Intelligence lapse led to massive Hamas offensive on Israel?

Former director of the Israel National Security Council, Helit Barel, hinted at an intelligence lapse, saying that the multi-front terror attack by Hamas caught the country "by surprise".

In an interview with ANI over Zoom, she added that the attacks could have been avoided if the intelligence wing of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were at the required "level of readiness".
Barel said Israel was currently in a state of war and there was a sequence of challenges and tasks at hand.

"It is quite clear that this attack caught us by surprise. There is no way that such terrible consequences would have occurred if Israeli forces intelligence were at the kind of readiness that we know and expect. Currently, we are in a state of war...There is a sequence of challenges and tasks at hand beginning with still getting all the areas down south where there were terrorist infiltrations completely cleared," she told ANI.

On the operation carried out by the Israeli defence forces to neutralise terrorists in the region of conflict (near the Gaza border as well as across Israel), she said, "The forces are walking house by house and corner by corner making sure terrorists aren't hiding anywhere. We have the larger task of making sure that all other arenas that Israel faces stay calm including the internal arena...I think it is inevitable that there will be very strong retributions within the Gaza Strip and I think

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