Terror’s Intelligence Apparatus
23rd October 2025
Netanel Flamer’s The Hamas Intelligence War against Israel is an extraordinary book: a dispassionate and factual history of Hamas’s intelligence-gathering activities during its first 34 years of existence, based on primary sources. As far as I know, there isn’t another study like it about this group or any other comparable violent non-state actor. Throughout the book, the author—a senior lecturer in the department of Middle Eastern Studies at Bar-Ilan University and a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies—demonstrates an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Israel–Palestine conflict and a remarkable ability to identify and communicate only the essential details.