At the entrance to the military staging areas around the borders of Gaza, there is a plain yellow sign greeting Israeli soldiers just returned from the battlefield, “Collection Point — Amshat”, a Hebrew acronym which stands for “intelligence-gathering, technical spoils of war”.
It is one end of a pipeline leading to a massive information collating operation.
Soldiers are expected to hand in whatever they have found in Gaza that could belong to Hamas and other Islamist groups. Items dropped off include many weapons, but most importantly mobile phones, documents and computers suspected of belonging to Hamas members.
“We found in the homes and headquarters of Hamas commanders training manuals and books that Hamas’s intelligence branch printed, explaining IDF [Israel Defence Forces] tactics and detailing our units and commanders,” said Captain Omri, an intelligence officer of one of the infantry battalions which operated in Shujaiyya, one of the main neighbourhoods in the east of Gaza City.
“It’s amusing to read these and see what they know about us. And then there’s the documents which we try and get out to the collection points as soon as possible.”
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A reserve officer who was called up when the war began said: “It’s a mountain of documents, literally millions of them through which we have to sift. So much of it is of value but we need to work out which documents are of the highest priority.”
The two highest priority categories are clues to the location of Hamas commanders for assassinations and information about the whereabouts and condition of hostages snatched into Gaza by Hamas on October 7. The failure to anticipate the attack that day, which killed about 1,200 Israelis, was the biggest intelligence disaster in Israel’s history.
But last Saturday Israeli commandos rescued four hostages after intelligence pinpointed their location in two apartments in the crowded Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. The operation demonstrated the extent to which Israel is benefiting from one of the largest intelligence-gathering and surveillance operations ever mounted. It is an operation that the United States and Britain are assisting.
However, the IDF also faced immediate international outrage over the death and destruction that accompanied the daytime mission. Health officials in Gaza, part of the Hamas administration, said at least 274 people, including dozens of children, were killed and hundreds more wounded. The IDF has put the death toll at fewer than 100 people.
Josep Borrell, the European Union’s chief diplomat, called it a “massacre” and condemned it “in the strongest terms”. A panel of human rights experts reporting to the United Nations said that by using a humanitarian aid truck in the operation Israel had put aid workers at “even greater risk” and broken international law.
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Israel’s military said today that eight of its soldiers were killed in an explosion in southern Gaza, the deadliest attack on its forces in months.
Overall Israel’s offensive has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians and driven almost two million from their homes, according to Gaza health officials.
The physical documents taken from Gaza have furnished intelligence analysts with a wealth of information on Hamas’s military infrastructure and the planning of the October 7 attack. So far it has been less helpful when it came to working out what happened next.
In an attempt to obtain more up-to-date information, Unit 504, the agent-running department of the military intelligence branch, beefed up its operation, calling up hundreds of former case officers and sending them into Gaza with the battalions and brigades. Their main role is to carry out initial battlefield interrogations of captured suspects.
While wearing the same uniforms and carrying weapons, these officers are easily noticeable in Gaza, older than most of the soldiers around them and not carrying combat equipment except for encrypted communication sets. “Our job is to be here on the spot, making sure that any information that can be of immediate use goes up the chain as soon as possible,” one of them said.
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The arrest of thousands of Palestinian suspects in Gaza, and the scenes of men, and in many cases children, forced to strip to their underwear and held for long hours blindfolded with their hands tied, waiting for interrogation, has caused accusations of widespread human-rights abuses by the Israeli military.
Much of the criticism has been focused on Sde Teiman, an army base in Israel, near the Gaza border, where an estimated 4,000 suspects have been held since the start of the war, often for weeks. Testimony from Palestinians who have been released, as well as from Israeli medical staff, has repeated charges of systematic abuse, scant rations and torture. In some cases, Israeli doctors have reported that plastic handcuffs were left on for so long that they caused gangrene and necessitated amputations.
Israeli human-rights groups have petitioned the country’s supreme court about the conditions in Sde Teiman and last week the Israeli government responded that three quarters of the detainees would be transferred to regular prisons and the camp will remain in use only for initial processing of about 200, while the medical facilities will be upgraded.
One of the main difficulties facing the intelligence operation has been Hamas’s use of its immense tunnel network under Gaza to hide hostages and its commanders, concealed underground, where Israeli spy planes and drones cannot detect them. In the first months of the war, Israeli troops were operating under orders not to enter the tunnels, sending in robots and tracker dogs instead, before dropping in explosives to destroy them.
In late December, Israeli forces operating in Khan Yunis began changing tactics, sending commandos into the tunnels, while advancing overground simultaneously and using drones to surveil the shafts in the hope of spotting Hamas fighters flushed out on to the surface. Brigadier General Dan Goldfus, commander of the forces in Khan Yunis called it “360-degree warfare”.
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Intelligence sources say the underground search-and-destroy manoeuvres have had an effect and now many of the hostages are being held in locations above ground such as the apartments from which the four hostages were rescued last Saturday and two others back in February.
“They have less places now to hide and with the tunnels no longer safe, it makes it more difficult for them to keep them alive there,” one Israeli analyst said. But moving the hostages between hidings places and keeping them in residential areas and in some cases with Palestinian families risks their discovery. Any movement above ground means they are exposed to the massive array of surveillance sensors deployed over Gaza.
This include not only Israel’s fleet of Heron surveillance drones and the Hermes 450 and 900, which carry out most of the airstrikes, but also American and British airborne platforms that arrive with their own specialised intelligence-gathering capabilities. In addition to being allies of Israel, the two countries have citizens among the hostages. Five of the hostages who may still be alive have US citizenship. Two weeks ago, Israel announced that Nadav Popplewell, a joint Israeli and British citizen, was presumed to be dead, his body held in Gaza.
While they are tight-lipped regarding the assistance to the Israelis, RAF Shadow R1 aircraft operating, from Akrotiri in Cyprus, have been spotted off Gaza’s shore. The Shadow’s under-fuselage electro-optical sensor turret can provide comprehensive coverage of extensive areas. The greater American armada of manned and unmanned aircraft includes the P-8 Poseidon, designed to carry out maritime surveillance of vast oceans, but here focused more inland. Any indication of suspicious movement, snippets of overheard conversations on mobile phones, and footage obtained from high-powered cameras are fed into joint databases using face and voice recognition technology.
But so far, in eight months of war the results of this operation are at best mixed. As one Israeli general put it after the rescue operation last Saturday: “We proved that we still have the intelligence-gathering and special-operations capabilities to carry out such a mission but the circumstances were also unique. Most of the 120 hostages still in Gaza can only be rescued in a deal.”
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So far only seven hostages have been rescued in operations, while 109 have been returned as a result of diplomacy. Tracking down the Hamas leaders has proved even more difficult. While dozens of mid-level commanders have been found and killed, of the Hamas leadership triumvirate, only Marwan Issa, the chief of staff of the military wing, has been killed. The two more senior leaders, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif are still at large, hiding in tunnels and communicating via written notes and runners to avoid detection.
“We’ve carried out some brilliant operations to rescue hostages and assassinate Hamas leaders,” one intelligence veteran said. “But it’s like finding needles and missing the haystack. Hamas is still there and it still holds hostages.”
The recent success has served only to fuel the controversy in Israel over whether the best way to rescue those still alive is to continue the war in Gaza or start working on a ceasefire agreement that will end it.
