Israel intelligence relies on human and technological assets

The Israeli intelligence community utilizes a combination of human recruitment and advanced technology to gather information. While Israel has invested heavily in cyber intelligence, signal intelligence, and artificial intelligence, recent failures during Operation Al-Aqsa have highlighted a growing dependency on technology at the expense of human intelligence (HUMINT).

Historically, Israeli intelligence relied on Jewish agents for both routine and sensitive missions. As operations expanded into hostile environments, the service increasingly recruited agents within Arab and Palestinian societies, while Jewish agents provided logistical and operational support abroad. Recruitment processes involve money, ideology, and coercion, often resulting in the abandonment of agents once they are no longer useful.

Experts, including former national security advisor Yaakov Amidror, note that modern technological systems cannot fully compensate for a lack of human resources. The intelligence community faces the ongoing challenge of not only acquiring data but ensuring it is correctly interpreted by officials, as seen in the failure to act on warnings in both 1973 and 2023.