Brig. Gen. (res.) Amit Saar, the head of the Military Intelligence Directorate Research Division on October 7 and the man tasked as the nation's top intelligence evaluator, died overnight following a struggle with brain cancer.
Saar assumed leadership of the Research Division in October 2020. Throughout early 2023, specifically in February and July, he issued formal warnings to the prime minister, asserting that Israel's internal political-social turmoil – fueled by the judicial reform – was perceived as a weakness by Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Despite these warnings to the political echelon and the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Saar's focus remained largely on the northern front; he failed to foresee the scale of the Hamas onslaught.
Saar later maintained that he had no prior knowledge of the "Jericho Wall" plan, Hamas's blueprint for the invasion. Just 96 hours before the October 7 attack, he released an annual intelligence summary suggesting Hamas was strengthening only at a "moderate slope" and remained hampered by the loss of its tunnel network. "The blindness was not due to a lack [of data], but an excess. We saw so much, yet we failed to comprehend what we were looking at," Saar later reflected during an interview with the Kan 11 show Yehiye Tov.
During the early hours of October 7, Saar was briefed on "red flag" intelligence. He later admitted that he did not believe these indicators signaled an imminent war, attributing the failure to a long-standing "misconception" that proved impossible to shatter in the final hours before the massacre.
Saar stepped down in April 2024 to undergo medical treatment for a malignant tumor. In a final missive to the officers of the Research Division, he expressed the deep institutional and personal trauma of the failure. "We did not meet what was expected of us, what we expect of ourselves," he wrote.
