Date of Award

4-20-2026

Document Type

Honors

Degree Name

General Beadle Honors Program

First Advisor

Dr. William Bendix

Abstract

This project conducts an autopsy of Israel’s failure to anticipate Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7, 2023. Existing scholarship identifies multiple contributing factors for this intelligence failure, including flawed strategic assumptions (conceptzia), political dysfunction, organizational sexism, and overreliance on surveillance technology. While all these factors may have contributed to the failure, most studies either examine the causal impact of a single factor in isolation or treat multiple factors together as equally impactful. As a result, the literature has yet to identify the primary driver of the October 7 failure. To address this gap, this study adopts a postmortem approach, borrowed from forensic pathology, to evaluate how different causal factors contributed to the intelligence breakdown. This approach requires a two-step analysis. First, the paper presents a chronology of relevant security and political developments spanning from 2016 to the first few hours of the October 7 attack. It then uses counterfactual analysis and backward causal reasoning to identify the proximate, intermediate, immediate, and contributory causes behind the intelligence failure. Not only does this study determine why Israeli defenses were taken by surprise, but it also shows how analytical methods from forensic medicine can be used effectively in nonmedical investigations.

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