On a visit to Israel last week, Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the U.S. president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, told senior Israeli military and intelligence officials what he thought went wrong on Oct. 7.

“I think too many influential people in uniform, too many influential people in suits, misdiagnosed the nature of Hamas,” Gorka told JNS.

Israeli officials decided that Hamas isn’t like Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah and that it is a political group that required a political resolution. They figured “there is a deal to be made with Hamas,” Gorka said. “They were wrong.”

Israel and the United States are “very good at killing terrorists,” but “if the group has a powerful ideology that allows them to recruit six replacements for

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