Three years ago this week, Hamas launched an invasion that Israel’s own intelligence services considered essentially impossible. Elliot Kaufman’s new book, In the War Room, explains why that confidence was misplaced, and just how close Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar came to succeeding. Kaufman spent the better part of the last two years reporting on this war for the Wall Street Journal, and his book pulls from documents recovered from Hamas along with direct access to Israel’s top political, military, and intelligence leadership. I asked him why Hamas launched the attack when it did. His answer: It was the opening move of a plan to destroy Israel entirely, one that depended on Hezbollah joining within days with a missile arsenal capable of leveling Haifa and crippling Israel’s power grid. That never happened, and Kaufman traces the failure back to one man, Hassan Nasrallah, and a single moment of caution that changed the course of the war. I also asked him about the viral Haaretz report claiming Netanyahu ignored specific warnings from the United Arab Emirates, and that Sinwar attacked partly out of frustration over a stalled economic deal with Israel. Kaufman didn’t dismiss it outright. Some of it holds up—Israeli intelligence did receive warnings, just not in the form or specificity the article suggests. But he pushes back on the deeper implication: that this was a failure of warnings rather than a failure of imagination. Israel had plenty of red flags; what it lacked was the ability to believe Hamas would actually act on them. We spent real time on the internal Israeli story. Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and opposition leader Benny Gantz ran this war while, by Kaufman’s account, detesting one another personally, refusing each other’s calls, and banning each other’s aides from meetings. That dysfunction shaped real decisions, including the early argument over whether to strike Hezbollah first while Israel still had surprise on its side, or focus on Gaza. Kaufman thinks Israel made the wrong call—the three-week gap before troops entered Gaza gave the international media time to turn against Israel, a window he argues never closed. We also got into what he considers the single biggest unforced error of the war—a two-month stretch when Israel cut off aid to pressure Hamas into a hostage deal, a decision that backfired badly and fed a global narrative about famine in Gaza that Kaufman argues never held up to scrutiny. By the end, we zoomed out to the bigger picture. Hamas set out to destroy Israel, but instead, Hezbollah lost its missile arsenal, Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria collapsed, and Iran’s nuclear program sits in rubble under a U.S. naval blockade. Every domino Sinwar knocked over on October 7 ended up falling against him. https://bookshop.org/p/books/in-the-war-room-the-inside-story-of-israel-s-fight-against-hamas-and-the-iranian-axis-elliot-kaufman/4cf4cd5e88222bda?ean=9798895654804&affiliate=93116 The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.