See : https://www.reuters.com/world/initial-us-intelligence-shows-...
> Initial U.S. intelligence reports show that some Iranian leaders were surprised by the Islamist group's unprecedented attack from Gaza, U.S. sources said on Wednesday.
> A U.S. official said, however, that Iran, Israel's regional arch-foe, had likely been aware that Hamas was planning to take action against Israel "but without the precise timing or scope of what occurred" last weekend.
It's also a fairly low amount of money for already-rich Qatari royalty to risk running afoul of their access to US markets.
Parts of Israeli intelligence also had a lot of advanced warning but it was dismissed by higher ups.
Most likely the trading was based on people who either read the internal Israeli intelligence on this topic or the Egyptian stuff. It is unlikely it was Qatar or Hamas associates, but rather more sophisticated actors who were in the Israeli market already and were used to acting on leaked information.
The main issue is how did someone get a date. The warnings I read were all sort of vague in terms of the exact date, rather specifying the high level plan.
this paper only compares volume to prior campaigns in Israel, and draws a conclusions based on that
additionally it has the bias of saying these are “gaps in enforcement of insider trading laws”, seemingly not understanding that an insider trading law would not cover things occurring outside of a company. nor should it.
its short selling of an ETF over a geopolitical event
so its just as likely any random stock picking newsletter could have called it. there’s even a guy on reddit that says Gaza attacks are based on the moon phase and tried to warn Israel, he happened to be not-inaccurate this time but its totally based on correlations only
" But as its name suggests, the U.S. law of insider trading is a poor fit for trading patterns of the kind we document here." (page 38).
So it does seem to understand that insider trading doesn't apply to the data here. I think "informed trading" meaning prior knowledge (not insider company trading) is the relevant point here.
yes, they are trying to shift opinions for this stretch of a case and masquerading it as academic. this is an enthusiast blog post at best, should have just posted it on Seeking Alpha or even just Medium
its good entertainment, they should have left a patreon link at the bottom
As for the Israeli public at large being informed about these attacks and knowing precisely when they would occur, it would seem they were as astonished as anyone. Whomever made these short trades on Oct 2nd were likely only a handful of informed parties. That's the component of this I'd love to know. Could the SEC determine where these trades originated and were they within a Pro-Hamas country like Lebanon, Iran or... Saudi Arabia? Or did it originate within the intelligence community, acting in bad faith?
Now, I know of no reason why Hamas, Iran, or Russian sources that knew something was about to go off, would not have tried to profit from that (through proxies of one sort or another). But this doesn't quite seem unusual enough to act on. If this kind of spike triggered an alarm, it would have gone off a couple times in the previous 52 weeks alone, and any alarm that has that many false positives will get ignored eventually.
The paper suggests that people who knew about the October attacks (so probably not Israelis, we can have a few guesses who) were short selling Israeli companies, as well as index funds based on Israeli companies, just in time. This happened both on US markets and elsewhere. So that while blood was being spilled they lined their pockets. It'd be interesting but I guess impossible to see how much it is later converted to crypto and reinvested into terrorism and how much is just blood profits that get reinvested.
The paper obviously can't tell who is trading and why, so it's not a positive proof, but it'd be interesting to see if money could be followed. Looks like they did a lot of work to eliminate any false signals.
I wish their typography was more readable, that line height is a major pain to read and why is it a PDF for crying out loud.
It's not like Israel has been, or is, a friend of Gaza. So when Gaza was planning the attack, either Israel's previously famous intelligence service was caught completely off guard (despite the warning by Egypt) - or they let it happen, intentionally, as an excuse to raid Gaza as well as improve the popularity of their struggling president.
Thoughts?
(Edit: For those questioning how this would improve the prime minister's or president's approval, few things improve the popularity of a president, or a prime minister, than a declaration of war following a catastrophic event. Bush reached 86% popular support after 9/11.)
Which would leave open the possiblity that they "let it happen" thinking the "it" was something much less substantial, but the motive doesn't really make sense to me, because they didn't need to take a hit at all. Just an accusation that Hamas was planning an attack would have been sufficient pretext.
That said, if this was an intentional move by Bibi, it backfired severely since his support dropped drastically as a result of the attack (and how poorly he continues to handle it). I've heard there's quite a bit of internal opposition in his party in spite of the fact that most politicians there are just Bibi's bootlickers and that without him the party will likely lose a ton of votes.
Given that he is an incredibly gifted politician, it seems unlikely to me that he made the mistake of thinking that an attack will be good for him, so I find the conspiracy theory to be unlikely.
> as an excuse to raid Gaza
And to answer this one specifically, I don't think Bibi wanted an excuse to raid Gaza since it seems to me like what he wants most is just to continue the current status-quo where peace is impossible. It is possible that others in his current far-right extremist government were looking for such an excuse, but no chance that they would actually get to make that decision.
How does that work ? He's at a record low approval, Israelis want a culprit and he's the default one
If that was the goal, it massively backfired
This is an odd way to decribe things considering Gaza is not a state. Its population is mostly refugees who were ethnically cleansed from nearby villages and functionally it operates as a concentration camp preventing those people from trying to return to those villages which are now occupied by settlers.
For people who don't know, UNRWA says Palestinian refugees are the only ones who are defined as eternal. All children, including adopted (!), of Palestinian refugees are Palestinian refugees, and so on to eternity. [1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNRWA#Definition_of_refugee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip
Also, it has been de facto ruled by Hamas since (edit: 2007) despite formally being under the control of the Palestinian Authority.
Netanyahu has long supported Hamas, both politically and financially. At a Likud meeting in 2019, he said "Those who want to thwart the possibility of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy." He was entirely willing to support those who killed Israelis if he thought it was useful to him.
(The story was originally from Haaretz, but that's paywalled.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/22/world/middleeast/peace-ac...
But if he welcomed this attack, it backfired dramatically and predictably. I can't see that anyone could think it would help Netanyahu politically. If the goal were to brutalize the people of Gaza, perhaps, but Israel hasn't generally needed much pretext to brutalize the people of Gaza.
He could just be desperate. He is looking at prison time for corruption, after all.
The problem though is that almost all societies, before us, considered stupidity to not be an excuse for any crime, for similar reasons to "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." This was because, as another principle I'm forgetting the name of points out, stupidity is indistinguishable from competently-executed malice. If competently-executed malice is always explained away as stupidity, there's no such thing as malice. (The only obvious exception, of course, being manifest insanity.)
This is a classical conspiracy theory. Things can't just fall through the cracks, it's always someone behind the scenes directing things.
"The groups carried out joint drills in Gaza which closely resembled the tactics used during the deadly assault - including at a site less than 1km (0.6 miles) from the barrier with Israel - and posted them on social media.
They practised hostage-taking, raiding compounds and breaching Israel's defences during these exercises, the last of which was held just 25 days before the attack."
In 2006, Gaza had the borders closed and was sealed in. Gaza's population was 473,257 people. Instead of giving in, Gaza decided to have a lot of children, resulting in a population of 2.048 million people as of 2020.
Kind of a failure on multiple levels. And now all those people want to kill you for what you did to them. That sucks. Your prime minister who has served for over 16 years is taking the blame with about ~20% popularity. Things need to be fixed.
One day, you wake up, and find out Gaza's planning an attack. And for once, instead of responding forcefully, you decide: What if we did nothing? They attack, we respond with the world behind our backs, and solve this problem.
I'm not saying that what's happened. It just seems plausible.
Now the problem with retrospectively "knowing about things" is that it's hard to account for the thousand other threats these people are constantly being made aware of and which ultimately don't materialize. Or at least I presume that's the case.
This is kind of similar, but smaller in scale, to how Ukraine was surprised that there was actually a push on Kyiv from the north with an attempt at decapitating the state. It's one thing to have the intelligence at hand, it's another to have the political power circle believe it.
