On May 28, 2026, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program (JKISP) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted a seminar with Yossi Melman, a longtime intelligence and security correspondent for Haaretz and author of ten books on Israel's intelligence community, including the New York Times bestseller Every Spy a Prince. Amichai Magen, Director of JKISP, introduced the talk, and Or Rabinowitz, Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies, led the conversation. Melman said Israel's 2026 war plan against Iran included an attempt to install former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a regime-change figurehead, an idea Mossad had cultivated for years through contacts made during his foreign travels. The plan collapsed when a strike meant only to kill Ahmadinejad's guards wounded him instead, a scheme Melman called "ludicrous," noting that Iranian intelligence already suspected Ahmadinejad of being compromised. He pointed to the assassination of Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, on the war's first day as an example of the tactical side of Israeli intelligence working exactly as it should. Turning that kind of precision into a lasting strategic outcome is the part Israel keeps failing at, Melman said.

Asked to connect this pattern to October 7th, Melman discussed the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Egypt staged repeated military drills along the border before its real invasion and trained Israeli intelligence to expect nothing. Melman said the same pattern held in Gaza. Female spotters had warned for weeks about unusual activity along the border, but their commanders told them to report only what they saw, not what they thought it meant, and Hamas had activated and deactivated emergency communications twice in the weeks before the attack, so that when the real signal came, Israeli analysts dismissed it as another drill. Mossad, Shin Bet, and military intelligence were still arguing over who was responsible for Gaza nearly two decades after Israel's 2005 withdrawal, and Melman said that confusion over jurisdiction was part of the failure as well. Asked whether Israel deliberately strengthened Hamas to weaken the Palestinian Authority, Melman said yes, since Hamas, unlike the Palestinian Authority, will never be negotiated with, which made it a useful tool for a government that wanted to keep the Palestinians divided. The biggest threat facing Israel right now, Melman said, is not Iran, Gaza, or Hezbollah, but rather the country's own internal polarization.