Israeli Intelligence Both Succeeds and Fails
The operation resulted in significant casualties, with 3,600 Hezbollah operatives injured from the pagers alone, according to Bergman.
Israeli intelligence achieved remarkable successes against Hezbollah and Iran but hubris and an overreliance on technology led to the disaster of 7 October, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning Israeli journalist Dr Ronen Bergman.
Speaking to community members at Melbourne’s Beth Weizmann Community Centre at an event sponsored by B’nai B’rith and the Lamm Jewish Library of Australia earlier this year, Bergman detailed a sophisticated operation against Hezbollah involving booby-trapped communication devices.
“Mossad was able to establish, or to get into a cluster of companies, most of them stationed in South Korea and Indonesia,” he said, describing how Israel manufactured and distributed explosive-laden pagers and walkie-talkies to Hezbollah operatives.
The operation resulted in significant casualties, with 3,600 Hezbollah operatives injured from the pagers alone, according to Bergman.
The devices were designed to be activated in a “doomsday scenario” if Hezbollah launched a major offensive against Israel.
Regarding Iranian operations, Bergman revealed that recent Israeli strikes had severely diminished Iran’s missile production capabilities.
“Iran’s capacity of building new surface-to-surface ballistic missiles is reduced almost to nothing now,” he said, noting that critical missile-production equipment had been destroyed.
However, Bergman was forthright about the intelligence failure that led to 7 October, attributing it to three main factors.
At the leadership level, he said Israeli officials completely misread Hamas’s intentions, falling for a deliberate deception strategy where Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar projected an image of seeking economic prosperity and calm.
The second failure involved misinterpreting Hamas’s capabilities.
Despite having Hamas’s “Jericho Wall” attack plans more than a year before 7 October, intelligence officials assessed it as not a current capability, but a desired capability, Bergman explained.
The third factor was what Bergman termed “intelligence supremacy”—an overreliance on high-tech surveillance that led to complacency.
“When you hear what they say in their bedroom, even if you don’t have enough live agents… you don’t really look at tactical interception, you don’t really look at open media,” he said.
Bergman drew parallels with the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when similar intelligence overconfidence led to strategic surprise.
He quoted a former intelligence leader who admitted, “We knew everything. But the truth is, we just didn’t believe they would do it.”
Looking ahead, Bergman outlined Israel’s options regarding Gaza’s future governance, stating there are “only three alternatives for Gaza. It’s either run by Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, or Israel.”
He suggested a new Palestinian regime under Saudi Arabian responsibility, guaranteed by international powers, could offer a viable path forward.
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