> This "mistake" provide his superiors with a pretext for his departure, all while sidestepping the events of October 7.
I am not convinced that the Mossad, a competent intelligence agency from what I have read, did not actually know what was going to happen. The October 7th attack gave a perfect political justification for wiping out as much of Gaza as possible.
Read the article from Maariv that is linked in the parent article.
Quite eye-opening. The plans were known for two years, but the hubris blinded them.
Another recent, very painful article is this one - https://www.haaretz.co.il/magazine/2024-04-04/ty-article-mag...
Exhibit A: Yom Kippur war. They had convinced themselves that Egypt would wait on armament deliveries, so their obvious preparations for war, troop movements, and massive exercises next to the border were not a problem. Syria's obvious troop movements and cancelling of leaves weren't a problem either because obviously Syria wouldn't attack without Egypt, and Egypt would obviously wait for more Soviet shipments of armaments. Spoiler: they both attacked, and although defeated later on, demonstrated that Israel wasn't as invincible as everyone had thought, and it resulted in Sinai being returned to Egypt and normalisation of relations between Egypt and Israel (thus long-term a victory for Egypt, even if they had their asses handed to them, militarily).
Exhibit B: Lillehammer affair, where Mossad mistook a random Moroccan waiter for a high level Palestinian leader, and killed him.
Exhibit C: Assassination attempt against high level Hamas leader, Khaled Mashal which was a failure and seriously jeopardised the relations with Jordan.
For the October 7 attacks, we simply don't know if it was a political decision to let the attacks happen, or if hubris convinced Israel/IDF/Mossad that the intelligence can't be true.
Many people in the Israeli government have been quite explicit about Hamas’s actions being useful to them as a pretext for doing so, too.
So, while I am not arguing that is is the case, it is not at all implausible (especially if the underjudged the scale or likely impact of the attack) that they might allow an unusual attack that was likely to be pretextually useful to occur to provide an excuse to bring the hammer down, even before considering the specific, personal pressures on Netanyahu and how he might view an excuse for a justified war as a means to deflect them.
I am not convinced that the Mossad, a competent intelligence agency from what I have read, did not actually know what was going to happen. The October 7th attack gave a perfect political justification for wiping out as much of Gaza as possible.