The 8200 commander indirectly attacks his unit following the leaked information about the unit's functioning on the eve of Black Saturday.
State Comptroller: "There is no justification for the government's late awakening to deal with the home front" // Photo: Office of the State Comptroller and Ombudsman
In an email sent yesterday to all members of the regular, permanent and reserve units, titled "On the sanctity of war," Brigadier General Y. wrote: "War obligates us to conduct ourselves with holiness. In what sense? In the wrong sense, we cannot give space to things that have no place."
"War requires matter-of-factness. War requires collegiality. War requires focusing on the main thing (defeating Hamas, returning the abductees and abductees, dealing with the north). Do not give room for background noise. In war, we invest all our energy in defeating our enemies, and do not spend a minute gossiping or talking badly about our friends and partners. This is the war of our watch, this is the war of our generation. This war obliges me, this war obliges us."
8200 (Arikhon), Photo: Yehoshua Yosef
Since the beginning of the war, Brigadier General Y. has refrained from accepting responsibility for his and the unit's failures in providing information that would have made it possible to thwart the October 7 offensive. Thus, the gold bulletin that 8200 brought about a year and a half before the attack was not translated into a full collection model that would have made it possible to learn more about Hamas' intentions, and the unit also ignored warnings from Counter F, who warned that Hamas was preparing for an attack.
Not the first mile
Y. has already sent the unit's members several emails since the beginning of the war, but the message he sent yesterday was particularly surprising. "A show of lack of leadership," an 8200 source cynically called it. According to him, instead of accepting responsibility, Y. looks for blame and calls the exact published information gossip.
Y. is not the only one in the Intelligence Directorate who refrained from claiming responsibility for the failure. The head of the operations division, Brigadier General G., also behaves as if the incident is foreign to him. The Operations Division was established as a lesson learned from the Second Lebanon War, in order to synchronize all intelligence activity with the main objective of the Intelligence Directorate: warning of war. Danzig and his men were familiar with Hamas's golden knowledge, but just like 8200, they did not turn it into a work plan.
8200, photographed in the offices of Dotz in Ramat Aviv, photo: Gideon Markowitz
Yesterday, Dayan revealed a warning issued by Danzig, given three months before Black Sabbath, in which he warns: "We tried, we did not succeed, we do not know how Sinwar will act."
A senior source called it "an amazing event of escape from responsibility," and wondered what Brigadier General G. had done with it: "Did he turn tables, open a tent outside the chief of staff's office, recruit all the intelligence agencies – Military Intelligence, Shin Bet, Mossad – or did he settle for a letter? The answer is clear."
Arrogance and fixation
These publications do not come in a vacuum. The information that has been flowing recently points to the colossal intelligence failure that has crossed all the systems in Military Intelligence. It mainly indicates arrogance and fixation of thought, which at the very least require internalizing the mistake and accepting personal and command responsibility.
Soldiers from Unit 8200. Illustration, photo: IDF Spokesperson
The commander of 8200 and the head of the operations division still refrain from doing so, in contrast to their commander, Director of Military Intelligence Aharon Haliwa, who claimed responsibility for the failure (as did the head of the Research Division, Brig. Gen. Amit Sa'ar).
This conduct will inevitably lead to a thorough overhaul of Military Intelligence at the end of the war, including the replacement of all the senior officials mentioned. Similar moves will be carried out by the Southern Command, the General Staff, and the Shin Bet, but they will not absolve the political leadership of its responsibility for the disaster, because over the past year it has been given countless strategic warnings about Israel's weakening, all of which have been completely ignored and blatantly disrespected.
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