This is John Batchel, conversation with Seth Fransman, my colleague.

He's at the Drusum Post, a war correspondent.

He's at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

He's the author of a new book, The October 7 War, Israel's Battle for Security in Gaza.

This is from the history of Hamas, its rise in the late 20th century, to springtime, 2024,

Seth is giving us not only the background, but the combat and the combat operations.

At the same time, commenting on the intelligence failure that is October 7th.

Here's Seth to describe how all intelligence failures look alike afterwards.

More of this tonight.

Yeah, I think it's just an example of a typical human failure, of complacency,

combined with arrogance, combined with looking in the wrong direction, and therefore

having a feedback loop in which everything that you're told, you just say, you just kind of dismiss

it. And so there was a lot of group think at the top there. I mean, look, if you're in a room

with 10 people and everyone thinks one thing, it's always worth to be the one that says, you know,

let's be a contrary and let's say it's not that. And you can look at that always in history,

whether it's stock market crashes or anything else. And you can say, it's always good to have

one person, you know, say, you know what, what if this is not the case? So the problem that

happened prior to October 70s, that there was a huge amount of

information coming out of Gaza, as you said, the women observers that are part of these observations

are part of the idea if it happens to be mostly women that they're serving them. But they were

watching Hamas training. Everyone knew Hamas's training. And they were telling their officers,

listen, not only are these guys training, but they're getting closer and close to their border.

...