Intelligence blind spots span Ben-Gurion to Syria

Two hours into a flight to Tel Aviv, an Omani co-pilot stabbed his captain and put the airliner into a sixteen-thousand-foot dive. Five passengers and two off-duty pilots fought their way onto the bloodied flight deck to pull him off the controls. For two years, Israeli authorities had not pulled foreign crew manifests from the vetting system.

I'm Yoni.

And I'm Ari. This is another episode of All Fronts, a Daily Lion production, where we put a week of Israel's security into one picture.

We'll start with the averted disaster over Saudi Arabia. On the thirtieth of September, Flydubai flight ten seventy-three was traveling from the United Arab Emirates to Tel Aviv with one hundred and seventy-four passengers on board. Two hours into the journey, at thirty-five thousand feet over Saudi Arabia, the Omani co-pilot drew a weapon and stabbed the captain. The aircraft plummeted. It dropped more than sixteen thousand feet in just over thirty seconds, and began transmitting the general emergency code seventy-seven hundred. The diverted plane safely touched down at Tabuk Airport at nine forty-five in the morning local time.

That safe landing is exactly where the political center focuses, seeing a story of systemic bureaucratic negligence. Their argument is that state agencies had the tools to stop an extremist pilot from flying into the country, but they failed to look. A twenty twenty-three law mandates that inbound crew manifests be sent to security services before takeoff. Yet the data was ignored. Information on foreign crews had not been pulled from the system for roughly two years. The Transportation Ministry deflected responsibility. They claimed they're not an intelligence body and lack the personnel to vet the a hundred and twenty airlines operating locally. The case goes further than that. They argue the aviation security doctrine is dangerously outdated. Since the attacks of two thousand and one, the industry has focused on fortifying the cockpit against external hijackers. That leaves flights vulnerable to those already at the controls. This blind spot persists despite precedents like the Germanwings disaster in twenty fifteen that killed a hundred and fifty people. Royal Air Maroc trained the co-pilot for three months in twenty twenty-five and then declined to employ him. Ultimately, this camp warns that celebrating civilian bravery is just a tactic to avoid accountability. The disaster was averted only because five passengers fought back and two off-duty pilots happened to be in the cabin. State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman published an audit in May twenty twenty-four warning about vulnerabilities in civil aviation security. But the findings were ignored. Treating pure luck as a defense strategy guarantees another fatal failure. It's exactly the same culture of ignoring warnings that led to forty-five deaths at Mount Meron in twenty twenty-one.

For the government and the defense establishment, the focus is not on those ignored warnings but squarely on the attacker and the orchestrated nature of the plot. The prime minister says the phrase he uses is Islamist radical indoctrination. Interrogations revealed the operative wanted to die in revenge for the war in Gaza. The trajectory suggests a premeditated plan to crash into the airport terminal at nine thirty in the morning. With tens of thousands of holiday travelers inside the building, the death toll could've easily reached into the thousands. In this view, the mass murder was stopped solely by the unbelievable courage of the people on board. When the aircraft began its dive, passengers rushed the flight deck to restrain the attacker. The struggle was violent. The cockpit was covered in blood as travelers physically pulled the assailant away from the instruments. One passenger managed to place the co-pilot in a chokehold while pulling back on the steering yoke to straighten the plane out. The leadership credits this forceful civilian intervention with preventing a historic catastrophe. The immediate response is to close the regulatory gaps that allowed the infiltration while hunting for the network behind it. The state's tightening protocols to enforce the ban on pilots from twenty-seven designated enemy countries entering Israeli airspace. The airline's flights were temporarily suspended, and repatriation planes were sent to retrieve stranded citizens. Meanwhile, intelligence agencies are investigating whether the operative had accomplices. The prime minister warned that whoever directed the plot will pay a heavy price. And security services are working to determine whether Iran orchestrated the attack.

That immediate crisis is over, and the stranded passengers have been brought home. The focus now shifts to the ongoing interrogations in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Those will determine how a hostile pilot bypassed international aviation screening. Meanwhile, Israel's transportation authorities are left to overhaul their oversight of foreign crews landing at Ben-Gurion.

Across the northern frontier, Israeli forces swept through multiple homes in the border town of al-Rafid on September twenty-second, and again on the twenty-sixth. The next day, a convoy of about fifteen military vehicles crossed into the central Quneitra countryside. They conducted a raid and search operation in the village of Kudnah.

Those operations are happening because the ground is shifting. The Alma Research Center argues that the American military withdrawal from Iraq leaves a vacuum. That withdrawal finished on September thirtieth under a two thousand and twenty-four agreement. And it allows pro-Iranian militias to maneuver toward southern Syria. An anonymous Shia official claimed last month that these militias still possess hundreds of unmanned aerial vehicles. The prospect of the Iraqi state gaining control over them remains remote. We're already seeing the spillover. Syria's Internal Security Forces announced on September twenty-ninth that they'd thwarted a sabotage plot in the Yarmouk Basin in Daraa. They arrested a three-member cell affiliated with Hezbollah. Earlier in the year, on April nineteenth, the Syrian Ministry of Interior disrupted a similar Hezbollah cell launching rockets in Quneitra. Detainee confessions in Lebanon have also revealed a smuggling pipeline. More than forty former security and military personnel for Assad were recently smuggled from coastal Syria into northern Lebanon. They were sent there to be trained and redeployed. So the case for preemptive action is that Israel must enforce its red lines. It has to maintain operational dominance against these emerging cross-border threats. Israeli aircraft cratered the runway of the Abu al-Duhur airbase in eastern Idlib with eight strikes in August. The Prime Minister's office characterized the operation as enforcing an existing status quo in security matters. In this view, waiting for militias to dig in isn't an option. Military force is the only reliable way to prevent the border from becoming an active front.

But that military force looks very different to the people living there. Across the border, residents of these Syrian communities describe an aggressive campaign. They say it terrorizes civilian villages and disrupts daily life. Local accounts detail how Israeli forces raided a home in al-Asbah in southern Quneitra and fired into the air on September fifth. They later fired smoke canisters during a five-vehicle patrol in Wadi al-Raqad. One resident of al-Rafid explained that the children wake up to the sounds of the vehicles and the presence of military dogs. That leaves families awake all night in perpetual fear over when their turn might come. The sweeps just keep coming. Forces raided a home in Bariqa and searched Ain al-Abed alongside aerial surveillance on September eighth. That was followed days later by the arrest of a young man in al-Hamidiyah, and a father and son in al-Rafid. A resident of Tarangah questions the justification for these nighttime intrusions. They ask why forces turn houses upside down in the middle of the night based on local informants. Especially when nobody in the village knows anything about the supposed weapons.

Those intrusions are also being watched from further away. The Abu al-Duhur Airbase lies roughly forty-three miles from the Turkish border. Retired Major General Ateş Mehmet İrez is a former chief of operations in the Turkish Air Force. He notes that Ankara tracked the Israeli flights and took precautions. But it refrained from intervening. İrez argues that building a permanent radar network takes months. And he warns that operations based solely on anticipation create a dangerous atmosphere. Tensions can easily turn into a direct military clash.

Right now the clashes are localized. The immediate reality on the border is a tactical contest over the vacuum left by the Assad regime. Israel is demonstrating it'll cross the frontier to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding its southern front. Meanwhile, Syrian villagers bear the brunt of the nighttime raids. The long-term security of the Golan now depends on whether those sweeps can permanently disrupt the smuggling routes.

While ground units probe the Syrian border, last month the army pulled a Hamas internal security chief out of Gaza City using deep-penetration special forces. But this week the focus shifted back to strikes from the air. On October third an Israeli airstrike hit an apartment building in Gaza City. That strike killed at least five Palestinians, including four women. Two of those victims were identified as members of the local Greek Orthodox Church.

The military and the political leadership look at those strikes as the only way to take apart an enemy that keeps rebuilding. In recent weeks Israeli forces killed more than one hundred Hamas-affiliated militants in Gaza. The military says that Gaza City apartment strike targeted Ali al-Amoudi. They describe him as the right-hand man to former Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar. Officials say al-Amoudi was directly involved in rebuilding the organization for war. They compare him to Izz al-Din al-Bik. That's a northern brigade commander killed recently who held his position since his predecessor died in November twenty twenty-three. The government says these commanders were actively recruiting operatives and plotting new attacks against Israeli forces. And the campaign goes beyond the people organizing the next phase of fighting. It includes anyone involved in the last one. Daniel Gordis notes that out of an estimated five thousand participants in the October seventh assault, more than twenty-seven hundred are confirmed dead. About three hundred are captured. That leaves roughly twenty-two hundred still at large. He says about twenty-eight hundred people on the list have been killed, including roughly twelve hundred killed during the attack itself. An army official says the targeted assassinations will continue until the last of the terrorists is killed. That applies regardless of any diplomatic truces. The prime minister echoed that. He warned unspecified enemies that Israel's long arm will reach them anywhere, anytime. To carry out these targeted strikes in dense urban environments, the military says it takes steps to limit harm to civilians. That includes using precise munitions. When noncombatants are hit, the army says it regrets any harm caused to uninvolved individuals. But it maintains that the strikes are necessary. They say they have to remove commanders who hide themselves directly inside the civilian population to rebuild their forces.

But people on the right say focusing on individual commanders misses the bigger picture. They argue the organization's administrative skeleton remains entirely intact. The Middle East Forum points out that Hamas is still capable of conducting structured internal elections under heavy military pressure. The local wartime faction is led by figures like al-Amoudi, who was released in the twenty eleven Gilad Shalit exchange. They recently competed for control of the Gaza political bureau against veteran figures like Nizar Awadallah. He ran for leadership back in twenty twenty-one. In this view, an enemy that can manage personnel disputes and voting procedures isn't defeated. And that administrative survival is backed by deep ideological commitment on the street. A planned anti-Hamas public protest in late June failed to gain any traction. Instead, crowds at recent funeral processions in the Gaza Strip chanted that October seventh will return. They explicitly rejected any international stabilization forces and declared that all of Gaza is for Hamas. Supporters invoked the early Islamic battle of Khaybar against Jewish tribes. They pledged to continue the struggle as the men of Mohammad Deif. For this camp, these demonstrations prove that no amount of precision targeting can erase the popular support sustaining the organization.

That targeting looks very different to Palestinian civilians on the ground. For them, the hunt for these commanders translates into disproportionate violence that slaughters peaceful families in their beds. Eyewitnesses to the Gaza City strike describe waking up early in the morning to heavy, continuous explosions. That sent children running and screaming. Residents rushed outside to find their neighbor's building destroyed. They began pulling the dismembered bodies of men, women, and children from the rubble. Among the dead were a fifty-six-year-old Christian woman named Maysaa Abu Daoud and her thirty-six-year-old daughter Mary Al-Najjar. Neighbors described the two women as peaceful people who had nothing to do with the hostilities. In this view, Israeli operations treat entire residential communities as combatants. Relatives of the victims say they were simply minding their own business at home. They note that they don't fire rockets or hurl stones. They argue that the military possesses the most powerful arsenal and uses it to destroy everything. In their words, the army labels any child who resists as a terrorist. Gaza health officials report that at least fourteen hundred Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since a ceasefire was announced around October twenty twenty-five. That leaves families to bear the devastating cost of a war that shows no sign of ending.

So the campaign in Gaza has settled into a grinding war of attrition. The military is systematically working through a list of thousands. They're betting that relentless pressure will eventually collapse the command structure. But the group's bureaucracy is still functioning and its street support is entrenched. That means the pace of assassinations is currently outmatched by the organization's ability to replace its dead.

Amid those fatal civilian tolls, back in late September, the government moved to revoke the citizenship of the directors behind the NAZA documentary. And now the military has put out a ten-page formal rebuttal to the film. Alongside that document, the army released a database. It identifies one hundred and seventy Palestinians killed in the Gaza war, who'd been counted as journalists, as members of militant groups. The military states one hundred and eighteen belonged to the Hamas military wing. Forty-nine belonged to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And two belonged to the Popular Resistance Committees. According to the dossier, seventeen of the people listed participated directly in the October two thousand and twenty-three attacks.

That direct involvement is the core of the army's defense here. The military argues the film presents a, and the phrase they use is, distorted, misleading and disingenuous picture of the I D F target planning and striking process. The rebuttal states the documentary fundamentally misrepresents how intelligence is cross-referenced. It clarifies that artificial intelligence doesn't determine whether a person is designated as a target. And it doesn't decide whether a strike is carried out. The army says it's reviewed hundreds of incidents involving reported civilian deaths during the war. And they say a threshold allowing two hundred casualties for a strike against a military objective has never existed. The case against the film also challenges its reliance on anonymous testimonies. The military notes the interviewees held low-level roles. They didn't participate in the relevant command decisions. Because these soldiers lacked visibility into the final stages of strike approval, the army argues their accounts can't be treated as a complete record of policy. The rebuttal adds these limited perspectives, in their words, can't establish the existence of genocidal intent under international law. Because the military says no such intent ever existed. Turning to the database of slain media workers, the military insists these individuals were targeted as active terrorist operatives. They weren't targeted for legitimate journalistic work. The army points to Hassan Eslaiah. He was killed in a strike on Nasser Hospital in May two thousand and twenty-five. And they use him as an example of a militant exploiting press credentials. Following the release of similar intelligence, international press monitors removed twenty-two names from their tallies in late September. And a review of foreign broadcast reports found fifty-three of the names examined had ties to militant factions. The military is demanding corrections from international outlets. They argue a camera doesn't grant immunity to a combatant. Finally, the army argues the documentary's assessments of civilian casualties completely mischaracterize Israel's objectives in the war. The rebuttal states the film fails to give due weight to the context essential for evaluating the campaign. Specifically the October two thousand and twenty-three massacres and the systemic embedding of Hamas within civilian infrastructure. The military maintains that without understanding the grave security threat that materialized in those attacks, the subsequent operations in Gaza can't be accurately judged.

The journalists on the other side of this are holding their ground. The international media partners behind the investigation stand fully behind the film. And they reject the military's characterization. A spokesperson for The Guardian says the documentary's the product of three years of reporting. It draws on interviews with more than one hundred sources. The spokesperson adds those sources include, in their words, officers and soldiers who were involved in multiple stages of the targeting process in Gaza. That includes intelligence, operations and the final authorization process. The documentary relies on twenty-four Israeli soldiers. They're mostly intelligence personnel, and they describe a systematic loosening of safeguards against civilian harm. The film alleges strikes on junior Hamas operatives were approved with an allowance of up to twenty expected civilian deaths. Meanwhile, senior commanders could be targeted with an allowance of up to two hundred. The investigation claims that in one instance, a strike was approved despite an estimated civilian death toll of about five hundred.

Now those specific claims have to answer to the army's declassified files. The military has placed its intelligence files and formal rebuttals on the public record. That directly challenges the international mechanisms that track wartime casualties. Global press monitors and human rights organizations now hold the army's declassified intelligence. It leaves them to either amend their databases or defend their initial reporting.

Far beyond Gaza, two years have passed since Hassan Nasrallah was killed in a September two thousand twenty-four strike in Beirut. On September tenth of this year, Israel detonated eleven hundred tons of explosives in the tunnels beneath the Ali al-Taher ridge above Nabatiya. That triggered a four-point-one-magnitude tremor. Since an April truce, Israeli and Lebanese delegations held seven meetings in Washington and Rome. And on June twenty-sixth, a United States-brokered framework agreement tied an Israeli withdrawal to Hezbollah's disarmament.

Looking at that framework, people on the right say clearing fighters from the tunnels shows Israel's overturned Hezbollah's system of deterrence. But they warn this isn't a permanent acceptance of the status quo. An analysis in J N S notes that in the past, Israel went to great lengths to avoid escalation. They staged a fake casualty evacuation after an anti-tank missile attack on Avivim in September two thousand nineteen. And they held back from a broad response when a terrorist planted an explosive at Megiddo Junction in March two thousand twenty-three. Today, Israel operates freely against targets like the Ali al-Taher ridge, which sits roughly fifteen kilometers from the border. Meanwhile residents in communities like Kibbutz Dafna less than two kilometers away hear the powerful strikes without facing massive retaliation. The case goes further. They argue this tactical quiet isn't a permanent peace. It's a calculated pause to buy time while Iran helps the group rebuild. Following the two thousand twenty-four ceasefire, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps dispatched around one hundred officers to Lebanon to retrain fighters and restructure the military command. Tehran also sent more than one billion dollars to the organization in two thousand twenty-five. But the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria has since constricted those logistical supply routes. So to maintain its influence without bearing the full financial cost of reconstruction, the organization's outsourcing relief efforts to civil charities. And they're relying on state allies to block disarmament. Before his death, Hassan Nasrallah urged supporters to shoulder the burden of recovery. Now, initiatives like WaTaawanou's Al-Wajh al-Hassan project are planning repairs for twenty classrooms in Ramyeh. Hezbollah members earn five hundred to seven hundred dollars a month in a country whose minimum wage is three hundred and twelve dollars. And forty-four percent of people there live in poverty. That grassroots backing provides political cover. You see that reflected in a May two thousand twenty-six poll showing that eighty-seven point five percent of Lebanese Shiites oppose disarming the group.

That cover translates to the ground. When Israeli tanks advanced on Khiyam in March, the elite Radwan Force received orders to join the battle and block them. The group later claimed to have repelled an advance attempt by enemy forces on the village's southern outskirts. Secretary General Naim Qassem has vowed to confront Israeli occupation and expansion. And parliamentary bloc leader Mohammad Raad praised Nabih Berri's resistant positions and his commitment to the option of resistance and liberation. The organization dismissed the June framework trading an Israeli withdrawal for verified disarmament as null and void. Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament Nabih Berri described the resistance's weapons as their pride and honor. He insists that any decision regarding the country's defense must come through calm, consensual dialogue rather than threats. He added the June twenty-sixth agreement simply won't be implemented. This commitment to the resistance extends directly into the social and reconstruction initiatives led by the community operating across the south. Afif Shouman, the president of WaTaawanou, credits Hassan Nasrallah with providing the direct and foundational guidance that built the charity. That ensures the civilian base is cared for while the fighters continue to defend the borders.

The immediate border remains quiet. But the infrastructure of the conflict is simply moving inland. While the military clears the ridges in the south, the financial networks sustaining the resistance are operating untouched in Beirut and abroad. The next phase will test whether tactical victories on the ground can outpace a rebuilding effort shielded by the Lebanese state.

Turning inward to threats within the borders, the Shin Bet designated commercial drones used by criminal syndicates as national security threats last month. And now authorities have indicted a Bar-Ilan University mathematics professor for plotting mass attacks against Arab citizens. The indictment lays out a plan to murder between six hundred and seven hundred Arabs to trigger mass panic and permanent expulsion. Preparations for the attack began in February two thousand and twenty-three. The professor intended to deploy seventy-two participants across twelve squads, with at least half of them licensed to carry weapons.

That specific plot is treated as a secondary detail by right-wing security groups. They're looking at the actual insurgency already operating inside the country. The argument's that Arab crime families and smuggling rings have amassed vast arsenals that pose an existential domestic threat. Security estimates suggest there are anywhere from a quarter of a million to nearly a million illegal weapons currently circulating inside Israel. This firepower's now augmented by commercial drones capable of carrying payloads of up to four hundred kilograms. To stop this accumulation, the proposed response is a mandatory five-year prison sentence for smuggling and illegal weapon possession, doubling to ten years for a repeat offense. And the case goes further. It argues the state must stop treating internal armed networks and the Palestinian Authority as civil law enforcement issues. They want them treated as insurgent elements. The leadership maintains a trained and armed force of sixty thousand to seventy thousand personnel. Over the last two years, roughly one hundred and twenty incidents involved their active security personnel participating in terror attacks. The ideological commitment is open. Their president stated that their last dollar will be given to those killed and their families.

The view from the left flips that entirely. They see the state deliberately leaving Arab communities undefended against spiraling crime while treating their civilian presence as a hostile threat. That's the reading in the magazine Local Call. While eighteen Arab citizens were murdered between nineteen eighty and nineteen ninety-nine, the annual death toll reached a peak of two hundred and fifty-two in two thousand and twenty-five. By March of last year, only about twenty percent of murder cases in Arab society resulted in indictments, compared to sixty-five percent in Jewish society. And meanwhile, one hundred and thirty-three Arab citizens have been killed by Israeli police since two thousand. So those on the left argue the plot reflects a mainstreaming political atmosphere. They see selective law enforcement and deep systemic abandonment of Arab citizens. Professor Riyad Aghbaria of Ben-Gurion University argues that if an Arab lecturer had been accused, nobody would've waited for an indictment before declaring them a fifth column. Last month, right-wing activists set up an outpost near Majd al-Krum and described the local residents as temporary. And a high school student was recorded on video saying every Arab in the country needs to die.

That atmosphere surrounds a legal process that's just beginning. The professor's trial will now proceed in the Central District Court. For the broader country, the security establishment's left navigating a heavily armed criminal underground. And they're facing mounting demands to treat domestic violence and illicit weapons as a full national security front.

Far beyond domestic operations, on the second of October, the army grounded all tactical attack drones after a fatal friendly-fire crash in northern Gaza. But the broader crisis in unmanned warfare is actually playing out in Eastern Europe. Until recently, Ukrainian forces were intercepting more than ninety percent of incoming Russian propeller suicide drones. Now, reports detailing Russia's deployment of jet-powered drones have exposed a critical vulnerability. The shift toward high-speed, low-cost autonomous mass is placing severe economic strain on traditional missile interceptor stockpiles. It's forcing a reckoning over how modern militaries defend their airspace.

That reckoning starts with the sheer speed of these new models. They achieve attack speeds of about six hundred kilometers per hour, making slow piston-engine interceptors totally ineffective. Production is estimated at more than one hundred jet drones per day, with each one costing roughly one hundred and twenty thousand dollars to build and carrying a ninety-kilogram warhead. Against this threat, Ukrainian interception rates have dropped to around sixty percent, and possibly under fifty percent. The case goes further. The weapons trade means this capability will inevitably reach Iran. That proliferation will confront Israel with massive swarms flying low to the ground, which traditional air defenses can't economically defeat. Because these weapons fly winding, low-altitude paths in huge volumes, they pose a more complex hazard than ballistic missiles. To counter this looming threat, the conclusion is that Israel must urgently deploy directed-energy defenses, because laser systems represent the only viable interception solution against swarms of this speed and scale.

A different view of the drone war looks past those laser systems, straight at the sheer volume of weapons required to survive it. In active combat areas like Pokrovsk, drones and unmanned ground vehicles now account for up to ninety percent of military activity. Ukrainian forces deploy approximately nine thousand drones daily, and the country aims to manufacture over four million drones annually. Some of these strike quadcopters cost only about five hundred dollars to produce. To scale up to meet this reality, Western powers must revive the decentralized factory models of the Second World War. When President Roosevelt set a goal in 1940 to build fifty thousand military aircraft annually, it required a massive industrial pivot. By 1944, American factories were turning out a combat plane every five minutes. Ukraine has mirrored this by expanding its domestic drone sector from seven companies before the war to roughly five hundred today. Decentralized mass manufacturing is the only way to build the necessary stockpiles.

For advocates of tech partnerships, the answer to this industrial challenge is already being demonstrated by the American military. Cutting through procurement red tape allows defense startups to move autonomous platforms from prototype to frontline success in under a year. When an American helicopter went down near the Strait of Hormuz, a twenty-four-foot autonomous vessel known as the Corsair reached the two downed pilots within two hours to rescue them. By July, three of those same vessels were used to strike a submarine and ship maintenance facility at Iran's Bandar Abbas naval base. The manufacturer delivered more than three hundred of these vessels after moving from prototype to production in less than twelve months. Buying cheap autonomous interceptors at scale solves the financial mismatch against hostile drone swarms. At the onset of the conflict with Iran, the United States Army purchased thirteen thousand Merops autonomous interceptors across a span of just eight days. Originally deployed by Ukrainian forces, these interceptors cost less than half the price of the Iranian Shahed drones they destroy.

That transition from highly advanced, expensive interceptors to mass-produced autonomous systems is no longer a theoretical debate about future doctrine. The industrial base is now racing to build interceptors that are cheaper than the targets they destroy. But until those production lines reach scale, air defense arrays will have to ration their remaining missiles against an expanding volume of incoming threats.

That's the picture as best we can see it. All Fronts is a Daily Lion production. Don't forget to tune in to the other Daily Lion shows: Sixty One, Crosswinds, and Tribe & State. See you next Wednesday.