While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East
By Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2025), 336 pp.

Reviewed by: Robert P. Barnidge, Jr., PhD, Chaminade College Preparatory School

While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East (While Israel Slept) by Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot is aptly titled, describing Israel's considerable negligence and intelligence failure in the lead up to October 7, 2023. That day, of course, saw Hamas terrorists infiltrate Israel from the Gaza Strip and kill over 1,200 innocent people, injure more than 10,000, and take 251 hostages. But While Israel Slept also shows why Israel slept, and here it tells of a fetish for calm and pinprick operations, a tactical rather than strategic vision, and weakness and indecision on the part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (and others) rather than a determination to achieve victory and defeat Hamas.

Hamas overran Israel’s Nahal Oz border base early on the morning of October 7. Under cover of missile fire that reached as far north as Tel Aviv, thousands of Hamas terrorists, including those from the elite Nukhba unit, penetrated Israel in dozens of locations. They did so not, as the Israeli establishment would have imagined, through Hamas’ tunnel system; rather, Hamas raided Israel out in the open, through simultaneous and continuous blasts and infiltrations along the Israel-Gaza border. Towns and villages, kibbutzim, the Nova Music Festival, and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) positions were ravaged and attacked in what many have referred to as a modern-day pogrom.

The authors draw analogies to the surprise attacks of Yom Kippur 1973, Pearl Harbor, and September 11, 2001, though they view September 11 as less apropos than Pearl Harbor (see 6-14). Katz and Bohbot argue that military intelligence on the eve of October 7 did not as such indicate an imminent attack of a nature, in scale and effects, to what actually did unfold.

Still, they identify three key failures: first, a serious misreading of Hamas’ commitment to violent, sustained confrontation with Israel; second, an underestimation of the grave and dramatic nature of what was to occur; and third, a tactical blindness at the border (see 56-57). Israel failed to piece together and effectively synthesize the disparate evidence that did exist in the months and even years leading up to October 7. This included Avigdor Lieberman’s 2016 Assessment of the Situation in the Gaza Strip -- The Position of the Minister of Defense, a report from 2022 indicating the seriousness of Hamas’ intent titled Jericho Walls, and urgent emails from a Unit 8200 analyst beginning in July 2023. 

As While Israel Slept puts it, “[e]verything and everyone were just wrong” (57), with the possible exception of Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar (see 61-64).

Ever since it withdrew from Gaza in 2005 until October 7, Israel regarded Hamas as a menace, albeit one that could be leveraged as a useful foil against the Palestinian Authority (see 268-72). It was thought that Hamas could be sustainably managed through such measures as a concessionary guest worker program for Gazans that proved an intelligence bonanza for Hamas (see 143-44), limited retaliatory strikes (see 201-36), half-hearted attempts at “financial warfare” (246), and Qatari money (see 258-72).

Only occasionally did these years see full-fledged confrontation, as in Operation Cast Lead (2008-09). This meant that when Hamas did launch its attack on October 7, Israel had “almost no human agents in Gaza” (114), and the IDF had to vie with tunnels that far exceeded those of the Viet Cong and North Koreans in their sophistication and lethality, with administrative shafts, logistics shafts, attack tunnels, and classic shafts (see 142-48). 

Hamas was ready for the ground game, both above and below the surface, and its sympathizers around the world were poised for a propaganda campaign on the streets that demonized the Jewish state and spread falsehoods about the IDF and Israel’s agonizing war of self-defense.

A nervous calm has emerged in the region since the adoption of the Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict of September 29, 2025, and the "welcoming" of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 less than two months later. Although published shortly before these developments, the recommendations from While Israel Slept are just as relevant today: reform intelligence, bolster the American-Israeli alliance, improve public diplomacy efforts, prepare an exit strategy, and strengthen national resilience (see 273-310). It is up to Israel’s public to digest these (and other) recommendations. While Israel Slept promises to contribute to this debate in a dynamic and ever-changing threat environment.