Israel has to think long and hard how it got completely blindsided by Hamas' surprise attacks, says former US National Security Council official

• It's "shocking" that Israel seemed to miss signs of Hamas' attacks, Ret. Lt. Col Alexander Vindman said.
• Vindman said such an attack would have needed extensive preparations in Gaza.
• "All of that was missed," he told MSNBC on Sunday.

Israeli intelligence appears to have missed the signs of the "enormous amount of preparation" required for Hamas' string of attacks at the Gaza Strip border, Ret. Lt Col. Alexander Vindman said.

Speaking on MSBNC's "American Voices with Alicia Menendez" on Sunday, Vindman said Israel would have to seriously reflect and reassess its intelligence operations if that were the case.

Hamas launched a series of surprise incursions and rocket attacks along the Gaza border on Saturday, killing what Israeli authorities estimated so far to be 700 people and wounding another 1,500.

Plans for such a widespread attack would have required financial transactions, troop movements, and increased communications — indicators of an attack that Israel could have picked up on, Vindman said.

"The fact that they missed this is kind of shocking," said Vindman, who served as Director for European Affairs in the US National Security Council from July 2018 to February 2020.

"Yes, the Gaza is kind of referred to as kind of an open-air prison, it's very isolated, very insular, and it's difficult for, really frankly, Israel or any country to get an insight on what's going on," Vindman admitted.

"But something this complex required an enormous amount of preparation," Vindman said. "Almost certainly it required external resources, those resources are going to come from allies, including places like Iran. That was missed."

And Hamas would have displayed "fine-tuning indicators" in the days and hours before the attack, moving troops and increasing communications ahead of the assault, Vindman said.

"All of that was missed," he said.

Israel would have to conduct a "major diagnosis" of its intelligence capabilities, Vindman added.

The retired lieutenant colonel, who served in the US Army, suggested that Israel might have been "deeply distracted" by recent internal politics and protecting settler programs in the West Bank.

If Hamas' operations in Gaza were indeed overlooked, it could "point to a national failure by the political leadership" under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Vindman said.

"That is something that Netanyahu is going to have to contend with, answer for, and may not be able to survive if that proves out to be true," he added.

Mossad and Shin Bet, Israel's foreign and domestic intelligence services, are widely considered some of the world's most elite intelligence agencies.

Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel, told Bloomberg that he found it "shocking" that neither Israel nor the US detected the incoming attacks beforehand.

"Failure to prepare. Failure to have troops along the border, failure of the fence along the border that they paid millions of shekels for," he told the outlet.

When asked by Bloomberg about potential gaps in Israeli intelligence, Israeli Defense Forces spokesman Richard Hecht said: "I know there are a lot of questions about the intelligence. Please stop asking. Right now we're fighting. I'm sure there will be a lot of discussions about the intelligence down the road."

The IDF did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours.