Inside Israel’s War Room: What Really Happened After October 7

Conversations with Coleman

Elliot Kaufman joins the show to discuss his book In the War Room, detailing Israel's strategic and political maneuvering in the aftermath of October 7th. The conversation explores Hamas's

Key takeaways

• Hamas invaded Israel believing it could destroy the state by forcing Hezbollah and Iran into a full-scale regional war, but Hassan Nasrallah hesitated to join immediately due to strict Iranian coordination protocols.
• Israel's intelligence failure in Gaza stemmed from overreliance on signals intelligence and a collapsed human network, whereas the Mossad maintained deep penetration of Lebanon and Iran.

Main topics

• Hamas invasion rationale & intelligence failures
• Israeli war cabinet dynamics (Netanyahu, Gallant, Gantz)

Notable quotes

"Hamas invaded Israel because it thought it could destroy Israel."

Conclusion

The episode provides a granular look at the strategic, political, and intel

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Elliot Kaufman. Elliot is an editorial writer and member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, where he focuses primarily on Israel and Iran. He joined the journal in 2018 after graduating from Stanford University. He is also the co-author, with Yona Jeremy-Bab, of the 2026 book, In the War Room, the inside story of Israel's fight against Hamas and the Iranian Axis. which is the subject of today's conversation. In this episode, we talk about why Hamas invaded Israel in October 2023. We talk about the recent Haaretz article alleging that Prime Minister Netanyahu ignored warnings of an attack, including from Mohammed bin Zayed, better known as MBZ. We talk about why Israeli intel agencies have been much more competent at fighting Hezbollah in Iran and less competent at fighting Hamas in Gaza. We talk about how Israeli decision makers, including but not limited to Netanyahu, made decisions at crucial turning points during the war. And finally, we talk about how October 7th has changed the balance of power in the Middle East for good. So without further ado, Elliot Kaufman. Speaker 2 (1:24) Okay, Elliot Kaufman, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks Speaker 1 (1:27) for having me. Speaker 2 (1:28) I've known you for quite a while. You are one of the best editors in the game. I know I've told you this privately before, but you should teach a course on it at some point in your life because you have a true gift. But we're not here to talk about that today. We're talking about the book you've written called In the War Room. And what you've done here is essentially write the first draft of the history of the October 7th war. And that's an incredibly ambitious project. It's a difficult project. And the first thing I want to ask you is, how did you do this? How did you, who did you interview? What was your method as a first draft historian, essentially? Speaker 1 (2:11) It's a great question. And my co-author and I, we saw that there were already a few books coming out. And we knew even before there were already a few books about the October 7th massacre itself. And what we said is, let's tell the story of what happens after, of the war that followed. And so I work, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, my co-author, Jerusalem Post, military correspondent. Between the two of us, our daily work was essentially focused on one story for two full years. And now with this Iran war, you could say almost three full years. And so building off of that, we realized together we could tell. Speaker 1 (3:02) The inside story based on behind the scenes material from all of Israel's top leaders. And I really mean that political, military intelligence, plus senior U.S. officials, Biden and Trump officials. But in Israel, really, it's Bibi, Galant, Gantz, Halevi, Zamir. And if you don't know those names, that's what the book is for. Please don't worry. Speaker 2 (3:32) Yeah. Okay. So let's get right into it. Speaker 2 (3:37) Why did Hamas invade Israel on October 7th? And let me put a little more meat on the bones of that question. You know, initially what we heard is that Sinwar chose to attack on October 7th because Saudi Arabia and Israel were on the brink of a major normalization deal of bringing Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords, which would probably be the biggest piece of news coming out of the Middle East in decades and a major piece of good news. You know, obviously the background fact here is that Hamas. wants to destroy the nation of Israel. So, you know, in that sense, why did they attack Israel is an easy question to answer. The real question is, why did they do it when they did it? What is the answer to that question that you give in the book? Speaker 1 (4:32) I'm glad we're starting there. Speaker 1 (4:36) Hamas invaded Israel, and I think people really overlook this. Hamas invaded Israel because it thought it could destroy Israel. That sounds crazy. It sounds impossible. Certainly, Israelis thought it was crazy and impossible, which is why they weren't ready for it at all. But based on the documents from Hamas that have been found in Gaza, we can piece together what was going on here. And what we have is, in some ways, a Hamas story, and in some ways, a larger Iranian story. Iran has this multi-decade project making multi-billion dollar investments on multiple fronts to surround Israel with a ring of fire of proxy terrorist groups, Hamas, Hezbollah, West Bank groups, the Houthis we're seeing now in Yemen, militias in Iraq. Speaker 1 (5:37) And they thought that one day that ring of fire could all at once engulf Israel. Hamas's innovation and really the innovation of its leader Yahya Sinwar was that it didn't need to wait any longer. It could start this story even without the rest of the Axis ready to go. Meaning it could break from that larger plan and by making that first strike, bring in Hezbollah, bring in Iran, bring in everybody else. And Hamas thought this was the time. Because when it looked at Israel and it looked at the regional situation, I think it was right. This was the time for a few reasons. Israel looked as divided as it had ever been. And we know this from Hamas's own assessment. They heard Israelis saying, we're not going to serve in the military reserves, for instance, because we disagree so strongly with the government. They saw the massive protests, unrest in the streets. In the previous Gaza war, they saw for the first time, really, Israeli Arabs had in certain cities rioted during the war. And so if there could be another front inside of Israel, well, that is a tremendous opportunity. And then the Saudi story, I think, is part of it. The Saudis certainly believe that it is. And we do have some documents from Sinoir seeing this. larger Arab-Israeli normalization, peace, which is the exact opposite of what they want. And so Hamas figured this was the time. They couldn't wait any longer to bring in that larger Iranian axis. There Speaker 2 (7:36) was a recent article in Haaretz, which has gone as viral in the West as a Haaretz article can ever go, which... has made, I think, two, many claims, but two that are relevant here. One is that... Netanyahu ignored warnings from foreign leaders, most notably MBZ, but also ignored warnings which he might have not ignored from his own intelligence officials. But the second was that... Sinwar was attempting to make this big deal with Netanyahu that would involve gas pipelines flowing to Gaza and would involve economic benefit, essentially. But Netanyahu was dragging his feet, so Sinwar got impatient and launched October 7th. That's basically the picture painted by the Haaretz article. Is that true? Speaker 1 (8:36) I think parts of it are true. So let's take the first part about this warning transmitted from the UAE. So this has been denied that it happened in the way that it was reported. However, Israel's sort of FBI equivalent, the Shin Bet, had received some warnings like that. We know that for a fact. And so it wouldn't be surprising. if Prime Minister Netanyahu had also received that kind of warning, saying that Hamas is up to something. We don't know exactly what. We don't know exactly when. But watch out for Hamas. And what people fail to appreciate is that October 7th happened not for a lack of warnings. In the week before, the month before, the year before, the day of. We detail this in the book. I mean, our real effort is to tell what happened after October 7th. But we do get into the weeds on that day. And you have Hamas activating Israeli SIM cards from inside of Gaza. Now, why would they need Israeli cell phones unless they wanted to use them in Israel? And even then, you have Israeli intelligence assessing, don't worry, we've seen them do this before, and it was only a drill. Nothing happened. Well, maybe they were drilling for the attack. Speaker 2 (10:06) And Speaker 1 (10:06) what Israeli intelligence said at that time is we don't want to reveal our sources and methods by overreacting to all of these warnings that came flashing red lights in hindsight. And so it really wasn't a lack of warnings. It was a lack of understanding. Even when they knew Hamas was invading, still the Israeli military and intelligence couldn't fathom anything more than a small incursion. Maybe they would attack one border town, try to kidnap a couple people. And so Israel's military sent small elite squads, you know, 15 guys, top soldiers, to take care of the issue when they should have been sending a division. They just couldn't imagine that Hamas would mount something so bold and truly believe that it could destroy Israel. Speaker 2 (11:07) So can you take me, can you try to bridge the gap between what you or I or someone listening to this thinks is possible and what Sinwar thought was possible? Like why did he sincerely believe that that This was like the first chapter in the end of Israel. Speaker 1 (11:30) He believed it. Speaker 1 (11:33) Because of, I would say, intentions and capabilities, Iran had made sure over a long period of time that both were ready for that sort of operation. Intentions, destroying Israel, the full Iranian axis was aligned on that question, including Iran itself. Speaker 1 (11:57) capabilities, not only was Hamas stronger than anybody realized and had a much more sophisticated plan than anybody realized, such that it got as far as it did, massacring nearly 1,200 Israelis, taking more than 250 hostages. And if it hadn't stopped at the Nova Music Festival to commit the very worst of the mass slaughters, it could have gotten even further. And it was planning, in fact, to link up with the West Bank where it could meet Hamas terrorists there, Islamic Jihad terrorists there, and a much larger population that could also stream over from both fronts. The second is Hezbollah in the north, in Lebanon. Hezbollah had amassed a missile arsenal 150,000 strong. And so you have Israeli estimates that if Hezbollah had wanted to launch to its full capacity, Speaker 1 (13:06) on say October 8th or 9th or 10th, Israel estimated 5,000 Israelis dead, dwarfing what Hamas was able to accomplish on October 7th. More than that, you would have Haifa devastated, the north a wreckage, Ben Gurion Airport badly damaged, much of it... taken out. Same with the national electric grid, about a third of it taken out. You would have a dozen towers, you know, massive towers toppling in Tel Aviv. Essentially, Israel would never be the same. And that's only those two, not even counting what happens when, in their view, Israeli Arabs rise up, West Bank Palestinians, and then Iran itself can join with its ballistic missile and drone capability, which we've seen so much lately. So Speaker 2 (14:04) in the book, you say Sinwar had had some conversations with Nasrallah of Hezbollah, and he understood that Hezbollah would come to his aid, would launch a full scale invasion after October 7th. Why did Sinwar miscalculate with Hezbollah? What is it that he didn't understand about Hezbollah, which which led to the fact that they Sort of they started shooting at Israel, but at very low levels Speaker 1 (14:30) That, I would say, remains the big question of the war, because Israeli military and intelligence knows all too well just how disastrously this could have gone, which is to say October 7th could have been much, much worse. But Hezbollah blinked, and it really goes to one man, its leader, its legendary terrorist kingpin, Hassan Nasrallah. who it turned out and this is the israeli intelligence assessment here Nasrallah sticks to the plan. That's how they ended up reading him. Nasrallah was committed to the larger Iranian plan of let's all agree on a date when we are all ready and let's do this properly. Okay? Destroy Israel properly. Speaker 2 (15:23) And doing it properly would mean Iran would be directing the shots, not Hamas. Speaker 1 (15:28) That's right. And October 7th, it wasn't ready. It hadn't been told the start date. Sinoir had thought that he had a tacit agreement that when he would start things, they would know that's the time you should join in. But he hadn't wanted to reveal that information. And from his point of view, he was probably right not to. Because given how thoroughly Israeli intelligence had penetrated Hezbollah versus not much at all Hamas, Israel might well have found out about his... October 7th attack. And so he was waiting that day and Hezbollah support didn't come. Instead, on October 8th, Hezbollah launched several dozen mortar rounds, some anti-tank missiles. It joined the war in support of Hamas. That's not nothing, Speaker 2 (16:22) but Speaker 1 (16:22) it wasn't the 4,000, 5,000 missiles it could have launched on day one if it wanted to. Speaker 2 (16:29) Right. So one of the big questions you tackle in the book is, if Israel's intelligence was so good when it came to Hezbollah, why was it so bad when it came to Hamas? You know, that disparity has fueled or at least given some fake credibility to some of the conspiracy theories. Speaker 2 (16:57) You know, ironically enough, it was Charlie Kirk, who is a big Israel supporter for pretty much his entire career. Right after October 7th, there is a now infamous clip of him, you know, saying, you know, I've been to Israel. It's a fortress. There's no way they couldn't have known about this. Right. Like and, you know, the first thing to say is just just because an intelligence agency is very competent, it doesn't mean it is perfectly competent. Like that should be obvious. The analogy I make is LeBron James. He's my goat. He's the greatest basketball player of all time. But I can show you a two-minute video of him on YouTube just missing wide-open layups, right? And so that doesn't negate the fact that he's the best in the world. So you would expect even the best intel agency in the world to miss things. But what is the more granular explanation of why Israel was so good on Hezbollah and so bad on Hamas? Speaker 1 (17:55) You know, you will hear that conspiracy theory from random Israelis on the street as well, because they, too, simply cannot believe it that something like this happened. And I'll tell you, on October 7th, I was reading a book by my co-author, in fact, a great book called Target Tehran, about how the Mossad had Iran penetrated and was operating almost at will. Iran and continues to as we've seen in some ways and so I too was stunned by this but there are a few things that people don't realize one is the Mossad is not the Israeli intelligence agency responsible for Gaza Mossad like the CIA has responsibilities abroad and because Gaza used to be controlled by Israel it's still It's still considered under the purview of the Shin Bet, which is more than the FBI, but the FBI equivalent. So it's not quite the same as the Mossad, not as fearsome, you might say, and not as capable. The Mossad's theaters, Lebanon, Iran, you saw incredible intelligence penetration, and you saw Israel act. Rather impressively, I think most people would agree. Gaza, the opposite. The other more granular story is about the collapse of Israel's human intelligence in Gaza. The Shin Bet had lost most of its on-the-ground spies in Gaza and had come to believe that that was okay. Speaker 1 (19:45) Even though it was right next door and they could slip people in, you know, without that much trouble. It was risky, of course. Hamas is running the place. They decided that they had such sophisticated signals intelligence. electronic eavesdropping and they were watching all the right things which is why they knew when the you know hamas commanders were called up when uh hamas activated those sim cards they were really on top of all of those things they thought that was enough and then i think the larger point is just that they severely underestimated Hamas. And you can see this, by the way, looking at Prime Minister Netanyahu's memoir, which was published in 2022, I believe. He writes about Gaza and takes on the question, why didn't you overthrow Hamas in the past, in some, you know, previous Gaza war? And he says, very simply, well, that would be a disaster. we would be walking into all kinds of booby traps. We would lose thousands of Israeli troops. The way Hamas would fight, we would end up killing tens of thousands of Gazans. It would be a diplomatic disaster. And besides, we had bigger fish to fry. He actually writes that. He says Iran and Syria as well, interestingly. He wasn't wrong about any of that. He saw very clearly what a full invasion of Gaza would mean, and that's why he never did it. And that's why nobody in Israel, essentially nobody, really ever took that possibility seriously. Speaker 2 (21:35) Okay, let's talk about the charge of Netanyahu, quote-unquote, propping up Hamas. The allegation, well, true, but its interpretation, I think, is subject to debate. that Netanyahu allowed bags of cash to flow from Qatar to Hamas in 2017, 18, and after it was bags of cash, it was money in other ways, and that this effectively empowered Hamas, and that the strategy, the intention behind this was to divide the Palestinians, keep Hamas in power in Gaza so that... Gaza and the West Bank are never ruled by the same faction of Palestinian politics. If they're fighting each other, and they are bitter rivals, obviously the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, if they're fighting each other, then they can never join forces and fight us at the same time, is the idea. And then the further claim that that is, in some measure, responsible for the success of October 7th. The one thing I'll say before you answer is... What's never included in this charge is that Gaza was experiencing, as reported in Reuters, a genuine economic crisis where you had tens of thousands of civil service employees like cops and teachers that were saying, I can't feed my family, right? And this was because Abbas of the Palestinian Authority had basically abruptly stopped paying their salaries, right? That was the situation Netanyahu was responding to. And so part of my gripe with this is, okay, all the people talking about Netanyahu propping up Hamas, like, you know, the Dave Smiths of the world. Like, if you were in charge at that moment and you had Palestinians in Gaza, you know, a cop with nine kids saying, my salary just randomly got cut in half and I can't feed my kids, what would you have done? would you have said, no, don't help them at all, don't let any money flow into Gaza? Because that implicitly is what you're saying if you're critiquing Netanyahu for the bags of cash thing, right? So feel free to disagree with any of that if I've got anything wrong, but how do you make sense of the Netanyahu propped up Hamas critique? Speaker 1 (23:59) So the basic facts here are that it wasn't that Israel was funding Hamas. Speaker 2 (24:06) Israel Speaker 1 (24:06) was allowing. Qatari money, build as aid money to go into Gaza and pay for these government employees. Now, would they have been shocked to learn that that money was being diverted to Hamas military purposes? They would not have been shocked. Speaker 2 (24:23) They Speaker 1 (24:24) knew that very well. I think what the criticisms of it miss... is the entire Israeli political context, which is the only people who opposed that policy in Israel were the right-wingers. Speaker 2 (24:45)