During his interrogation, a Shin Bet agent from Gaza admits to acting as a double agent and providing false information about Hamas’s intentions, contributing to the failure to prepare for the massacre.
During the fighting in the Gaza Strip, Israel managed to capture a local Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) agent, who admitted during his interrogation that he had been operating as a double agent.
The agent revealed that his role was to lull Israel’s defense establishment into a false sense of security on the eve of Hamas’s deadly terrorist attack on October 7, 2023.
According to a report published on Channel 12 News on Tuesday evening, the agent lied to Shin Bet officials in a conversation held just hours before the attack.
In that conversation, he stated, “There is no preparation for an offense by Hamas,” despite accumulating warnings and suspicious signs in the preceding hours.
The conversation with the agent, who was considered reliable, created the impression within the defense establishment that there was no real threat. His statements, described as a “weakening signal,” led to a reduced state of preparedness for Hamas’s attack, and no significant additional conversations with other agents took place throughout the night.
In retrospect, the defense establishment assesses that this conversation had significant weight in the partial understanding of the scale of the impending threat, just hours before Hamas’s deadly attack.
