Three years after October 7, is the IDF ready to stop an invasion? - analysis

OCTOBER 6, 2026 19:03After days of hearing how incompetent Israel's entire security apparatus is at checking pilot security for foreign airlines, it is necessary to ask, with trepidation: Three years after October 7, is the IDF really ready enough to prevent a potential future invasion?The answer varies depending on which front we are discussing.Israel's neighbors include: Lebanon, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.The short version is that the chances of an impending large-scale October 7-style invasion are extremely low for the next year, while more unpredictable five years or more down the road.The IDF is still on the attack and has large security zones in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza, which it lacked before October 7. In the West Bank, the IDF has 25 battalions, up from 11, and has large contingents of soldiers deep in problem cities such as Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur al-Shams.IDF soldiers lower Israeli flags to half-mast at the President's Residence in Jerusalem to commemorate the October 7 massacre, October 5, 2026. (credit: ISAAC HERZOG)How long the IDF will maintain these security zones remains an open question.The Trump administration has pressured Israel to undertake at least partial withdrawals from each zone, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resisted to date, other than in Lebanon, where he has complied but slow-walked the process.But what if Trump compels Netanyahu or a potential new premier, Gadi Eisenkot, to withdraw from 63% of Gaza to 30% or 15%? What if the same happens over the next year in Lebanon and Syria?Will Israel remain ready or go to sleep on the job after several years of quiet within the Green Line?The Jerusalem Post has received briefings throughout the war and recently in order to paint a picture of the country's readiness.Where has the IDF improved?IDF's HUMINT Unit 504, collecting other physical intelligence in GazaOn October 7, the IDF had no human spies in Gaza and was relying almost entirely on cyber or signal intelligence. The IDF's Intelligence Directorate's Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Unit 504 has gone into overdrive in Gaza since then, but also the IDF has nearly complete freedom to use drones to surveil Hamas from the air, as the terror group has lost the capacity to shoot them down.Some combination of this and other intelligence helped the IDF nab Mu'in al-Arabid on September 2, which led to the killing of three out of Hamas's five brigade commanders in a matter of weeks, with no response from Hamas.If Israel keeps up even a fraction of this penetration and pressure, it will be in a much better position to block any invasion plans, which currently Hamas could not even contemplate.IDF Intelligence's 'Red Team' does not save military from some big misses on IranA leading failure of IDF intelligence to disregard Hamas invading as a scenario to plan for was the "groupthink" which infected all Israelis.IDF Intelligence Chief Maj.-Gen. Shlomi Binder, who took over in August 2024, made a wise move in elevating "red teams," whose main job is to play devil's advocate to accepted theories, to having brigade-level human and technological resources, adding hundreds of officers and a more senior commander.But IDF intelligence has not stopped missing major strategic issues.During Operation Roaring Lion, IDF intelligence believed it could and had destroyed a much larger quantity of Iran's ballistic missiles and launchers than it actually did (though it did succeed in disrupting future production), which majorly impacted and impacts the broader strategic picture.Israeli recommendations to the US about whether the Strait of Hormuz would present a major dilemma that could change the course of the war were wildly off.IDF intelligence has also been overly optimistic about its ongoing pressure on Hezbollah leading to progress in at least partial disarmament. These issues do not relate directly to invasions, but they show large holes still exist in the intelligence establishment due to "groupthink."This shows that even with "red teams," large institutions use paradigms to map out their work and plan their budgets and rarely second-guess those paradigms.Technology, Islam experts, and AIA major failure of October 7 was that IDF intelligence had been reducing the number of Arabic speakers and experts in Islam in recent years.Hacking and intercepting signal intelligence could be used to rapidly translate Arabic messages for non-Arabic speakers. Since October 7, IDF intelligence has been filling the empty seats of Arabic speakers and experts.But IDF intelligence is about to embark on a new AI-agent revolution. AI will not only be used to help IDF officers complete tasks faster, but will also start to co-plan and map out basic strategy with them.The upside is that AI agents are expected to identify new methods to gather intelligence that humans could not arrive at on their own.But the downside could be that only a couple of years after bringing back the human cultural understanding element, IDF intelligence may once again become more dominated by technology, which could lead to missing complex nuances that only human experts of Islam might catch.There is no question that, initially, after October 7, the IDF has been taking its mostly female, low-ranking observers more seriously.Infamously, the female observers who constantly warned of potential Hamas invasion threats had been ignored prior to October 7.The playing field has changed. The lookouts are now pouring over Hamas moves deep within Gaza near the yellow line where Israel's 63% of Gaza territory meets Hamas's area. This is a big improvement from looking at Hamas on Israel's border.But some lookouts have complained that, once again, their warnings are not being acted on, even though they are being heard. One lookout recently said that now soldiers on the yellow line can only open fire on Hamas with approvals from top commanders at IDF headquarters as opposed to with approvals from battalion field commanders. If so, she asked, "What is the point of reporting Hamas movements?"This is not a good dynamic for moving forward.The question of whether Israel has enough troops on the border is ongoing and dynamic.IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir said this week that the IDF will coordinate its size and readiness along the borders based on its enemies' capabilities, not on intelligence assessments of their intentions.This includes the fact that the number of forces assigned to readiness and reserve roles across all sectors has doubled.That sounds good in principle, and if you ask Zamir, he will say that this also means the standing army policing the borders all around is twice what it was in OctoberBut that is not really the question, as twice as many soldiers would not have stopped Hamas's invasion either, given that Hamas outnumbered Israeli defenders around 10-to-1.So the better question is: How quickly can the IDF multiply its numbers by three or four times? If it can be done in 30 minutes or two hours, then many of the problems from October 7 could be mitigated.Once it becomes three hours or more, it might still be too late.Zamir's speech this week, saying that he has given and will give greater freedom to field commanders to take action and deploy, as well as saying that the IDF is working harder to help headquarters get better and faster understandings of the true situation on the border, might improve reaction time for sending reinforcements. But all of this still depends on the IDF and the country continuing to take Hamas seriously even years into the future.In addition, the IDF is bragging about its amazing new technologies and connectivity between all sensors. This is fantastic if everything is going well, but if there are no backup sensors that are mobile and that Hamas cannot see, surveil, and plan against, then the Gaza terror group could try to surprise attack the sensors again, the same as it did three years ago.In May, the IDF assassinated Hamas's military chief, and then assassinated his replacement within a period of weeks. The group could not respond in any meaningful way.The IDF seems to strike Hamas officials at will on an almost daily basis, even in a period when, nominally, the sides have been in a ceasefire for a year.Paradoxically, this has led the IDF to now exhibit an even greater superiority complex than it did prior to October 7.To avoid falling into the overconfidence of dismissing Hamas, IDF intelligence has shifted gears so that its field and technological intelligence arms now conduct separate evaluations of the threat.In addition, there are now both short- and long-term assessments of the invasion threat, which might help catch threats that were previously missed. In the past, short- and long-term trends were conflated, often leading to the dismissal of potentially distant, dangerous trends in the face of the seemingly endless quiet of the present, which made everyone feel more complacent.All of this has combined with a still relatively new full brigade of hundreds of officers focused on the warning mission, including a brigadier-general-level commander, to better ensure that warnings are taken seriously throughout the IDF's Byzantine bureaucracy.Israel currently has most of its enemies on the run.Yet, politics can get in the way. The government's unforced error of permitting National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to block police efforts to rein in Jewish extremist violence in the West Bank has made the area Israel's current most dangerous front.Further, it is human nature to lose focus, and relying on technology has its own dangers.In fact, avoiding an overreliance on technology may have been a post-October 7 blip on a trajectory in which human intuition continues to be deemphasized, just as most of humanity continues to give up more of its functions to AI automation.Three years late, "V", the junior female intelligence officer whose personal intuition and warnings about Hamas's invasion plans were ignored by her superiors, received an award. That is the right message, if belated, to send to the IDF intelligence corps.But with AI ascendant, how many "V"s will be ready to protect Israel in the future?Follow us on Google