The Commander Yossi Sarielhead of the Israeli army’s intelligence unit 8200, the largest of the armed forcessubmitted his resignation on Thursday. According to his resignation letter, the reason he left his position was his responsibility for the October 7 attacks, even though nearly a year has passed since that tragic day for Israel.
“October 7 at 6:29 a.m. I did not fulfill the task expected of me“as my subordinates and commanders expected and as the citizens of the country I love so much expected of me,” begins a letter sent by Sariel to members of Unit 8200, collected by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
In the letter, the commander takes responsibility for the unit’s failure that day, ensuring that I didn’t understand that the border with Gaza “requires a different risk management system, based on the minimal margin of error that exists.”
HAS less than a month since the anniversary of the attack Hamas’ Sariel submitted his resignation in accordance with “the state of the war, the processes of consolidating the service and strengthening resilience within the unit, as well as after the completion of preliminary investigation processes into what happened.”
THE unit 8200 It is the largest information gathering unit in the Military Intelligence Directorate, tasked with both creating and using tools for collecting, analyzing, processing and sharing information, making it a spearhead of cyberwarfare for the Israeli armed forces.
According to a report by Channel 12 News, Israel’s most popular channel, 8200 was responsible for design the alert system to warn of a possible invasion by Gaza militias in 2014.
This Thursday, Sariel became the fourth higher post who resigned from his post to report on October 7.
Aharon Haliva, then head of the military intelligencewas the first government official to resign, as well as one of the few, along with the head of Israel’s southern district of the domestic intelligence service – Shin Bet – and the head of the Gaza Army Division, General Avi Rosenfield.
The lack of accountability in Israel has been a source of discontent within society, particularly against the top echelons of the military and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has taken no public responsibility for what happened.
In October, Shin Bet chief Ron Bar apologized for what happened on October 7 and took responsibility, but for now he remains in office.
Although the military is conducting an internal investigation into the failures that enabled the Hamas attack, there is no national commission of inquiry that could shine a spotlight on Netanyahu’s government.
