3 Years of the October 7th Attack: "Never Take the Enemy Lightly" — What Did Israel Go Wrong? Expert weighs

Israel on Wednesday marked three years since the October 7 Hamas-led attack that killed about 1,200 people and took 251 others hostage.

The attack, the deadliest attack in Israel’s history, revealed major gaps in the country’s intelligence assessment and security preparedness. It also sparked a war in Gaza that has since killed more than 74,200 people, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

People also gathered at the site of the Nova music festival in southern Israel, where hundreds were killed during a Hamas attack.

The reports pointed to previous intelligence warnings from other countries and other signals that Israel had not acted adequately, as well as a broader failure to assess Hamas’ intentions and capabilities.

Prof. (Dr.) Khinvraj Jangid, professor and director of the Jindal Center for Israel Studies, said the failure went beyond a single intelligence failure.

Jangid, who specializes in Israeli society and politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said one failure was at the intelligence level, where Israel did not respond adequately to signs of Hamas activity and preparations.

“There are two levels of failure. There was one failure at the intelligence level, in the way that they did not pay serious attention to the movement of Hamas forces,” Jangid told Livemint.

But he argued that the intelligence failure was closely related to a deeper problem: Israel’s assessment of the threat posed by Hamas.

“I think it came from this over-reliance on the assumption that Hamas couldn’t really hurt Israel any more than firing rockets,” he said.

“Five, seven years before October 2023, whenever Hamas attacked Israel, they attacked by launching some rockets or balloons, they fired the balloons.”

“I think this is the maximum that the Israelis expected.”

Jangid said it created “a bit of lethargy and overconfidence about what nature of threat Hamas might actually be capable of.”

Jangid said the second setback was political, arguing that Israel’s intense domestic crisis in 2023 diverted attention from the external security threat.

“The second thing is a bigger failure of political attention,” he said. “Israel was in a civil war situation in 2023.”

Israel was then engulfed in mass protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial reform, with strikes and widespread unrest.

“Because of Netanyahu’s judicial reforms, the positions where he wanted to change the appointment of judges, the whole country was on fire,” Jangid said.

Read also | Israel shares new footage of October 7 Hamas attack as Tel Aviv mourns

“There was a national strike and the airport was closed.

Jangid recalled that the Israeli defense minister at the time warned the government that the internal political crisis could have security implications.

“We’re so far into civil war that our enemies will benefit from us that we really need to get out of this kind of domestic instability,” he said, recalling the warning.

“I would say the failure is not just intelligence. The failure is also because Israel was deeply caught in a civil war situation domestically.”

Jangid said the scale and nature of the Oct. 7 attack came as a deep shock to Israel.

“In a way, Israel survived, very brutally, a massive terrorist attack of the kind that after the establishment of the State of Israel, no civilians really witnessed such carnage,” he said.

“What happened on October 7, actually the following three days, was a very, very terrible massacre on a large scale.

“Think about it, over 21 communities have been attacked.

He described the attack as an unprecedented security shock for a country that has long placed intelligence, surveillance and military preparedness at the center of its national security strategy.

“This kind of thing was extremely brutal for the state of Israel,” Jangid said.

“Jews have seen such atrocities, but that was during the Holocaust.

The October 7 attack also transformed the conflict from a confrontation between Hamas and Israel into a wider regional war, with Iran-backed groups opening additional fronts against Israel.

“After October 7, and I remember that, since October 8, Hezbollah from Lebanon started attacking Israel in the north,” Jangid said.

He said the attacks forced Israel to evacuate large numbers of residents from communities near the Lebanese border.

“More than 100,000 people from the north were evacuated and remained evacuated for two years, all of 2024 and all of 2025,” he said.

Jangid argued that Iran’s role is central to the broader regional confrontation.

“I think Iran has been participating in this war since October 8 by enabling and encouraging Hezbollah to attack Israel from the north,” he said.

The Northern Front added another layer to Israel’s post-October 7 security calculations, forcing it to face not only Hamas in Gaza, but also Hezbollah in Lebanon and a wider network of Iranian-backed armed groups in the region. The Houthis in Yemen have also launched missile and drone attacks on Israel.

Why Israel Finally Targeted Iran

According to Jangid, Israel increasingly came to the conclusion that confronting Iran’s regional network required addressing what it believed to be the network’s source.

“That’s why Israel, when it could really get its head out of the waters in southern Israel and northern Israel, realized that in order to deter these proxies, it would have to attack the source of the proxies, which is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Tehran,” he said.

“Iran is not Ukraine and Israel is not Russia. I think Iran has participated very actively in this war.”

“The war against Iran was in a way inevitable because Israel really wanted to solve the problem for its national security once and for all.”

“It doesn’t matter that it failed. But the rationale, the logic of the war is absolutely in self-defense as I understand it.”

What does October 7 mean for India?

For India, Jangid identified two broad lessons from the Israeli experience.

The first, he said, is not to underestimate the opponent.

“Never take an enemy lightly,” he said. “Too much confidence and too much confidence can really bite.”

Jangid argued that adversaries are closely monitoring the country’s domestic situation and may seek to exploit periods of political or institutional weakness.

“Hamas attacked Israel in October of 2023 because Israel was completely consumed, consumed by the domestic situation in the civil war,” he said.

“If a country is internally unstable, if a country is going through a deep crisis internally, then that’s the weakest a country can come to.”

“I think one of the lessons is that our enemies take note of how we’re doing at home.

“Are we cohesive? Are we nationally resilient? Are we united?”

“Are we moving forward politically? Or are we attacking each other and fighting over fundamental issues instead of resolving our differences peacefully?”

October 7 also showed the limits of technological superiority and intelligence capabilities, Jangid said.

“Having the best of Mossad, having the best of nuclear weapons, and having the best of regional and American alliances will not save Israel from this kind of upheaval.”

“It’s ironic, isn’t it? It’s a country known for its intelligence.”

For Jangid, the main lesson is that no intelligence system can eliminate uncertainty or guarantee that an adversary will behave according to established assumptions.

“All of this also tells us that the concept of security is extremely slippery and confusing,” he said.

“All of these things were kind of useless the day Hamas really caught Israel by surprise.”