceptions of NATO, 1952–2020
Melih Nadi Tutan
ANKARA’S REGIONAL PARTNERSHIPS
Open access!
From Competition to Compartmentalization: Rethinking Türkiye-Gulf Relations
Betul Dogan-Akkas
Open access!
Foreign Aid as Statecraft: Muslim Donors in the Horn of Africa
Yunus Turhan
Open access!
The Türkiye-Qatar Partnership: From Ottoman Roots to Strategic Alliance
Ismail Köse | Fatma Alghussein
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