“It was a massacre”: Ex-agent explains why Israeli secret services were surprised AfD leader Weidel: “We are no longer an Eastern phenomenon”

Shira Kaplan grew up in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, and, like most secular women in Israel, did military service. She worked for the Israeli secret service “Unit 8200”. This specializes in monitoring communication channels and is comparable to the American NSA. Kaplan has lived in Zurich for 13 years. The 40-year-old runs a cybersecurity company through which she sells Israeli technology in Switzerland and invests in start-ups.

How do you follow the war in your home country?
ShiraKaplan: I get direct insight through groups on the social media platform Telegram. A flood of videos shows minute by minute what is happening on site. Combined with many WhatsApp groups and online media, you can now follow a war live.

Are your family members and friends safe?
Yes. My niece, she is 21, is an intelligence officer near Gaza. She is safe, but works around the clock. We Israelis are very connected to each other. We all have friends who have been murdered, killed during army operations or kidnapped to Gaza

How do you feel?
Like a nightmare. We cannot understand how this attack was possible. She completely surprised us. We have never had a day with so many deaths in the history of the Israeli state. It was a massacre. People are angry because the army took six hours to mobilize. You feel neglected and betrayed. Everyone is wondering: how could this happen?

Israel runs some of the best intelligence services in the world. Why didn’t they see the attack coming?
Israel was busy with internal fighting. The enemy saw this and took advantage of it. Hamas itself said that they felt strengthened because Israelis had been demonstrating in the streets for more than forty weeks. In this situation, many Israeli reservists simply quit their military service because they wanted to put pressure on the government. Our country was divided. So we became weak…

This way you explain what went wrong strategically. But what went wrong tactically?
There is only one explanation: the Palestinians must have programmed an encrypted communications system that we completely missed during the surveillance. There are indications that Russia has supported the Palestinians. Iran and Saudi Arabia have probably also contributed to this technological development. The campaign had been planned for months, probably more than a year

Is it possible that the secret services have focused too much on technological surveillance and neglected work with human sources?
No. Secret services obtain their information in different ways. The most important three are as follows. Firstly, monitoring communication channels (Signals Intelligence). Secondly, working with human sources (Human Intelligence). Third, the evaluation of publicly available information (open source intelligence). The Israeli secret services invest in all areas. We have hundreds of officers on the ground, including in Palestine

How come they didn’t see or hear anything?
That’s the billion-dollar question right now. Books are written about it and films are made about it. At this point it’s too early to answer. There are currently people injured in hospitals or being held hostage in the Gaza Strip

The event has been compared to the terrorist attack on 9/11. Right?
The attack is compared to two events. The surprise is similar to the Yom Kippur War, which also broke out on a holiday. The humiliation is comparable to the attack on the Twin Towers in New York. The Israeli state has never experienced anything like this since its founding 75 years ago

When you were young, you were used to bombs and terrorist alarms.
As a child, I lived in a bunker for a month because Saddam Hussein fired missiles at us from Baghdad. We wore gas masks. I grew up as a teenager in the 1990s when buses exploded in Tel Aviv. Certainly: we know what war is. But the current carnage has a completely different dimension

What has changed?
We Israelis have learned in recent decades that we are not alone in the world and that we must adapt. We became a bit like Europeans, we became polite and compromised. But now the laws of the Middle East apply again: the power of the stronger. We can no longer accept that our border areas must expect constant attacks. 3,000 rocket attacks a day are unbearable

What is going to happen now?
Israel’s response will be brutal. Children and civilians will die. That is the problem in the Gaza Strip: the terrorists are hiding in schools and civilian homes. It will be painful to watch thousands of tons of explosives fall on them

Do you feel safe in Switzerland?
Currently we have to expect attacks all over the world. In Egypt, in Alexandria, a bus carrying Israelis was attacked the day after the attack. We don’t know what will happen now. Switzerland is safe. But Israelis need to be cautious everywhere right now. (bzbasel.ch)