Israel's CYBER SPY Unit on Brink of Collapse!

Right, so a bit of cheery news for a change as it’s being reported that Israel’s oh so creepy, oh so secretive Unit 8200, the cyber spy division of the IDF is on it’s last legs and what makes this story all the ore delicious is it appears to be entirely self inflicted.
Of all the ranks of the IDF and how they have conducted themselves over the last 14 months since the night of October 7th and Israel’s assault on Gaza thereafter, Unit 8200 has come in for particular criticism in it’s failings and when you consider it is also actually the largest single unit in the IDF, and what former members of this unit have gone on to do, the work they’ve gone into around the world, people really ought to know a lot more about this division of the IDF and why it matters so much that the crisis it is in is absolutely a cause for celebration.
Right, so Unit 8200 is in significant bother and has been coming in for a lot of criticism in Israel itself for numerous failings actually going back to before the events of October 7th and they’ve added up, to the point the unit may now be verging on collapse from within and that can’t come soon enough.
Unit 8200 is the cyber spy division of the Israeli Defence Forces, and for the most part we don’t know what activities exactly they carry out, because the nature of their job is to be secretive. It is the modern day iteration of the old Israeli units that used to be employed in codebreaking and intelligence, which in todays modern era continues in that intelligence gathering role, whilst also carrying out data mining, as well as carrying out technological attacks and strikes, employing people as spies within the ranks of Israel’s enemies, most notably amongst Palestinians, using blackmail and extortion rather than wages in order to coerce co-operation, to aid in carrying out Israeli attacks on Palestine and those in the unit reputedly mark a cross on their headsets for every Palestinian who is killed thanks to their efforts. So they’re a really charming lot, a shady bunch of genocidal nerds if you like.
Therefore I welcome you to join me in not shedding a single tear to hear that the unit is embroiled in civil war so to speak at this moment in time.
As an intelligence unit first and foremost, a spy unit, you’d imagine finding out about potential attacks on Israel before they happen, would be a very important part of Unit 8200’s remit, seems fairly obvious, but the fact they have repeatedly failed to do so, all the success strikes on Israel that have been made, well, the finger of blame is on them.
I mean I’ve thought about these strikes on Israel and it’s easy to just think about them in terms of Israel’s failing air defences, but of course where those defences are most effectively deployed, particularly as they have been pounded and there is a shortage of interceptors and iron dome batteries have been destroyed, where best to protect Israeli skies falls more and more on the intelligence unit, to know where best use of what air defence capability Israel still has should be placed. That ongoing failure has heaped more and more pressure on a unit, that has also largely been rendered rudderless because of previous failings even going into the genocide in Gaza and it actually does go to show that Israel thought they’d have a much easier time of things than they have in annihilating the Gaza Strip as they have, they never I’m sure dreamt that the world would turn on them as so many people have and politicians who might still have such loyalties to the Zionist regime, are becoming increasingly unpopular amongst their own people as a result.
Now the problems for Unit 8200 in regard of all of this began ahead of the night of October 7th. Where there has been a lot of discussion of Israel potentially having arranged this strike with Hamas, where the security wall cameras were offline allowing the Hamas breach to go undetected, where the Nova music festival was allowed to go ahead nearby, where the military protection in the nearby kibbutzim had been reduced, all circumstantially implicating Israel in allowing their own people to come under attack to excuse an incursion into Gaza by way of response.
Something like that, co-ordinating something like that, coercing Palestinians to make such a strike if Israel were indeed behind all of this, you would imagine Unit 8200 would be heavily involved, for them to not be involved and this happening all the same, an attack on Israel by Hamas happening and they didn’t see t coming, didn’t warn about it, well that would be a calamitous failure on their part surely?
Well a head at Unit 8200 did indeed end up rolling over this as it happens, but not until nearly a year later, in September of this year, so that casts an altogether different slant on things, was this guy truly contrite, it had just taken him basically a year after his failure to fess up and resign, or was he pushed out of convenience, or due to further Unit 8200 failures since, more than that initial strike by Hamas on October 7th, that possibly still therefore having been planned, just the cock ups since that hadn’t been?
Here's an excerpt from the Times of Israel detailing this resignation:
‘The commander of the IDF’s Unit 8200, Brig. Gen. Yossi Sariel, notified his superiors and subordinates on Thursday that he intends to resign from his position, close to a year after Israel’s intelligence establishment failed to prevent Hamas’s October 7 onslaught.
The IDF said Sariel is due to be replaced “in the coming period.” Unit 8200 is the IDF’s main signals intelligence unit, and is among the units pointed to as playing a role in the failure to prevent October 7. Sariel entered the position in February 2021 following a long military career in intelligence.
Sariel said Thursday that he was resigning over his role in the failures leading up to the massacre, although the move comes a full 11 months following the assault, in which thousands of Hamas terrorists breached Israel’s borders and killed around 1,200 people, taking 251 captive to Gaza.’
Even the pro Israel Times of Israel points out how long after the supposed failure he was resigning over actually occurred, so it just doesn’t sit right, something smells off. It’s been tried to be explained away that Sariel didn’ want to resign as he saw it as cowardice, but there have been further failures on Unit 8200’s part, so why did he not mention them too?
For example in just the last two weeks, the headquarters of Unit 8200, Glilot Base, and Kirya base, the home of Israel’s Defence Ministry, General Staff, War Room and Air Force Command have both been hit successfully by Hezbollah in drone strikes, drones needed for accuracy, because Israel placed these bases in amongst the suburbs of Tel Aviv, essentially building them in a place whereby they use their own citizens human shields. This strikes both came in one day on the 14th November, and that was actually the second strike this month on Glilot Base that had successfully found its mark. All of this was levied at Unit 8200, it was their fault, their failing that these happened.
Then there was that infamous pager attack in Lebanon. Unit 8200 was apparently behind that as well, but with all the collateral damage caused by such an indiscriminate attack, that simply won Israel global condemnation – rightfully, it was a terror attack pure and simple – and certainly didn’t do anything in practical terms to slow Hezbollah down from ongoing strikes on Israel.
But coming back to the problems of Unit 8200, the mutinous rumblings and the civil war from within seems to come about as a result of Yossi Sariel’s replacement, Ori Stav.
Three Unit 8200 officers, senior officers have spoken to US news outlet Axios – there might be a reason for that which I’ll come to, which have implicated Stav and not Sariel as being at fault for the failure to predict the events of October 7th. Now is this just the discontent of officers who were close to Sariel and aren’t keen on Stav, or is there more to it? Were Unit 8200 at fault for, or cut out of the plans concerning that Hama attack on October 7th, which lets not forget other nations, Egypt notably, were warning Israel was in the offing anyway? This is why an independent UN investigation into the lead up to October 7th is so important, because we’re completely reliant on Israel’s story and frankly that isn’t good enough, that can’t be trusted.
At any rate, the net result is the leadership of Unit 8200 changed in September and two months on senior officers are already speaking out against the new boss, who was it should be noted, the deputy leader of Unit 8200 under Sariel before replacing him. If the Unit implodes, so much the better not just for Palestinians but for the entire world.
Unit 8200’s personnel are selected from young people in their late teens and early 20s, some identified from highly competitive high school programmes, and as such many of them once their service has finished go on to careers in Israel's booming high tech and cyber security sector, but can also end up, much further afield in much more prominent roles.
I mentioned that Axios being who these three senior officers approached might not be too surprising, Axios’ White House Correspondent, Barak Ravid, is former Unit 8200 himself, a man who penned an article on the anniversary of October 7th, titled ‘One year after Oct. 7 attacks, Netanyahu is on a winning streak.’ Newsflash, he really isn’t.
Ravid has also claimed that attacks in Lebanon were an attempt to ‘reach de-escalation through escalation’ and he got utterly ridiculed and rightly so for that. He also hailed the pager attack as a success, instead of terrorism as globally it was condemned as.
We’re not immune from Unit 8200 in the UK either. Keir Starmer, long before he became Prime Minister and around the same time a lot of Party staff were being made redundant, took on an Unit 8200 spy called Assaf Kaplan, who is, as far as we’re aware, still working for the Labour Party. He was employed to monitor social media, he was the guy in charge of ostensibly looking to find excuses to purge left wing Labour members. Skwawkbox covered an Electronic Intifada story on this guy back in 2021, saying:
‘Assaf Kaplan, a former Unit 8200 officer, will take the post of ‘Social Listening and Organising Manager’ in Starmer’s office – ‘social listening’ is a term for organisations monitoring online conversations about them, or any other topic of interest. Kaplan is, or was until recently according to EI, also a Facebook friend of Shai Masot, the disgraced Israeli spy who was sent out of the UK after his interference in UK politics was discovered.
According to EI, “Kaplan’s LinkedIn states he has experience using a “digital monitoring platform” as well as “human analysis” to keep tabs on voters in Israeli elections.”
and the mention of his experience in military intelligence was deleted after the EI article was published.’
All in all if this unit finally collapses, so much the better for all of us, that it is in trouble and such a consequence could be on the cards is a reason to be cheerful today, I’ll certainly toast it’s none too soon demise.
It isn’t of course just failures from within that are allowing the ever growing list of enemies Israel has to contend with, but economic attacks further afield too. Take the Houthis in Yemen as an example, they’ve just embarked on their maddest strike yet, you won’t believe what they’ve managed this time, but do check out that story as your suggested next watch in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.