Bannon's War Room - WarRoom Battleground EP 881： While Israel Slept

00:00:00.000 This is the primal scream of a dying regime.

00:00:07.000 Pray for our enemies.

00:00:09.000 Because we're going medieval on these people.

00:00:12.000 I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.

00:00:17.000 The people have had a belly full of it.

00:00:19.000 I know you don't like hearing that.

00:00:20.000 I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that,

00:00:22.000 but you're not going to stop it.

00:00:23.000 It's going to happen.

00:00:24.000 And where do people like that go to share the big lie?

00:00:27.000 Mega Media.

00:00:29.000 I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.

00:00:34.000 Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?

00:00:38.000 If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.

00:00:44.000 War Room.

00:00:45.000 Here's your host, Stephen K. Banff.

00:00:53.000 It is Thursday, 30 October in the year of our Lord 2025.

00:00:57.000 Thanks for sticking around for the late afternoon, early evening edition of the War Room.

00:01:02.000 We're going to do a special right now for one hour on, quite frankly, an extraordinary book,

00:01:08.000 While Israel Slept. 0.76

00:01:10.000 I cannot give a book a higher recommendation to go out and buy immediately and then carve some time out.

00:01:21.000 Because once you start this book, you will not want to put it down.

00:01:26.000 You'll want to read it to the end.

00:01:28.000 Then you want to think about it and then you're going to go back with your pen and underline.

00:01:33.000 And I hope this starts discussion groups around the country for a couple of reasons.

00:01:38.000 Number one, it is a shocking revelation of what actually happened in the lead up to 7 October.

00:01:47.000 Of the audience remembers, because we do the Saturday show, Jack Pasovic.

00:01:50.000 I actually got Jack away from the family.

00:01:53.000 We covered it live on that Saturday.

00:01:56.000 And it's still seared in the memories of people, particularly the brutality.

00:02:00.000 But what shocked us the most was how Hamas had such an organized... 0.78

00:02:05.000 Because I said, this is not a terrorist attack.

00:02:07.000 This is not even a paramilitary attack.

00:02:09.000 This is a military attack.

00:02:10.000 Air, sea, land, over 40 miles.

00:02:13.000 That's what stunned us that day.

00:02:15.000 Now you can finally get your arms around it.

00:02:18.000 Yaakov Katz and Amir Bobat have really taken the first cut of history here in writing this.

00:02:24.000 While Israel slept, how Hamas surprised the most powerful military in the Middle East. 0.79

00:02:30.000 The only quibble I have with you, Brother Katz, is that I would add in the most, you know,

00:02:36.000 one of the greatest intelligence services or combined services in the history of the Judeo-Christian West.

00:02:44.000 So I want to start...

00:02:46.000 First off, and the reason this book is important, it's not just what happened on 7 October.

00:02:51.000 This is a warning to the United States of America.

00:02:54.000 Because when I read the book and started getting my arms around the critical path of what happened,

00:03:00.000 it took me back to 9-11.

00:03:03.000 It took me back to the FBI and the CIA not cooperating.

00:03:06.000 It takes you back to you think you got all this technology,

00:03:09.000 you think you have all these smart people,

00:03:11.000 and then you see just basic fundamental breakdowns of miscommunication, noncommunication, ego, all of it.

00:03:17.000 And it's what exposed Israel. 0.91

00:03:19.000 And also some strategic choices that just come out to you as like,

00:03:24.000 how could they possibly be thinking that?

00:03:26.000 Yaakov, first off, go through your bona fides.

00:03:30.000 Why were you two guys the first guy to really take a cut at this?

00:03:35.000 And obviously, everybody or virtually everybody would talk to you.

00:03:39.000 So what is your background and why were people willing to come forward with some brutally shocking evidence?

00:03:47.000 Well, Steve, it's great to be with you and thank you for having me on the show.

00:03:51.000 Both Amir and I are long-time journalists in Israel.

00:03:56.000 I served for about 10 years as the military correspondent for the Jerusalem Post

00:04:00.000 and went on to become the editor-in-chief of the newspaper for just over seven years.

00:04:04.000 I've written by now, this is my fourth book on military affairs inside Israel.

00:04:10.000 I've written about the bombing of Syria's nuclear reactor in 2007 by Israel, of Israel's military innovation. 0.67

00:04:17.000 And Amir too, for the last 25 years, pretty much has been a military reporter for a Hebrew language website,

00:04:23.000 one of the Hebrew language leading websites in the country.

00:04:27.000 So we have been covering the IDF and Israel's intelligence agencies for decades.

00:04:32.000 And like everyone, I think, we maybe in a more extreme way were shocked and surprised by what happened on October 7th

00:04:40.000 because we were in those briefings with the heads of the military, the heads of the intelligence agencies,

00:04:45.000 obviously the political echelon, talking about the different variety of threats that Israel faces.

00:04:50.000 And you kind of talked about this in your intro.

00:04:53.000 No one can accuse Israel of being not vigilant or aware of the threats and challenges that it faces.

00:05:00.000 Since inception as a state in 1948, we have been under attack from enemies all along our borders,

00:05:07.000 whether it was Syria or Egypt or Iran or Iraq or, of course, Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

00:05:14.000 But something happened here that led the country's political military establishment to believe that this war could be avoided,

00:05:22.000 believed that they could live alongside a genocidal, jihadist, anti-Judeo-Christian, Western value organization, i.e. Hamas,

00:05:31.000 and that everything will be okay. And it wasn't.

00:05:34.000 And that is something that we wanted to try to understand how we got to this point,

00:05:39.000 very much because this will happen again.

00:05:42.000 It will happen to Israel. It will happen to the United States. 0.94

00:05:45.000 You will have strategic surprises always.

00:05:48.000 And we look at what's happening in the world today.

00:05:50.000 Something is broken.

00:05:52.000 And we need to understand how to avoid this from happening.

00:05:55.000 I want to go back and if you can use some of the Hebrew words because I can't pronounce them,

00:06:00.000 but the word concept jumps off the page of you as you go through this.

00:06:06.000 The political, military, and intelligence elite had a different – they had a concept,

00:06:12.000 and that concept was really focused on Tehran, Iran as the threat, and their proxies like Hezbollah.

00:06:19.000 And it seemed like Hamas, although in Gaza, in the Muslim Brotherhood, in a mortal threat,

00:06:26.000 the strategic concept was focused on that.

00:06:29.000 And we just – we've put this to bed.

00:06:32.000 We've got control of this, but we've got to focus on that.

00:06:35.000 Is that – what's the Hebrew term you use?

00:06:37.000 So we call it the concepsia, which is basically just to play off the word concept.

00:06:41.000 I think, you know, maybe a better way to look at it is the prism or the paradigm through which Israel viewed Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

00:06:49.000 You know, I think also – I see the comparison that's often made to 9-11, but I just want to say something here.

00:06:55.000 I think it's more in a case, an example of Pearl Harbor.

00:06:59.000 9-11 definitely when we look at the flow of intelligence that you mentioned, the problems with not enough information moving from one intelligence agency to the other.

00:07:08.000 But Pearl Harbor more in the sense that back then, in the 40s, the late 30s, the United States knew that there was a war raging in Europe.

00:07:16.000 They knew that the Japanese were preparing for something and were already fighting in the Pacific.

00:07:20.000 But they thought that it couldn't reach their shores until it exploded on their shores in Pearl Harbor.

00:07:27.000 And Israel, for that sense, also thought, yeah, we knew of Hamas.

00:07:31.000 There were wars and operations fought every couple of years ever since Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza, handed it over to them, gave them an opportunity to build something great.

00:07:41.000 But unfortunately, they decided to destroy it and turn it into an Afghanistan-like territory. 0.99

00:07:47.000 But we thought that it would never happen.

00:07:50.000 We lacked the imagination, Steve, and I think that's the big part of the story.

00:07:53.000 But this concept, this concept was very much based on what you mentioned, was the idea that when Israel looked at the threat matrix in the region, what it saw was the great Iran, the greatest evil in the region. 0.77

00:08:09.000 By the way, a place where when they marched down the streets of Tehran chanting death to Israel and burn Israeli flags in the same breath, they're chanting death to America and burning American flags.

00:08:21.000 I think Americans are well aware of Iran's involvement, not just the hostage taking back in the Islamic Revolution and the takeover of 1979 and that hostage crisis that the United States had to deal with back in the time.

00:08:34.000 And thankfully, those hostages were released back under President Reagan, but also the assassination plots that we have seen repeatedly over the years by Iranian elements against U.S. officials, some of them from the first Trump administration. 0.55

00:08:49.000 So the Iranians have long been trying to undermine the West to weaken Israel, to weaken America. 0.97

00:08:55.000 And they were working together with Hamas and with Hezbollah, of course, to build up this capability that has surprised Israel in a dramatic way on October 7th. 0.62

00:09:06.000 I want to go back through the lead up to that and about – because what shocked me, and I think I keep up with the Jerusalem Post and the Herats and the Times of Israel and other blogs, military blogs, but I didn't quite understand that there were warnings of this and there were people in that process that warned about it.

00:09:28.540 But go back – these young women who were threatened – and I love the way that – because they're so – you know, they've got a keen eye, right, as women often do.

00:09:38.900 They have a keen eye.

00:09:39.600 So these young, I guess, enlisted and junior officers are put in as actually the front early search radar for what's going on in Gaza.

00:09:49.720 They had warned people leading up to it.

00:09:51.840 And my point is that this wasn't totally like a caught by surprise.

00:09:54.780 As you guys go through the step-by-step of the weeks leading up to it and then the, like, 24 hours, and you realize there were people that at least had an idea that something was amiss.

00:10:06.140 Talk about these young women that were threatened by court-martial for what they were identifying. 0.88

00:10:10.620 So these women, we call them in Hebrew tatspitaniot, which is the Hebrew word for basically surveillance soldiers or spotters, observers. 1.00

00:10:20.560 And their job was to sit in these frontline positions along the border with Gaza, their eyes glued to screens.

00:10:26.180 Each one has an area that they are responsible for to look at that peers over in Gaza.

00:10:31.820 And just to give people a sense, Steve, Israel did have a very sophisticated border barrier, multilayered fence, phased array radars, electronic fence.

00:10:41.620 They had turrets with remote control guns on them if people started to venture too close to the border.

00:10:48.180 There were cameras, of course, that lined the border and other sensors.

00:10:52.660 And these women were in this role in the IDF and the Israel Defense Forces was to watch.

00:10:57.900 The joke was, and I had visited their bases numbers of times, the joke was that if they saw a bee flying along the border, they would see it and they would identify it.

00:11:06.320 And they were supposed to look, did a bush that was in this place on Monday, on Tuesday, suddenly move here?

00:11:12.960 And what does that mean?

00:11:14.120 Is there now a rocket launcher there?

00:11:15.860 Is there a tunnel shaft there?

00:11:17.460 What's happening?

00:11:18.660 And they had a keen awareness and the ability to see things.

00:11:22.340 And, you know, you're right that in the IDF, they specifically chose women.

00:11:27.000 Jokingly, I'll say, you know, men, people like to say have a difficulty multitasking and women can do that better.

00:11:33.220 But I think that women were able to definitely pick up a nuance that was unique. 0.99

00:11:39.500 And unfortunately, they had been warning for weeks, if not months, that something strange was happening on the other side of the border.

00:11:47.480 There was more training.

00:11:48.780 There were more senior Hamas commanders coming to the border.

00:11:52.280 They were doing things that they had not been doing in the past.

00:11:54.680 And they warned.

00:11:55.320 They brought it up to their top commanders.

00:11:57.080 And their commanders said, you don't understand.

00:12:00.040 Hamas does not want war.

00:12:01.360 That's what our intelligence is telling us.

00:12:02.900 You stay in your tactical seat because we, on the strategic level, we really see the full picture.

00:12:09.460 And the tragedy, Steve, is that on October 7, when Hamas crossed in and invaded and went straight away for those frontline positions and stormed them,

00:12:18.780 15 soldiers in that base were murdered.

00:12:22.420 Six of those women were taken hostage.

00:12:24.800 One of them was miraculously rescued by the Israeli forces about five, six weeks into the war.

00:12:30.820 But five of them spent almost 500 days in Hamas captivity.

00:12:34.520 And that profound tragedy is striking.

00:12:39.440 But I'll say one other thing, because this is, I think, important for us to remember.

00:12:43.800 This was a sophisticated border barrier.

00:12:46.480 I had been a few years ago to Korea, and I went up to the DMZ.

00:12:51.320 And you thought you saw something that was also quite impressive.

00:12:55.400 And the Israeli border, the barrier on the border with Gaza, to people who have been there over the years, looked like an impenetrable barrier.

00:13:05.080 And I know that the United States thinks a lot about these issues of walls and borders and faces similar challenges, potentially, on its borders.

00:13:14.820 And that's not enough.

00:13:15.940 A big wall does not prevent your enemies from potentially penetrating it.

00:13:21.540 It's something.

00:13:22.480 It's an obstacle.

00:13:24.160 But if we really want to deal with these challenges and threats that we face, we have to go deeper.

00:13:29.600 We have to go to the core of where they come from.

00:13:33.080 So you had these spotters, and they kept kind of warning, hey, something's going on here.

00:13:41.000 We don't know what it is, but there's activity, more activity, maybe some of these commanders.

00:13:45.940 They were essentially dismissed, by and large.

00:13:48.920 And the tragedies, five of them were eventually taken captive.

00:13:52.460 It is part of the very moving part of this story.

00:13:56.040 But to go back to the day, you've got October 7th, but the day before the 6th, two things happened early in the evening.

00:14:02.760 Number one, Israel is so classified that you can't even use the name of the system.

00:14:09.120 So the Israelis have a system in Gaza that is like the state-of-the-art.

00:14:14.760 Not just do you have physical barriers.

00:14:16.080 You actually have a surveillance system that's a state-of-the-art.

00:14:18.540 The very name of it is classified.

00:14:19.940 That goes out either from a cyber attack and or a power outage, you don't know what.

00:14:27.600 I think it's 6 or 7 in the evening.

00:14:29.580 At the same time that you guys are picking up or intelligence, and I think it's military intelligence,

00:14:35.060 is picking up where there's a concentration of, I guess, cards for phones, a real concentration.

00:14:42.480 So walk us through, it's like 6 or 7 in the evening, two events happen that start going up through the system

00:14:52.300 to alert the system, something's up over in Gaza, right?

00:14:57.560 And tell me about the initial response to that.

00:15:00.980 You know, what shocked us, I think, when we were working on this book was the flurry of activity

00:15:05.460 that actually was going on between October 6th and the morning of October 7th.

00:15:10.840 The attack commenced at 6.29 a.m. in Israel on October 7th that morning.

00:15:16.580 But so much was happening for almost 24 hours preceding the attack.

00:15:21.040 There was the SIM cards, about 100 Israeli SIM cards.

00:15:26.180 Just so our viewers and listeners understand, in Gaza, there's a different cellular network than the one we have in Israel.

00:15:33.120 And suddenly, the Israeli intelligence agencies discover that 100 detect,

00:15:38.200 that 100 Israeli SIM cards have now gone live.

00:15:41.500 Inside Gaza.

00:15:42.360 Now, that means one of two things.

00:15:43.720 Either suddenly 100 Israelis are now in Gaza, that would not be a good thing. 0.95

00:15:47.280 Or that Palestinians in Gaza are switching out their Palestinian SIM card for an Israeli SIM card

00:15:53.180 because they plan to cross into Israel, maybe as part of an attack.

00:15:57.020 Then when they looked back, though, they saw that the Palestinians, someone in Gaza, had done this a year prior.

00:16:06.900 Much less, maybe about 30 to 40 SIM cards.

00:16:10.040 But maybe this is the annual oil checkup of SIM cards.

00:16:13.620 So maybe this is just part of what they did last year.

00:16:15.840 They drilled.

00:16:16.460 They practiced.

00:16:17.080 Now, again, they're practicing.

00:16:17.960 Later in the evening, as you mentioned, that system goes down.

00:16:22.380 It was jittery to begin with.

00:16:24.200 It was very sensitive.

00:16:25.360 It often malfunctioned and had problems.

00:16:27.980 And for now, at least, the Israeli military has ruled out the possibility of a cyber attack that actually took place.

00:16:36.840 But we may not know.

00:16:38.980 But for now, that is not something that the Israelis say was possible.

00:16:42.840 But really, the system, because of its sensitivity, would come on and come off.

00:16:47.400 So that was a problem.

00:16:49.180 And then throughout the night, Israel started to pick up other signals.

00:16:52.800 It started to see, for example, that rocket launchers were being uncovered inside Gaza.

00:16:57.580 It started to see that would indicate maybe they're planning to launch rockets.

00:17:01.740 They started to see that those underground bunkers.

00:17:04.240 Let's remind people, Steve, that under Gaza, there's the Gaza above and there's the Gaza below. 0.74

00:17:09.480 There's the Gaza of about 350 miles of tunnels.

00:17:13.100 Take the New York subway and the London underground, put together.

00:17:16.460 That's what runs under Gaza. 0.81

00:17:17.940 These are tunnels that are used by Hamas to launch rockets from, to store weapons, to run operations from,

00:17:24.700 to eventually keep hostages, the 251 that they took from Israel inside.

00:17:29.340 So all of this is where they operate, underground.

00:17:33.100 And we start to see that they are preparing some of these bunkers for their top commanders.

00:17:37.300 All of this, if you put it together, leads one to believe that something is happening.

00:17:43.500 But in Israel, the intelligence officials and the military officials are torn.

00:17:48.460 Is this a drill or is this an attack?

00:17:51.620 And we got to understand something.

00:17:54.160 Gaza, like we said before, a longtime threat.

00:17:57.660 Hamas, a longtime adversary. 0.87

00:18:00.060 This is not something that never happens.

00:18:02.820 There are always, every few weeks, once a month at least, some indication that something might be happening.

00:18:08.580 And there's always a state of awareness and alert and vigilance.

00:18:12.160 But here, the commanders made the existential, the crucial mistake, where they leaned more on the option of a drill than on the option of an attack.

00:18:23.760 And I think that what they missed here, to an extent, was not the information, because the information we had, now we know.

00:18:31.440 We lack the imagination.

00:18:33.440 We lack the ability to piece it together to understand what was really happening and what these enemies were really after.

00:18:41.840 And they were planning something that was greater than anything possible that Israel imagined could happen.

00:18:47.820 Just for nomenclature, so the audience can understand it, you had the Mossad, right, the legendary Mossad.

00:18:54.880 You then have the IDF military intelligence.

00:18:58.000 I think that's Amman.

00:18:59.300 Is that how it's pronounced?

00:19:00.920 Yeah.

00:19:01.440 Amman.

00:19:01.780 And then you have what, Shin Bet.

00:19:03.140 So you have three.

00:19:05.600 And I want to make sure the audience gets in.

00:19:07.220 By the way, you've got to read the book.

00:19:08.940 You read the book, you won't put it down.

00:19:10.300 But the timeline, because what shocked me in having done live coverage of it with Posobiec, is that when these two events of the cyber, either cyber attack or the system just fails because it's got some issues, and the SIM cards, as I think of 6 or 7 o'clock the night before.

00:19:29.480 From 6 or 7 o'clock until the attack happens at 6.29 a.m. the following morning, this book, you cannot put it down.

00:19:40.100 You're just flipping pages and reading that because it was the senior most people in the Mossad.

00:19:46.940 I mean, it started earlier.

00:19:48.080 But all of a sudden, by midnight, you've got everybody coming from there because it was a holiday weekend.

00:19:55.340 You got people coming in.

00:19:56.520 I mean, the intelligence command centers are staffed.

00:20:01.620 There's reports going out.

00:20:02.780 They're on conference calls.

00:20:04.380 And I think it's 2 o'clock in the morning.

00:20:07.800 They actually put the nation – it's 2 or 3 in the morning.

00:20:09.840 They put the nation on high alert.

00:20:12.140 I mean, people realize that something might be up here, and eventually they decided to – they deferred to, hey, maybe a drill.

00:20:18.820 But at some point in time, hey, this may not be a drill.

00:20:21.880 We want to mitigate the risk here.

00:20:23.380 Let's go on alert.

00:20:24.060 But that time from 7 in the evening, the night before, all the way to it goes to high alert, is it people not talking to each other?

00:20:33.260 Because you've got the – look, Mossad, as you know, for better and worse, is this mythic creation that runs the world.

00:20:40.900 And you see the pressure they're under, and you've got eight hours or almost nine hours where they're deciding and thinking.

00:20:50.300 And it's not that – they're waking guys up in the middle of the night.

00:20:53.180 They're getting on conference calls.

00:20:54.500 You've got the junior officers who are the best of best.

00:20:57.060 They're all showing up at the command centers.

00:20:59.260 The apparatus is alert, and something's up.

00:21:03.060 It's either a drill or a misdirection play, or this could be big.

00:21:08.560 And some of the guys are saying this could be really big.

00:21:10.620 Sir.

00:21:10.920 So let me make a little order here.

00:21:14.580 Israel has three key intelligence agencies, like you mentioned.

00:21:17.620 The Mossad is pretty much the equivalent of the CIA.

00:21:20.880 And we've seen, for example – I'm sure that many of our listeners and viewers remember the Pager attack, the beeper attack that was launched against Hezbollah, which was incredible. 0.99

00:21:29.580 The beginning of the 12-day war against Iran with the elimination of their nuclear facilities, which started with the elimination and decimation of their top military leadership and their top scientific leadership, also part of Mossad, had a hand in that.

00:21:43.160 So Mossad mostly is focused outside of Israel, almost completely – it doesn't do anything inside Israel.

00:21:48.980 But under the structure of the intelligence agencies, Mossad also does not deal with Gaza, does not deal with Hamas in Gaza.

00:21:55.600 That falls under the purview of what's known as the Shin Bet or the Shabak is another term that's often referred to.

00:22:01.540 It's the Israel Security Agency, the ISA, and it is responsible for countering Palestinian terrorism.

00:22:08.360 In addition, AMAN, which is the Hebrew acronym for military intelligence under the IDF, is responsible for all fronts and all threats.

00:22:18.020 It's the largest of the organizations, but it also is the one that kind of translates the intelligence and gives it for an operational use to the actual fighting units of the military, whether it be the Air Force, the Navy, or the ground forces.

00:22:34.420 So the two players here were the Shin Bet and military intelligence, and you're 100 percent right.

00:22:39.380 I mean, what we do is we go into detail, hour by hour, they were all on the phone talking to one another.

00:22:46.700 The heads of the IDF were on the phone call looking at the data, looking at the intelligence, trying to assess what's happening.

00:22:52.600 The head of the Shin Bet goes from his house back to headquarters just north of Tel Aviv in the middle of the night at about 3 a.m.

00:23:00.240 because he feels something is off.

00:23:03.080 He convenes his division commanders.

00:23:05.000 He actually dispatches a small team of his own commandos down to the border with Gaza.

00:23:10.760 They were just a handful of people.

00:23:12.020 They were nothing that could stand up to what was coming across the border.

00:23:15.980 And you see that there was this level of alert.

00:23:19.880 There was this concern.

00:23:20.940 But what happened was where the Israeli military made the ultimate mistake, Steve, was when they looked at the intelligence and they said, OK, we understand that something might be happening.

00:23:32.180 But we have our forces along the border.

00:23:34.180 We don't anticipate this would be anything too big for those forces to be able to manage.

00:23:39.640 And if we put them in, for example, metaphorically turn on the spotlight and shine a light into Gaza or throw some helicopters up there and they're spinning their rotters and now Hamas knows that we know that they're doing something, you have two things that might happen.

00:23:55.620 One is, if it is a drill and they're not going to attack, but now they think we're going to attack, then they might attack.

00:24:02.840 That was concern one.

00:24:04.420 Concern two was if it's a drill and they're not planning to attack, they now will know that we know about the drill and they will reverse engineer to try to find out about the system, for example, the classified one.

00:24:16.140 And how do we know what's happening so we could be burning our intelligence sources?

00:24:21.480 And that was a mistake.

00:24:22.860 It was, you know, I think a strategic mistake, but it was a mistake that will happen.

00:24:28.660 These mistakes are made when it comes to intelligence.

00:24:31.220 What we discovered, though, unfortunately, was that some of the intel got stuck in the pipeline.

00:24:37.140 And this is true also we know about 9-11, of where one agency had information, was not sharing it with the other agency.

00:24:44.020 And after 9-11, you, of course, had the 9-11 Commission, which established the DNI, the Directorate of National Intelligence, which had the goal, whether it's working is a separate question,

00:24:53.040 but had the goal of putting together all of the different intelligence agencies in the United States to coordinate better, to work better, to ensure that no information is lacking from one another.

00:25:06.640 One of the recommendations that we do make in this book is to consider the prospect of establishing a similar entity for Israel, or at least, at the very least, breaking down the bureaucracy and the red tape that hinders sometimes that flow of intelligence between the different agencies.

00:25:23.040 We're going to take a short commercial break.

00:25:24.820 A book, whether you're pro-Israel or you're not pro-Israel, whether you're part of Israel First or you're part of America First or somewhere in between,

00:25:36.740 this is the first cut of what I'm sure eventually will be a major commissioner investigation, but first of all, it reads like a novel.

00:25:45.640 If you just want to get something you cannot put down, While Israel Slept is the book.

00:25:51.220 And we have Yaakov Katz is with us.

00:25:54.360 We're going to take a short commercial break.

00:25:56.280 Of course, with what's happening in the Middle East, you saw President Trump.

00:26:01.020 We did it live last night, 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.

00:26:03.500 I want to thank everybody for the coverage.

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00:31:26.860 Yakov Katz, the book is While Israel Slept.

00:31:29.640 Everyone should get it.

00:31:30.920 Just carve some time out because when it arrives at your house, you're not going to put it down.

00:31:35.920 Whether you know zero or where you think you know a lot, because I thought I knew a lot and I understood.

00:31:41.020 I knew virtually nothing.

00:31:43.060 That's the kind of book it is.

00:31:44.800 Yakov, two things.

00:31:45.500 We're at 3 o'clock in the morning, so on high alert, we're going to get to the run-up to it, but I've got to go through two things.

00:31:51.280 Number one, particularly if you're in the United States and removed from the region, I had an opportunity in 1979, early 1980.

00:31:59.980 I was on the first, you know, part of the first carrier battle group that arrived in the North Arabian Sea for the Iranian hostage crisis.

00:32:08.660 And the place was like, you know, the landscape of the moon.

00:32:11.800 I just told, you know, my parents later, I said, you can't understand how far away it is and how alien it is.

00:32:17.440 It's like being on the moon.

00:32:18.560 But at least legendary is that half of Hamas is on the payroll.

00:32:28.240 What shocks me here and concerns me as an American for our own system is that – and your books have all been about high tech.

00:32:35.640 You and Bobat have written some amazing books on Israel as a technology superpower.

00:32:40.560 You just talked about Gaza.

00:32:42.160 You've got a system that can look at everything.

00:32:44.080 You've got, you know, you've got in-depth, intelligence in-depth, defense in-depth, these spotters who are brilliant and can spot things.

00:32:52.760 But at no time in this – maybe I'm missing it.

00:32:54.940 At no time in this, which I thought was the key of whether it's Mossad or Schoenberg or whatever, human intelligence, informers, guys that are on the payroll, right, either for patriotic reasons or just for cash money, that never comes – you never see that arrive.

00:33:12.540 Is that something that the technology has just lulled people to sleep?

00:33:17.320 Is it not something that's a huge part of activity?

00:33:20.280 Because I keep arguing all the time here in the United States, particularly in our efforts in China.

00:33:24.940 You know, a couple of dozen years ago we lost I think 20 of our intel agents in the CCP to a leak, and I don't think we've ever recovered from that.

00:33:33.980 And you can tell our intelligence on the CCP and the China is not great.

00:33:39.280 Is that – one of the things that happened here?

00:33:40.860 Are there not guys on the payroll that they just flip and wouldn't give you the information?

00:33:45.380 Or has the technology lulled you guys to sleep?

00:33:49.460 Well, I think it's a combination of a number of things, Steve.

00:33:51.360 I think on the one hand, when we look at this, what I call the policy of containment, it had a couple of legs to it.

00:33:57.120 One was definitely the technology.

00:33:58.640 We had Iron Dome, which was able to intercept missiles that were coming in from Gaza and shoot them down.

00:34:05.300 So that wasn't a strategic threat.

00:34:06.740 They didn't have to drag us every time into a war, every time a missile was fired our way.

00:34:11.240 And when they would pop out of Israel, pop outside in Israel through tunnels that they dug across the border, like they did back in 2014, 0.51

00:34:18.720 we built an underground wall and a system that could detect tunnels.

00:34:23.580 By the way, the system that Israel developed is actually used by the United States Army, also along the border with Mexico and the southern border in the United States.

00:34:34.340 So this is a system that is probably the most sophisticated in the world to detect when someone is digging a tunnel, where it is being dug.

00:34:42.720 And even so sensitive, it could tell you what tool is being used to dig that tunnel.

00:34:46.940 So that technology is super impressive.

00:34:48.980 But what it does is it gives you a false sense of security.

00:34:52.120 It makes you feel like you're impenetrable.

00:34:53.840 And we know how many people crossed into Israel on October 7th through a tunnel.

00:34:57.780 Zero.

00:34:58.380 They all came above ground.

00:34:59.440 So while the tunnel technology worked and was great, it wasn't enough to stop this invasion.

00:35:05.580 But there was another thing there.

00:35:06.980 And this was the what I call the bigger fish to fry piece of the policy.

00:35:11.960 We had Iran. 0.95

00:35:13.500 We have Hezbollah with 150,000 rockets and missiles, a larger army, a larger military on our northern border. 0.95

00:35:21.040 So Hamas, Israel thought it could contain. 0.84

00:35:24.880 It didn't have to invest the same resources.

00:35:26.780 I mean, you look at the pager attack that Israel was able to launch against Hezbollah, right?

00:35:31.260 It's not just being able to put explosives inside a beeper machine or a pager.

00:35:35.040 But how do you get Hezbollah to buy it?

00:35:36.940 You have to use human intelligence assets.

00:35:39.740 So we had them there.

00:35:40.980 We had them in Iran. 0.95

00:35:42.400 How come we didn't have them in Gaza?

00:35:44.260 And we see, I mean, you have hundreds and eventually thousands of people who run across the border.

00:35:49.120 Not one could call up their Israeli handler and say, hey, we're coming.

00:35:53.160 Get ready.

00:35:54.160 We didn't have that human intelligence.

00:35:56.020 And I think that that blind spot is obviously something that's being fixed as we speak and over the last two years.

00:36:02.980 But Israel fell asleep figuratively at the wheel because it thought that the technology was enough.

00:36:08.400 It thought that it had a handle.

00:36:09.580 And it was prioritizing wrong to some extent of those challenges.

00:36:13.840 But, you know, you mentioned the Chinese and you mentioned Iran as an example.

00:36:19.320 I mean, there was a report that just came out the other day of how China is helping Iran rebuild their missile capability, right?

00:36:26.980 You see what's happening in the Middle East.

00:36:29.140 This isn't just about Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Israel.

00:36:33.540 This is a much bigger story.

00:36:36.040 This is about the forces that are anti-American, anti-West, that they focus often for the first stage on Israel because it's the easier target.

00:36:46.220 It's based in the region.

00:36:47.660 It's there.

00:36:48.640 It has borders.

00:36:50.100 It has the ability.

00:36:51.100 It's got Arab countries and terrorist groups that surround it.

00:36:54.460 So obviously that's going to be the first stage.

00:36:56.600 But it's on the march to the West.

00:37:00.280 And when you look at the alliances and the relationships that exist there between the Chinese, for example, or North Korea, for that matter, and Iran, and then definitely under the Assad regime back in Syria.

00:37:15.800 We'll wait to see what happens with the new government that's now in place in Damascus.

00:37:19.680 But you get a sense that this is a much bigger adversary with much greater ambition, Steve, than what we think about when we just look at Israel solely.

00:37:31.840 I want to get to that second because you guys have some very specific recommendations.

00:37:36.300 So we're at 3 o'clock in the morning.

00:37:38.560 The other question I've got about the human intelligence and why that didn't play a bigger role and why it's quiet.

00:37:43.800 But as the attack unfolds, and this is why I said on the show live, and I'm very proud we talked about this, I said this is not a terrorist attack.

00:37:51.740 This is not even a paramilitary attack.

00:37:53.820 This is a full-scale military attack.

00:37:56.060 It's over 40 miles.

00:37:57.640 You've got air, land, sea.

00:38:00.300 You've got paragliders coming in.

00:38:01.680 And Hamas, with the Muslim Brotherhood, I mean, their reputations, they're not Hezbollah, right?

00:38:08.700 They're not the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

00:38:13.340 You know, how did they practice?

00:38:15.920 How do you practice a 40-mile air, sea, land invasion that's not going to use the tunnels but come across?

00:38:26.200 How do you practice that?

00:38:27.180 Because over and over again, you have to get the timing right.

00:38:29.240 You have to get all that.

00:38:30.040 How did that happen?

00:38:31.760 And the only thing that we have that I've warned about it was these young women who said, hey, this looks like there's more activity. 0.77

00:38:37.940 This had to be years in the planning, didn't it?

00:38:40.280 And not just the financing in the organization, but for them to hit basically all their marks when the balloon went up, it had to have a very sophisticated planning to execute.

00:38:52.260 How was – did they not have it or did they have it and was just missed?

00:38:57.020 So they had it, and there was even an intelligence report that came out back in 2022.

00:39:03.580 It was named Jericho Walls, was put together by some analysts, lower-level analysts in military intelligence in the IDF, named Jericho Walls for the walls of Jericho from the time of the Bible.

00:39:16.600 As you remember, when Joshua enters the land of Israel and blows the trumpets, the shofar, the ram's horn along the walls, the walls come tumbling down.

00:39:28.020 And this was the figurative metaphor for how this barrier that Israel had built along the border could come down.

00:39:34.680 But, you know, we spoke about before the flow of information.

00:39:38.640 So this intelligence report that came out a few years before spoke of how one day Hamas might try to launch a cross-border infiltration with hundreds of people.

00:39:49.240 It could try to come by air.

00:39:50.560 It could try to come by sea.

00:39:52.060 It's planning to abduct and take people hostage.

00:39:54.440 The defense minister did not see this report until weeks into the war after October 7th, not before.

00:40:02.700 This was something that, again, has to be fixed in the flow of information.

00:40:06.420 But Hamas was practicing and training and was even telling us, you know, when we go back, you know, another source of information of intelligence is what we call OSINT, open-source intelligence.

00:40:16.520 And that should not be dismissed or undermined because that is something, or underappreciated, they often are communicating what they plan to do, right?

00:40:24.860 When you hear Hamas say, we're coming and we're going to kidnap and we're going to murder, and you, Israel, say, well, you know, we'll just build a bigger wall.

00:40:34.480 We'll deploy a few more soldiers.

00:40:35.900 We're not dealing with the problem at its core.

00:40:37.920 That problem is not going to go away.

00:40:40.940 You cannot defend yourself to death.

00:40:44.000 You do have to go on the offensive.

00:40:46.200 When you see the Iranians building long-range ballistic missiles that don't just cover Israel, because Israel is nearby, but can go into Europe and start to make their way towards the United States of America, 0.98

00:41:00.940 America, you get an understanding that this is about something bigger than just let's invade Israel, kill some Israelis, kill some Jews. 0.98

00:41:09.200 Because, you know, for these genocidal jihadist groups to want to kill Jews or Israelis, that's just called Monday. 1.00

00:41:16.740 This is what they want to do all the time. 0.97

00:41:19.520 But they do have political ambitions.

00:41:22.020 They want to spread regional hegemony.

00:41:23.920 And that was, I think, what we missed, was not understanding what's more deeper and at the core of what these ambitions are really about.

00:41:34.860 You can't just let this sit and simmer.

00:41:36.860 It won't go away on its own.

00:41:39.200 The other thing that's shocking, and I want to get back to the IDF response because that's also going to shock people.

00:41:45.180 What stuns me is that there seems to be, particularly in this aspect of it, no concept of which I argue that the MAGA movement has perfected because we don't have resources.

00:41:58.240 We didn't have resources for anything else for years.

00:42:00.600 What I call narrative warfare or information warfare.

00:42:03.420 It's really back on its back.

00:42:06.180 When the balloon goes up, the Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are so far advanced on driving the narrative. 0.98

00:42:15.260 And I don't want to get into who's right and who's wrong in here, right, because I know my audience is going to be blowing me up here in a second.

00:42:20.300 But the Israelis in the IDF are like have a blind spot for narrative warfare, communication. 0.91

00:42:29.740 It's everything's kind of reaction in its back foot.

00:42:31.800 How did that happen?

00:42:32.680 How did the Israelis not understand that in modern warfare the narrative part, the information war, is as important and sometimes more important than the kinetic part?

00:42:44.180 Well, I think you're 100 percent right that the narrative warfare or information warfare is an integral part and is part of one of those fronts of any war.

00:42:54.280 You have the front in Gaza where those soldiers are fighting against Hamas.

00:42:57.980 You have the home front where those missiles are landing, whether they're Hamas missiles, Hezbollah missiles, Iranian missiles, and missile defense systems that Israel has developed, which are key to keeping us safe.

00:43:11.240 But you also have the public diplomacy front and that narrative.

00:43:15.180 And if we look at the world today, tragically, I think the world does not understand, for the most part, what has happened here.

00:43:22.640 I mean, you know, for example, when we look at Gaza, there is a tragedy that has taken place in Gaza.

00:43:28.900 I have no problem saying that.

00:43:30.200 The tens of thousands of people who have been killed is a great tragedy and the devastation is tragic.

00:43:36.120 But I look at the question of who is responsible for that, and I look at Hamas, and this is documents. 0.83

00:43:43.180 I mean, go to those tunnels, Steve.

00:43:44.560 We've been there.

00:43:45.580 And we see in those tunnels how Hamas is fighting, what it's doing, where it's storing its weapons.

00:43:50.940 You go into homes in Gaza, and under children's beds, you see the rockets and the RPGs and the anti-tank weapons and the AK-47s.

00:44:00.880 They're keeping them in the same room where they might have a Mickey Mouse sticker on the wall and a nice pink girl's bed.

00:44:08.560 Underneath, you could have a cache of rockets and grenades.

00:44:13.660 You have the tunnels under every supermarket, mosque, school, UN compound, and home.

00:44:19.860 So when Israel is trying to defend itself and it sees a rocket launcher in a window or in a mosque and it blows that place up because it doesn't want that missile to be fired into Israel and kill potentially Israelis, and then there are civilians who do get killed.

00:44:35.140 I mean, is Israel not supposed to be able to fight?

00:44:38.280 Are our hands supposed to be tied?

00:44:40.280 And I think that we needed to do a better job explaining that 100 percent, and we have failed at that.

00:44:45.780 But I think what the world is misunderstanding is the nature of this conflict today.

00:44:53.160 People, you know, what the Hamas understood was that having so many civilians killed, that's their job. 0.97

00:45:00.620 They want them to be killed so that the Western world falls into the trap of believing this falsehood that there was a genocide in the Gaza Strip.

00:45:10.760 And when they believe that, they crack down on Israel, and that serves their greater purpose. 0.95

00:45:16.120 Even though so many people are dead, Hamas doesn't care, right? 0.68

00:45:19.320 Ask yourself a question, Steve.

00:45:21.300 How come they have all these tunnels underground Gaza?

00:45:25.260 I have a bomb shelter in my home.

00:45:26.960 Come to Jerusalem, where I live, and when there are missiles that go off, we go down to the bomb shelter.

00:45:31.600 So these tunnels underneath every home and hospital and school and supermarket in Gaza, how come the Palestinians of Gaza are not allowed inside there?

00:45:41.400 Well, Hamas told us.

00:45:42.780 They said, no, it's not for the people.

00:45:44.300 It's for us, the commanders and the terrorists.

00:45:47.560 So what should we do in a war?

00:45:49.840 Should hands be tied?

00:45:51.060 Or do you have to fight?

00:45:53.740 And this is a terrorist group that is out to destroy the way of life of the Judeo-Christian values and the way that we all live, whether it's in Israel or in the United States.

00:46:03.120 So what is to happen in the future?

00:46:05.800 God forbid such an attack happens one day somewhere else in another country.

00:46:10.500 And I think that you're right.

00:46:11.460 We need to explain this better.

00:46:12.960 We need to recognize this front of the war.

00:46:15.360 And Israel is neglecting that and needs to do a better job.

00:46:18.540 But I think we also have to ask ourselves a deeper question.

00:46:22.300 What has happened to the West, to the values that people are misunderstanding who is the bad guy in this, who is evil, and who is right?

00:46:32.780 Who is the one that is trying to spare lives on both sides of this conflict even when they are being attacked?

00:46:39.960 And that's Israel in this case.

00:46:42.300 Okay.

00:46:42.800 I want the audience to buy this book.

00:46:44.240 What I'm going to do, I want to have you back on for the IDF response, particularly from day one and all the way through.

00:46:49.280 But I can't do it now because we're running out of time.

00:46:51.500 I do want a couple of things to ask you.

00:46:53.640 Number one, you're pretty critical of the Netanyahu government.

00:46:57.860 Give me a couple of minutes on that.

00:46:58.940 Then I want to ask you, hey, particularly for people that supported Israel and never agreed with a two-state solution,

00:47:04.780 you essentially have a two-state solution now with Qatar financing it and the Turks going to provide for security.

00:47:10.940 But you are fairly critical of the Netanyahu government and the overall response and how this thing has gone on for a couple of years.

00:47:19.040 What is the key basis of your, not attack, but of your analysis of the government's response?

00:47:30.260 Well, Netanyahu has been prime minister pretty much uninterrupted since 2009.

00:47:36.640 And I look at the policies that were put into effect under Netanyahu and this policy of containment.

00:47:43.080 And for example, I mean, something that is difficult to ignore is asking the Qataris and the two-faced role in the double role that they play in this region 0.99

00:47:54.420 to send back in 2018 $30 million every month to Hamas in cash to Gaza to figuratively buy quiet.

00:48:02.480 That was a policy that was put into effect by Netanyahu, this idea that you can pay off your enemy.

00:48:07.960 And I understand what was at the foundation of it, this attempt to buy quiet, to kick the can down the road, to avoid that war,

00:48:16.300 because Israel is a country like, is a liberal democracy, is a country like the United States and like those in Europe

00:48:23.360 that wants quiet and wants to grow and flourish as a society.

00:48:29.280 But that was a mistake.

00:48:31.080 I look at what Netanyahu's government did in the run-up to October 2023 to that attack when they were pushing through judicial reform,

00:48:39.080 which, by the way, lots of the pieces of that reform I personally agree with, but I saw how it divided the nation.

00:48:46.360 And I learned from this that the unity or social cohesion is so important for the national security of our country,

00:48:56.200 because when we're divided and polarized, we are distracted and we are not focused.

00:49:03.080 And our enemies can take advantage of that situation.

00:49:05.560 And that is, to a large extent, what happened with Hamas in the run-up to October 7th.

00:49:11.680 I think that Israel needs a reckoning when it comes to what happened on October 7th. 0.79

00:49:16.660 We need a commission of inquiry.

00:49:18.460 The book, I believe, is a good start.

00:49:20.760 And Amir and I did our best to try to piece this all together.

00:49:23.440 But, you know, we're two journalists.

00:49:25.080 We're writers.

00:49:26.060 The access we get, which was phenomenal, I want to believe, is just scratching the surface of what a real state-appointed commission of inquiry could uncover.

00:49:35.700 And I hope that that is created, because we have to learn the lessons to prevent this from happening again.

00:49:40.540 Because like we said earlier, there will be strategic surprises in the future.

00:49:44.740 And I think that Netanyahu, we needed accountability.

00:49:48.240 We needed taking of responsibility, because this, at the end, happened under his government and his watch.

00:49:54.400 I would love to get you back next week sometime to talk about the IDF and the IDF response.

00:50:00.320 Very detailed.

00:50:01.200 Everybody should get this book.

00:50:02.480 Let's read it.

00:50:04.100 And next week, hopefully, we'll get Yaakov Katz back, or maybe the week after.

00:50:09.580 Are you coming to the United States?

00:50:11.120 Are you doing a book tour?

00:50:12.080 Where do people get access?

00:50:13.320 And particularly people that disagree with a lot that was said tonight, those are the folks I want to drill down into this the most.

00:50:19.140 So where do they go for your coordinates and social media?

00:50:22.760 And if you're giving any book tours here in the United States or any interviews, where do they go to find that out?

00:50:27.860 So yeah, been on book tour, continuing on the book tour.

00:50:30.980 And you can find me at my website, yaakovkatz.com, myname.com.

00:50:36.900 And you can find me there with interviews and with schedules and how to contact me.

00:50:42.000 And we'd love to hear from people any questions they might have of more detail about this book.

00:50:48.700 But the book is available wherever books are sold here in the United States.

00:50:51.740 So feel free.

00:50:53.780 Particularly the part of the audience that disagrees with a lot that was said tonight.

00:50:58.180 I want you to get the book, read the book.

00:51:00.240 And Brother Katz has said he's available to take your inquiries.

00:51:05.120 And we'll reach out to him, hopefully, and get him back on next week.

00:51:07.680 Sir, thank you so much.

00:51:08.560 Appreciate you.

00:51:09.700 Thank you, Steve.

00:51:11.280 We're back tomorrow at 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

00:51:14.720 It's going to be packed all day, four hours, two in the morning, two in the afternoon.

00:51:20.540 Tonight, the last 600 meters kind of has its D.C. premiere.

00:51:27.020 I'll be there with Michael Pack and the team.

00:51:29.700 And that's going to play on the 10th of November, the 250th birthday of the United States Marine Corps.

00:51:35.200 It'll play at 10 o'clock, 10 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time with PBS.

00:51:39.480 See you tomorrow morning, 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time,

00:51:42.580 when you will be back in the War Room.

00:51:55.740 What if he had the brightest mind in the War Room,

00:51:58.420 delivering critical financial research every month?

00:52:02.060 Steve Bannon here.

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00:52:06.280 He's our wise man, a former CIA, Pentagon, and White House advisor

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00:52:40.560 and even threats to national security.

00:52:42.580 Right now, War Room members get a free copy of Money GPT

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00:52:48.740 This is Jim's flagship financial newsletter, Strategic Intelligence.

00:52:54.060 I read it.

00:52:55.100 You should read it.

00:52:56.180 Time is running out.

00:52:57.020 Go to RickardsWarRoom.com.

00:52:58.860 That's all one word, Rickards War Room.

00:53:00.760 Rickards with an S.

00:53:02.240 Go now and claim your free book.

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00:53:07.840 Thank you.

Bannon's War Room - October 30, 2025

WarRoom Battleground EP 881： While Israel Slept

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