“Israel’s strike on Hamas’s political leadership in Qatar’s capital, aimed at forcing an end to the Gaza war, looks like a rare Israeli tactical mistake.”

– David Ignatius, “Doha attack narrows Israel’s options in Gaza war,” Washington Post, September 10, 2025,

With this singular sentence, the Post’s David Ignatius has demonstrated once again that he is unaware or prefers to ignore the numerous strategic and tactical mistakes that Israel has committed over the past eight decades since gaining independence.  Israel has pursued numerous confrontations in this period, and its decision-making has produced a significant number of strategic and tactical mistakes.

The Suez War in 1956.  Israel never should have been a secret partner in the Franco-British colonial war to depose Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and regain control of the Suez Canal.  Israel’s participation convinced many Arab leaders that Israel was nothing more than an extension of European colonial power in the Middle East.  Heavy political pressure from the United States and the Soviet Union led to the humiliating withdrawal of the British-French-Israeli forces from Egypt.  British Prime Minister Anthony Eden had to resign, and the crisis made it more difficult for the international community to deal with the Soviet invasion of Hungary at the same time.

The Six-Day War in 1967.  The Six-Day War was marked by two strategic lies that compromised Israeli credibility in the international community and should have compromised Israel’s standing with its only serious ally, the United States.  As a junior analyst at the CIA at the time, I helped draft the report that described Israel’s attack on Egypt, which Israelis described as a preemptive attack.  It was nothing of the sort.  We had access to sensitive communications intercepts that documented Israeli plans for the attack, and there was no evidence whatsoever of an Egyptian battle plan.  In fact, half of Egyptian fighting forces were engaged in Yemen’s civil war, and there was no sign of Egyptian readiness in terms of air or armored power.  The lack of readiness allowed the Israeli air force to destroy Egyptian fighter aircraft that were parked wingtip to wingtip on Egyptian air bases.

In addition to lying about the start of the war, the Israelis were even more deceitful three days later when they attributed their malicious attack on the USS Liberty to a random accident.  If so, it was a well-planned accident.  The ship was a U.S. intelligence vessel in international waters, both slow-moving and lightly armed.  It brandished a huge U.S. flag in the midday sun, and didn’t resemble a ship in any other navy, let alone a ship in the arsenal of one of Israel’s weak enemies.  The USS Liberty was providing excellent intelligence information on Israeli battle plans, which is why Israel wanted it out of the way.

Yet the Israelis claimed they were attacking an Egyptian ship.  Israeli boats fired machine guns at close range at those helping the wounded, then machine-gunned the life rafts that survivors dropped in hope of abandoning the ship,  Thirty-four American sailors died, but the National Security Agency’s official U.S. investigation of the disaster remains classified to this day.

The Lebanese Invasion in 1982.  Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon led to a siege of the capital city of Beirut, which had not been discussed with Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and which violated Israeli pledges to Arab states that it would not attack their capital cities.  The Israelis made this pledge because of the vulnerability of their own capital, Jerusalem.  The raid was designed to force the Palestine Liberation Organization out of Lebanon, which it did, but the PLO was replaced by a far more dangerous and lethal insurgency, Hezbollah, which brought Iran’s Revolutionary Guard into the picture.  Sharon believed his military forces would be in Lebanon for several weeks or months.  In actual fact, they were there for the next two decades…and Israeli military forces are back in southern Lebanon today.

The Gaza War.  There are too many Israeli strategic and tactical blunders to discuss in this short essay.  An intelligence failure allowed the Hamas attack in the first place, and Israel’s creation of an outdoor prison in Gaza twenty years ago certainly explains Hamas’s pursuit of revenge.  The war itself is genocidal in nature, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been appropriately labeled a war criminal by numerous international and human rights organizations.  The strike in Doha to kill Hamas’s lead negotiator certainly tells you all you need to know regarding Israel’s strategic and tactical blunders. (The intelligence failure that enabled the initial success of the Gaza invasion in 2023 was similar to the strategic intelligence failure that led to the initial success of the Egyptian-Syrian attack against Israel in 1973, when the Israelis had strategic warning from a well-placed Egyptian operative.)

Clearly, there was nothing “rare” regarding the Israeli blunder in Qatar.  It was part and parcel of a far larger picture of Israel reliance on military forces to achieve objectives that require diplomacy and negotiation.  Israeli hubris regarding its own capabilities and the lack of regard for Arab capabilities and coordination are key factors in its intelligence failures.  The genocidal campaign in Gaza has made Israel a pariah state, and U.S. complicity has turned the international community against the United States as well.

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