NEW YORK, October 30. /TASS/. Israeli security services stopped listening to the hand-held radios of Hamas militants a year ago, after they concluded that it was a waste of effort, The New York Times reported, citing sources.
Israel’s domestic security service could have been warned of the recent attack by the radical group, had they not stopped listening to traffic on the radios, the report said. Instead, the security service interpreted the unusual activity of the militant group hours before its attack on Israel as another exercise, the newspaper said.
At some point, the security service had a theory that Hamas could attempt a small-scale assault. A decision was made to deploy a group of elite counterterrorism forces to Israel’s southern border.
"The most powerful military force in the Middle East had not only completely underestimated the magnitude of the attack, it had totally failed in its intelligence-gathering efforts, mostly due to hubris and the mistaken assumption that Hamas was a threat contained," the report said.