In the past 14 months, the Middle East was shaken by a series of unexpected military assaults on three fronts.
The Hamas invasion into southern Israel, the IDF’s devastating campaign against Hezbollah, and the current rebel offensive in Syria share common factors that contributed to the surprise.
Here’s a closer look at the failure to predict these strategic events, and the intelligence challenges faced by Mideast observers and analysts:
Strategic surprises, intel failures
The IDF and Israel’s security services obtained detailed information on Hamas attack plans before October 7 but largely dismissed them, assessing they were beyond the terror group’s capabilities.
Despite surveillance reports suggesting a significant operation was in the works, defense analysts and senior IDF officers ignored warnings, leading to a catastrophic intelligence failure. [here’s more on the psychology of Israel’s intel failure]
This misjudgment allowed Hamas to execute a large-scale, coordinated assault that caught Israel off guard, with shattering results.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah was certain that Israel will not launch a major offensive against the group, and that IDF combat capabilities were limited. Once Israel intensified the pace of attacks, it turned out that Hezbollah was completely unaware of the IDF’s ability to track and eliminate its top leaders and strategic sites, in Beirut and elsewhere.
This led to a catastrophic outcome for the organization, as its entire leadership and large parts of its military arsenal were wiped out. [here’s a detailed report on Hezbollah’s deeply flawed analysis of Israel]
In the Syrian theater, the Assad regime and its allies underestimated the organizational capacity and resolve of opposition groups. This oversight enabled rebels to launch a swift and effective offensive, quickly capturing key territories and toppling the regime.
Foreign intelligence agencies were surprised by the rapid rebel advance, a sign of significant intel gaps regarding the situation on the ground. The IDF and Mossad failed to spot indications of a major uprising, estimating until recently that the Assad regime is stable, Russian support is solid, and the Syrian army is rebuilding.
The broken intelligence puzzle
The rapid succession of surprises and setbacks highlights the significant challenges to intel gathering and analysis in the current landscape. Here are some key factors to consider:
Over-Reliance on Technology: Intelligence agencies heavily rely on tech tools like satellite surveillance and intercepted communications. While these tools provide vast amounts of data, the sheer volume can overwhelm analysts, making it harder to identify strategic developments and underground currents.
Moreover, automated systems may miss nuanced or low-signal threats that don’t align with expected patterns.
A reliance on predictive analytics and AI-based models can create blind spots when real-world conditions deviate from modeled scenarios. In this context, traditional tools like expert judgment and field reports are sometimes undervalued.
In parallel, the growing availability of encrypted communications and decentralized technologies can make it harder for agencies to intercept and interpret communications. Adversaries exploit these tools to shield their activities from detection.
Non-state actors like Hamas have adapted by using operational security measures, minimizing digital footprints or deliberately feeding misleading information into monitored channels, to deceive tech-reliant systems.
Neglecting Cultural Expertise and HUMINT: Intelligence agencies increasingly lack deep regional or cultural expertise as they prioritize technology and generalist skills over subject-area specialization. This hampers their ability to understand subtle cultural or behavioral signals.
On top of this, the emphasis on signals intelligence has in many cases come at the expense of recruiting human intel assets. Building reliable networks of agents is time-intensive and risky, especially in volatile areas like the Middle East. A lack of emphasis on cultivating and maintaining such networks leaves intel organizations with fewer qualitative insights.
In a related issue, intel agencies may focus on narrowly defined threats such as counter-terrorism or cyber warfare, without adequately integrating insights across disciplines. This can obscure broader patterns or connections, leading analysts to misread the big picture.
Complex and Adaptive Adversaries: Groups like Hamas and Syrian rebels operate in decentralized structures and adapt quickly, making them harder to predict using traditional models. They also exploit gaps in intelligence coverage, such as areas overlooked by automated surveillance.
Moreover, non-state actors often operate in tightly controlled civilian areas, making it difficult to gather intelligence without risking exposure or collateral damage.
In the case Hezbollah’s failure to correctly analyze Israel’s moves, the group’s military planners failed to take note of changes and adjustments in the IDF’s combat doctrine and capabilities, among other things.
This is a reminder that large security organizations and modern states are still capable of showing flexibility and quickly adapting to changing circumstances and security environments.
Moving forward, the most important lesson may be that while technology has revolutionized intelligence work, the human element remains crucial. Without investing in deep expertise and field agents, intelligence agencies risk being blindsided by complex and dynamic threats, in the Middle East and beyond.
