The commander of the IDF SIGINT unit 8200 dispatched a strongly-worded letter to his commanders in which he sharply criticizes the leaks to the public regarding what happened in his unit before and after the Hamas invasion.
Israel Hayom reports that an internal message to the unit read: "I do not want to give any space to background noise. I do not want to spend even a minute on gossip and slander about our comrades. This is a war on our watch, and the war of our generation. This war is an obligation for me, for us."
The message states that the units commander has so far refrained from accepting responsibility for the surprise attack despite the fact that the unit is responsible both for gathering and assessing intelligence, and that it is not impossible that gathering stronger evidence would have allowed the upper echelons to predict the attack before it happened.
Earlier reports stated that the lower ranks of the unit gave explicit warnings that the attack was to take place during the holiday season, and the upper echelons rejected the warnings.
The most senior officers in the unit only warned the political echelon that the protests over the judicial reform were raising the chances of a multi-front attack. "For our main enemies, Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, this weakness is an expression of a plan to speed up their linear agenda which ends in the collapse of Israel, and the current situation is an opportunity to increase its state of crisis," wrote Lieutenant General Amit Sahar to Prime Minister Netanyahu, shortly before the attack.
After the attack, there were reports that the failure had not been in signal intelligence, but rather over-reliance on signal intelligence and a failure to employ secret agents within the ranks of the enemy.