Was the pre-October 7 policy toward Hamas defensible at the time?

For roughly fifteen years, from the 2007 Hamas takeover of Gaza to the morning of 7 October 2023, Israel’s security establishment ran a policy built on one assessment: Hamas was deterred, preferred governing to war, and could be kept quiet with Qatari money and Israeli work permits. Every part of that assessment was wrong, and Israel’s own military and Shin Bet investigations have said so in writing. The question this page keeps honestly open is the one those probes have not yet settled: was the conception a defensible bet given what decision-makers knew at the time, or a failure that the warnings on the table already made inexcusable?

The conception: who believed what, and why

Israelis call it ha-konseptzia, the conception, a deliberate echo of the intelligence doctrine that blinded Israel before the Yom Kippur War in 1973. After Israel withdrew every soldier and settler from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and Hamas seized it from Fatah by force in June 2007, successive governments settled into containment: Hamas rules Gaza, periodic rounds of fighting restore deterrence, and between rounds, quiet is purchased. Quiet, not peace: Hamas itself never offered more than a tactical hudna, and its charter goal never changed.

The conception was not one man’s policy. It spanned Ehud Olmert, every Netanyahu government, and the Bennett-Lapid government of 2021 to 2022, and it was the professional view of Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet, not a political imposition on them. The IDF’s own probes, published in February 2025, found that after Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021, intelligence assessed Hamas as deterred and its Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar as a pragmatist focused on governing, even as, the same probes note, Sinwar had been planning the invasion since about 2017.

The money: amounts, mechanism, who signed

The financial leg of the policy is documented in detail. In August 2018, after months of border violence around the Great March of Return, Israel’s security cabinet under Netanyahu approved a Qatari aid channel into Gaza: the envoy Mohammed al-Emadi carried suitcases of cash through Israel’s Erez crossing, about $15 million a month at first, later rising toward $30 million, nominally for civil-servant salaries, fuel and needy families. Total Qatari money into Hamas-run Gaza since 2007 is estimated above $1.8 billion. Israeli security officials warned throughout that the money was fungible, freeing Hamas’s own funds for rockets and tunnels; the Shin Bet’s March 2025 self-investigation identified the Qatari flow as one reason Hamas could build its October 7 force.

The Bennett-Lapid government ended the suitcases in 2021 and rerouted the money through UN-supervised stipends and a Qatari fuel arrangement, but kept the policy, and added its own leg: Gaza work permits, raised from a few thousand to roughly 18,500 by September 2023, on the theory that paychecks worth ten times Gaza wages gave Hamas a stake in calm. The policy ran to the last month: in early September 2023, Israeli officials met al-Emadi in Jerusalem about keeping the funds flowing as Sinwar pressed to raise a monthly transfer from $3 million to $7 million, weeks before the massacre.

The warnings that existed

This is where “nobody could have known” gets hard to sustain. Israeli intelligence had obtained Hamas’s battle plan, a roughly 40-page document code-named “Jericho Wall,” more than a year before the attack. It described the opening rocket barrage, drones knocking out border cameras and automated guns, and thousands of gunmen crossing to overrun communities and the Gaza Division’s own bases. Senior officers judged it aspirational, beyond Hamas’s capabilities. In July 2023 a veteran analyst in Unit 8200 warned that a Hamas training exercise closely tracked the plan; a superior called the scenario “totally imaginative.” The young female border observers at Nahal Oz, the tatzpitaniyot, reported Hamas drills, mock hostage-takings and probing at the fence for months; many of them were murdered or dragged into Gaza at the posts where their reports had been filed. And on the night of 6 to 7 October, signs of unusual activity triggered consultations among senior officers, who decided against raising the alert.

What October 7 proved

At dawn, about 3,000 terrorists breached the fence and executed Jericho Wall nearly as written: some 1,200 murdered, 251 taken hostage, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Every pillar of the conception failed at once. Hamas was not deterred; the money had fed the war machine; the permits and the quiet had bought planning time, not moderation; and the political leadership enjoying Doha’s hospitality, Ismail Haniyeh among them, celebrated on camera. The IDF’s February 2025 probe called it a “complete failure” and a decades-long misreading of Hamas. The accountability began in uniform: Military Intelligence chief Aharon Haliva resigned in April 2024, Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi left in March 2025 taking explicit responsibility, and Shin Bet director Ronen Bar departed in June 2025 after his agency published its own admission of failure.

The inquiry that has not happened

What Israel still lacks, as of mid-2026, is the civilian reckoning. Bereaved families, the opposition, and most of the security establishment’s alumni demand a state commission of inquiry, the judge-appointed instrument Israel used after 1973. The Netanyahu government has resisted that format, arguing the judiciary would stack it against elected officials, and in July 2026 the Knesset passed the first reading of a bill for a politically appointed commission instead, with the opposition boycotting the vote. No commission of any kind is yet seated. Until one is, with subpoena power over the cabinet record, the who-knew-what-when question, especially above the military echelon, stays formally open.

The honest question versus the propaganda version

The honest debate has two defensible sides. For the defense: the conception was shared across parties and institutions, including a government that contained Netanyahu’s fiercest rivals; the alternative on offer was reoccupying Gaza, which almost nobody advocated; the aid was humanitarian-framed and eventually UN-supervised; and hindsight makes every surprise look foreseeable. For the prosecution: the enemy’s actual plan was in the building, the specific warnings were dismissed with adjectives rather than analysis, and a March 2019 remark attributed to Netanyahu by his own Likud colleagues, that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support transferring the funds to Gaza because it keeps Hamas and the Palestinian Authority divided, suggests the policy served a political strategy, not only quiet. A serious inquiry would weigh exactly that.

What the record does not support is the slogan built on top of this failure: that Israel “funded” or created Hamas and therefore brought October 7 on itself. The money was Qatari, not Israeli; the policy’s aim was calm on a border Israel had fully left in 2005; and a containment policy failing catastrophically does not move one gram of agency from the men who crossed the fence to murder families. Israelis themselves are the harshest critics of the conception, in probes, in the press, and in the streets. That self-scrutiny is the difference between a failed policy and the conspiracy version told about it.

Who attacked first on October 7? · Did Israel create Hamas? · October 7 attacks · Hamas · Israel and Qatar: the double game · The October 7 memorial

Sources

From Asked & answered on the main site.