How did Israeli intelligence fail to stop major attack by Hamas?

As Palestinian group Hamas launched an attack on Israel on Saturday, dozens of armed Palestinian gunmen managed to breach the heavily fortified border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, while thousands of rockets were fired from Gaza into Israeli territory.

Now the question arises: how, with all its vast resources, the Israeli intelligence did not see this attack coming?

With the combined efforts of Shin Bet (Israel's domestic intelligence agency), Mossad (its external spy agency), and the full capabilities of the Israel Defense Forces at their disposal, it is genuinely astonishing that there was no prior knowledge of this impending assault, reports BBC.

Or if they did know, they failed to act on it.

Israel is widely acknowledged to possess one of the most extensive and well-funded intelligence apparatuses in the Middle East. It maintains a network of informants and agents within Palestinian groups and extends its intelligence presence into Lebanon, Syria, and other regions.

On the ground, along the tense border fence between Gaza and Israel, an array of surveillance tools, including cameras, ground-motion sensors, and regular army patrols, is in place.

The barbed-wire-topped fence was designed as a "smart barrier" precisely to prevent the kind of infiltration witnessed in this recent attack.

However, Hamas fighters managed to breach it by bulldozing their way through, cutting holes in the wire, or even entering Israel via the sea and paragliding.

To execute such a coordinated and complex attack, which involved stockpiling and launching thousands of rockets right under the watch of Israeli authorities, Hamas must have employed exceptional levels of operational security.

Notably, on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war of October 1973, another surprise attack on Israel by its adversaries, the Israeli media is urgently seeking answers from the country's military and political leaders regarding how these security breaches could occur.

Israeli officials told the BBC that a major investigation is already underway, and they anticipate that questions surrounding this incident "will go on for years".

But right now Israel's primary concern is to address and mitigate the infiltration of its southern borders, with efforts underway to remove Hamas fighters who have gained control of several communities on the Israeli side of the border fence.

Israel will need to address the issue of its own citizens being taken captive, either through an armed rescue mission or by negotiation.

It will try to eliminate the launch sites for all those rockets being fired into Israel, an almost impossible task resembling a game of whack-a-mole as they can be launched from almost anywhere with little notice.

And perhaps the biggest worry for Israel is this: how does it prevent others from heeding Hamas's call to arms and prevent the escalation from spreading into the West Bank? There is also the potential risk of drawing in the well-armed fighters of Hezbollah across the northern border with Lebanon, making this a highly volatile situation.