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On October 7, 2023, Israel awoke to a massacre. The shock was not only in its scale—but in its nature: deliberate, brutal and deeply symbolic. Beneath the immediate questions about defense failures and military response, another question demands attention: how did one of the world’s most sophisticated intelligence systems fail to foresee a pattern of violence that has long been recognized in other conflict zones? The answer lies in what intelligence experts call the “comprehension gap”—the inability to translate raw, chaotic reality into strategic insight.
How did Israel’s intelligence community fail to identify the use of sexual violence by Hamas as part of a broader strategy—not a spontaneous byproduct of war, but a calculated tool of terror?
What was missed—and why
Hamas is not ISIS, but the parallels are striking. Just as ISIS used rape to break the spirit of Yazidi communities in Iraq, Hamas weaponized the Israeli female body as a site of humiliation and conquest. The goal wasn’t only to harm individuals—it was to send a message. To shame, destabilize and sow fear through acts of gendered brutality. This wasn’t chaos—it was choreography: documented, disseminated, denied, repeated.
And yet, Israeli intelligence continued to view sexual violence as incidental—not intentional. Its analytical models weren’t built to classify rape as a strategic threat. A “terror attack” meant explosives, shootings, infiltrations—not assaults on women’s bodies. As a result, there were no specific indicators to monitor, no early-warning tools to deploy, no conceptual framework to prepare for what unfolded—although warnings did exist.
Feminist scholars, social researchers and analysts of asymmetric warfare had long pointed to rising patterns of gender extremism in Islamist groups. These included calls for gender-based vengeance in sermons, extremist messaging on social media and dehumanizing depictions of women in ideological materials. But these red flags were largely dismissed as irrelevant to security assessments. The voices that tried to connect the dots were sidelined.
The 2023 law—and the debate it exposed
A particularly revealing moment occurred in July 2023, when the Knesset passed a law increasing penalties for sexual offenses motivated by national or racist hatred. The law reflected a critical insight: that when sexual violence is fueled by ideology, its consequences extend far beyond the individual—it becomes an act of collective targeting. Yet rather than sparking a serious discussion about gendered terror, the law triggered an ideologically charged backlash.
Several women’s rights organizations condemned the legislation—not because they doubted the danger of ideologically motivated rape, but because they feared it would be politically co-opted. Their main concern was that the law created a hierarchy of victims, suggesting that some rapes were worse than others, depending on the identity of the perpetrator. The broader public debate quickly shifted from the strategic to the symbolic—from asking how enemies might weaponize sexual violence, to whether the state was using women’s pain for nationalist agendas.
This discomfort revealed a deeper conceptual blind spot: an unwillingness to acknowledge that sexual violence can function as a tool of ideological warfare— when the victims are Israeli and the perpetrators Palestinian. The insistence on viewing rape strictly through the lens of criminal justice left no room to see it as a tactic of terror. And when you can’t name a threat—you can’t anticipate it.
When the violence came, so did the denial
The failure didn’t end with what was missed before the attack. It continued in the hours and days that followed. Alongside the physical assault came a narrative campaign—swift, coordinated and corrosive. Denials flooded the internet. Claims circulated that women weren’t raped, but merely killed in crossfire. Others alleged that the videos were Israeli fabrications. The groundwork for doubt had already been laid, and it spread like wildfire.
Israel was slow to respond. There was no unified media strategy, no plan to counter the digital gaslighting. As a result, by the time evidence reached the global stage, much of the world had either moved on—or become suspicious. Israeli intelligence, long accustomed to monitoring threats in the physical realm, was unprepared for this kind of war: one fought in algorithms, hashtags and manipulated footage. In today’s information landscape, facts are not enough. The truth must be defended—actively and preemptively.
Rethinking the intelligence paradigm
To avoid repeating the failures of October 7, Israel must adopt a new intelligence paradigm—one that recognizes gender-based violence not as an unfortunate byproduct of chaos, but as a deliberate weapon of war. This shift requires more than operational adjustments; it demands a conceptual transformation. Rape, when used systematically—accompanied by incitement, propaganda, and documentation—is not merely a crime. It becomes a weapon. Like a missile—but one that pierces not only walls, but identity.
This kind of violence is designed to terrorize, destabilize and symbolically dismantle the social fabric. And yet, our intelligence frameworks have not been equipped to detect it. To truly assess this threat, we must expand the professional circle of intelligence. That means bringing in sociologists, gender experts, behavioral scientists, media analysts—people who understand ideological mobilization, not just troop movements.
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Crucially, we must grasp that gender-based terror doesn’t emerge from a void. It is the end product of long-term cultural conditioning—sermons, slogans, schoolbooks and digital propaganda that train fighters to see women not as human beings, but as targets and trophies. This indoctrination is traceable. It leaves a footprint: in Telegram channels, in educational materials, in religious discourse that shifts from calls for purity to justifications for brutality. We must be trained to look—and be willing to name what we see.
Today’s threats don’t always come with warning sirens. The next war may be fought through narrative manipulation, social media distortion and campaigns of strategic denial. In such a battlefield, recognizing the systematic objectification of women in enemy rhetoric may prove as vital as intercepting a missile convoy.
A call to expand the field of vision
This is not just a call for better information—but for better interpretation. For a security mindset that understands that violence aimed at women is often not random, but ideological. That attacks on the body can be attacks on the nation. And that when the truth itself becomes a battlefield—only intelligence that dares to think differently can get ahead of the next assault.
In a time when the boundaries between fact and fiction are increasingly blurred, and when women’s bodies are used to send messages of collective terror, Israel cannot afford to treat gender-based violence as a secondary concern. It must be recognized for what it is: a weapon of war. One that must be studied, tracked and, above all, never underestimated again.
- Lee Shpilrain Nahari is a political science researcher specializing in gender-based violence in armed conflicts and international relations and risk management consultant at EBA & Co.