Israel on Wednesday marked three years since the Hamas-led October 7 attack, when about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.
The assault, the deadliest attack in Israel’s history, exposed major gaps in the country’s intelligence assessment and security preparedness. It also triggered the war in Gaza, which has since killed more than 74,200 people, according to the .
People also gathered at the site of the Nova music festival in southern Israel, where hundreds were killed during the Hamas attack.
Reports have pointed to prior from other countries and other signals that Israel did not act on adequately, as well as a broader failure to assess Hamas’ intentions and capabilities.
Prof. (Dr.) Khinvraj Jangid, Professor and Director of the Jindal Centre for Israel Studies, said the failure went beyond a single intelligence lapse.
Jangid, who specialises in Israeli society and politics and the Israel-Palestine conflict, said one failure was at the intelligence level, where Israel did not adequately respond to signs of Hamas activity and preparations.
“There are two levels of failures here. There was one failure at the intelligence level, in a way where they did not note of the movement of Hamas forces,” Jangid told Livemint.
But he argued that the intelligence failure was closely linked 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 cannot really hurt Israel more than shooting rockets,” he said.
“For five, seven years before October 2023, whenever attacked Israel, it attacked by launching some rockets or balloons, fire balloons.”
“I think this is the maximum Israelis anticipated.”
Jangid said this created “a bit of lethargy and an overconfidence about what nature of the threat Hamas can really be capable of.”
Jangid said the second failure was political, arguing that Israel’s intense domestic crisis in 2023 distracted attention from the external security threat.
“The second thing is a bigger failure of political attention,” he said. “Israel, in the year 2023, was in a civil-war kind of situation.”
Israel was then engulfed in mass protests over Prime Minister Benjamin judicial overhaul, with strikes and widespread disruption.
“Because of judicial reforms, the positions where he wanted to change the appointment of the judges, the whole country was on fire,” Jangid said.
“There was a national strike, and the airport was shut.”
Jangid recalled that Israel’s then-defence minister had warned the government that the internal political crisis could have security consequences.
“We are so much in a civil war that our enemies will take benefit of us, that we need to really come out of this kind of domestic instability,” he said, recalling the warning.
“I would say the failure is not only of intelligence. The failure is also because Israel was deeply caught in a civil-war kind of situation in the domestic setting.”
Jangid said the scale and nature of the assault represented a profound shock for Israel.
“Israel, in a way, survived, very brutally, a massive terror attack of the kind that, after the state of Israel was established, no civilians really witnessed such a massacre,” he said.
“What happened on October 7th, actually for the next three days, was a very, very terrible massacre at a large level.”
“Think of it, more than 21 communities were attacked.”
He described the assault as an unprecedented security shock for a country that has long placed intelligence, surveillance, and military preparedness at the heart of its national security strategy.
“Such a thing was extremely brutal for the state of Israel,” Jangid said.
“Jews have seen such atrocities, but those were in the time of the Holocaust.”
The attack also transformed the conflict from a Hamas-Israel confrontation into a wider regional war, with Iran-backed groups opening additional fronts against Israel.
“After 7th of October, and I remember this, from 8th of October, 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 of the north were evacuated, and they remained evacuated for the period of two years, all of 2024 and all of 2025,” he said.
Jangid argued that Iran’s role was central to the wider regional confrontation.
“I think Iran participated in this war from the 8th of October, by allowing 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 confront not only Hamas in Gaza but also Hezbollah in Lebanon and the wider network of Iran-backed armed groups in the region. The Houthis in Yemen also launched missile and drone attacks towards Israel.
Why Israel eventually turned its focus towards Iran
According to Jangid, Israel increasingly concluded that confronting Iran’s regional network required addressing what it viewed as the source of that network.
“That’s why Israel, when it could really get its head out of the waters in the south of Israel, and in the north of Israel, it realised that in order to deter these proxies, it would have to attack the source of the proxies, which is the Islamic Revolutionary Guards in Tehran,” he said.
“Iran is not a , and Israel is not a Russia. I think Iran participated in this war very actively.”
“The war upon Iran was, in a way, inevitable, because Israel really wanted to fix the problem for its national security once and for all.”
“It doesn’t matter that it has failed to do so. But the rationale, the logic of the war is absolutely in self-defence, as I understand it.”
For India, Jangid identified two broad lessons from Israel’s experience.
The first, he said, is not to underestimate an adversary.
“Never take the enemy lightly,” he said. “Too much self-assurance and too much overconfidence can really bite back.”
Jangid argued that adversaries closely watch a country’s domestic situation and may seek to exploit periods of political or institutional weakness.
“Hamas attacked Israel in October of the year 2023 because Israel was completely absorbed, consumed in its domestic civil-war kind of situation,” he said.
“If a country is internally unstable, if a country is internally going through a deep crisis, then that’s the weakest a country can come to.”
“I think one lesson is that our enemies take note of how we are doing domestically.”
“Are we coherent? Are we nationally resilient? Are we united?”
“Are we politically moving ahead? Or are we attacking each other and fighting over the fundamental issues, rather than working through our disagreements in a peaceful manner?”
October 7 also demonstrated the limits of technological superiority and intelligence capabilities, Jangid said.
“Having the best of the , having the best of the nuclear weapons, and having the best of the regional and American alliances doesn’t save Israel from this kind of shaking.”
“It’s an irony, right? It’s a country known for its intelligence.”
For Jangid, the central lesson is that no intelligence system can eliminate uncertainty or guarantee that an adversary will behave in accordance with established assumptions.
“All of this tells us also this thing that the notion of security is extremely slippery and confusing,” he said.
“All of these things were, in a way, useless on the day Hamas really caught Israel by surprise.”
