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The Choices of War: Hamas Using Kidnapped Israelis as Human Shields, What Should Israel Do?
By Alan M. Dershowitz
Israel has a right under international law to prefer preventing the deaths of its own civilians over inadvertently causing the deaths of enemy civilians.
These and other micro-questions do not detract from the macro-answer that when a tragic choice must be made between the life of a soldier and a civilian, all other things being equal, the civilian life should be preferred.
Historians have long debated whether Churchill was aware of but refused to warn the residents of Coventry to get out of the way of the Luftwaffe bombing that caused 507 civilian deaths, because such a warning would have disclosed to the Germans that the British had cracked Germany's Enigma code. This disclosure would have caused the deaths of many British soldiers who were relying on intelligence secured from Enigma, which would have dried up if the Germans knew it was compromised.
Of course, every civilian death in Coventry was entirely the fault of the Nazis, legally, morally and politically, just as every death to an Israeli hostage used as a human shield would be the fault of Hamas, regardless of who actually fired the fatal shot. But this doesn't solve the problem for Israeli policymakers, generals or soldiers of how much risk to their own civilian hostages should they be willing to take to achieve their legitimate military goals.
Israel should try to negotiate the freedom of hostages as if there were no ground war, and should pursue the ground war as if there were no hostages.
The bottom line is that Israel should be free to strike whatever balance it seems appropriate. It will , of course, do everything it can to preserve the lives of the hostages, while Hamas will do everything it can to use the hostages as weapons against the Israeli military. It will not be easy but it must be done.
Israel has a right under international law to prefer preventing the deaths of its own civilians over inadvertently causing the deaths of enemy civilians. Pictured: A Hamas terrorist holds two of the many Israeli children that Hamas abducted and brought as captives to the Gaza Strip.
The long-practiced Hamas strategy of using Palestinian children and other civilians as human shields raises the important and old moral issue of weighing the lives of enemy civilians against the lives of one's own civilians and soldiers. Even if some of the Palestinian "civilians" are not entirely innocent, and even if their deaths were unintended and collateral to legitimate military objectives, they are tragic. Israel has a right under international law to prefer preventing the deaths of its own civilians over inadvertently causing the deaths of enemy civilians.
No such moral calculus is available to measure the cost to Israel of inadvertently causing the deaths of its own citizens who are illegally and immorally being used as human shields by Hamas, in Israel's legitimate efforts to prevent future attacks to its civilians and current attacks on its soldiers. This is more a tactical than a moral issue, though it contains elements of both. But it involved complex decisions that Israel alone is entitled, indeed obligated, to make. No international law or claims of universal morality have a say, because the balance here is between the lives of Israeli hostages and other issues.
How then should Israel weigh the lives of the hostages against those of its soldiers and its future civilian victims? There is no clear answer provided by history, morality, military tactics or any other body of knowledge and experience. But a few generalizations may be relevant and instructive.
The lives of a country's civilians are valued more than military lives. This is because the role of the soldier includes risking his or her life in the interest of protecting civilians. This may not be as obvious in a nation like Israel with near-universal conscription. These and other micro-questions do not detract from the macro-answer that when a tragic choice must be made between the life of a soldier and a civilian, all other things being equal, the civilian life should be preferred.
But all things are never equal, especially in the fog of war, or even in the planning of war from a headquarters distant from the battlefield. Tactical and strategic considerations may require the sacrifice of civilian lives. The story of Winston Churchill's decision regarding the German bombing of Coventry whether completely true, partially true, illustrates the dilemma.
Historians have long debated whether Churchill was aware of but refused to warn the residents of Coventry to get out of the way of the Luftwaffe bombing that caused 507 civilian deaths, because such a warning would have disclosed to the Germans that the British had cracked Germany's Enigma code. This disclosure would have caused the deaths of many British soldiers who were relying on intelligence secured from Enigma, which would have dried up if the Germans knew it was compromised.
Of course, every civilian death in Coventry was entirely the fault of the Nazis, legally, morally and politically, just as every death to an Israeli hostage used as a human shield would be the fault of Hamas, regardless of who actually fired the fatal shot. But this doesn't solve the problem for Israeli policymakers, generals or soldiers of how much risk to their own civilian hostages should they be willing to take to achieve their legitimate military goals.
To paraphrase Yitzhak Rabin: Israel should try to negotiate the freedom of hostages as if there were no ground war, and should pursue the ground war as if there were no hostages. The latter is a lot more difficult to accomplish than the former because Hamas' unlawful use of Israeli civilian hostages imposes logistical restrictions on the military options available on the ground.
The bottom line is that Israel should be free to strike whatever balance it seems appropriate. It will , of course, do everything it can to preserve the lives of the hostages, while Hamas will do everything it can to use the hostages as weapons against the Israeli military. It will not be easy but it must be done.
Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process, and Our Constitutional Rule of Law. He is the Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Fellow at Gatestone Institute, and is also the host of "The Dershow" podcast.
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Our Post-Hamas Wreckage
Middle East policy is in ruins
By Victor Davis Hanson
As Hamas goes, so with it go many of the following related Western pretensions.
It has been 22 years since we saw crowds throughout the Middle East celebrating the murder of 3,000 civilians—and since newspapers had daily “idiot watch” notices of American intellectuals defending radical Islamist mass murderers. And now the madness is back again, and we are witnessing the recrudescence of normalizing radical Islamic terrorists abroad.
I suppose the theory is that no one in America cares much about radical Islamists foaming at the mouth, whether abroad or here. And the result is that they are empowered and their defense of murder is growing—yet its hubris will earn an almost-certain response, an anger slowly but insidiously growing at radical Islam.
A Middle East Policy in Ruins
The current Biden appeasement of Iran and gift of billions of dollars in aggregate to the West Bank and Gaza are now, by bipartisan consensus, unsustainable. The only supporters of that lethal madness left are the embarrassments of BLM, the Squad, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the campus crowd.
Their collective hatred of Jews and Israelis was manifested in their delight over the post mortem mutilations of murdered women and children. And why—even before Israel had responded with air attacks—were leftists and Islamists suddenly celebrating the news of the executions of more than 1,200 Jews? It was instinctual, a Pavlovian response.
Even some leftist Democrats were shocked by their own constituents, whom they had created. Biden still might cling to his past destructive Middle East policies (and I expect him to restrict the Israelis within days after they begin to go in full force into Gaza), but the idea of continuing aid to the West Bank and Gaza or of “normalizing” relations with theocratic Iran will now be rightly seen as a suicidal delusion.
Ukraine and Gaza
Most Americans support arms for Ukraine to repel Russian aggressors.
But something is becoming strange about these two respective wars.
Why did the State Department more or less put no restrictions on Ukrainian retaliation, including operations against the Russian Black Sea Fleet—but the Secretary of State almost immediately called for a “ceasefire” to prevent Israeli retaliation, a mortal sin if he had dared say that about Ukraine’s similar response to aggression? Would an American diplomat lecture Ukraine about ending the “cycle of violence?”
Why does the U.S. discount any possibility of a strategic response from Russia—which reportedly has some 6,000-7,000 nuclear weapons—to attacks on its homeland, but seems almost terrified about calling Iran to account for its central role in arming and funding terrorists to start a war with Israel by slaughtering 1,200 civilians?
Is the U.S., as professed, really able to fund a $120 billion—and counting—war in Ukraine, and to replenish Israeli stocks (300,000 artillery shells shipped from U.S. depots in Israel to Ukraine, a reportedly mere one-month supply for Kyiv), and to restore depleted existing U.S. munitions (note the billions of dollars of equipment abandoned in Kabul), and to ramp up our forces to deter China (while allowing 8 million illegal aliens to flow across an open border and $33 trillion in national debt) without going on a massive war footing?
There are likely somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 total wounded and dead in Ukraine, in the most lethal conflict in Europe since 1945. Why is the U.S. so eager to call for a ceasefire after a fraction of those casualties in Gaza, but it is near-taboo to mention a breather amid the historical carnage, with no end in sight, in Ukraine?
The administration always says we can do everything simultaneously, but then we never do. Rhetoric is not the same thing as trebling our arms supply chain, and cutting the budget elsewhere to pay for it, and closing our border.
The Biden Open Border
Given the common denominator of Russian and Gazan invading forces crossing poorly fortified borders, why would we not secure our own—far longer and less secure than either?
The Biden border nihilism is now a losing proposition even for the leftists who helped promote it. Biden is eroding the very base of the Democratic Party, by alienating inner-city and border-district minorities. They are irate at the hordes of people stampeding into the country with the assumption that breaking our laws is their birthright.
Even the daily mendacity of Alejandro Mayorkas and Karine Jean-Pierre cannot hide the brazen contempt for the law. Every day that the border remains open and thousands more pour in unaudited, illegally, without skills, in non-diverse fashion, and with cartel fentanyl—to the cheers of the corrupt socialist President Obrador of Mexico—the more Joe Biden is destroying his own party.
The ruin in Gaza only reminds Americans that under present policies we will soon see thousands of America-hating, anti-Semitic Gazans seeking to pour into the United States illegally, eager to join the mass demonstrations cheering on Hamas death squads. It seems to take about a month for a radical Middle Eastern refugee, having arrived with gratitude toward his new American hosts, to take to the street on a “Day of Jihad” calling for the end of Israel (and often damning America).
Allies as Enemies
Abroad, we are finally accepting the long-suppressed reality that many of our “allies” are not neutrals but enemies. The U.S. bases in Qatar and Turkey, and our indifference to the pro-Hamas sentiments, if not outright aid, of both, have empowered terrorism.
Ever so slowly, the two anti-American nations are reminding Americans that we need to draw down our forces from these hostile landscapes, which in any global crisis would likely be hostile territory for our own troops.
Everyone knows Erdogan’s Turkey has no business in NATO—and everyone has no idea how to get them out. And so everyone puts an asterisk over Turkey as a NATO member. For now, the alliance’s only Islamist, non-democratic, and anti-Western nation is best simply avoided, since expelling Turkey appears to be more trouble than tolerating its toxic presence.
The Palestinian State Solution
The Left’s shrill demand for a “two-state” solution, and tolerance of Palestinian tired and serial threats to drive Israel into the sea, are for now over. The glee with which Gazans and West Bankers met the news of mass murder, mutilation, hostage-taking, rape, and the desecration of bodies is proof enough that these dictatorial governments probably do represent the majority of their citizens.
Most Gazans were giddy on hearing of the macabre methods of Hamas, and only wished that there had been more opportunity to spit on hostages, poke captive women, kick corpses, and torment the child and female trophies brought back from Israel. The Gazan delight in the grotesque was reminiscent of some medieval pogrom, or the Roman triumphs of old with their files of enslaved captives. And perhaps the desire to take captives and pass them back through the killing fields to Gaza reminds of the Aztec practice of seeking to capture rather than just kill their enemies, in order to have plenty of bodies for the human sacrifices on Templo Major.
The old idea of Gaza—self-governed since 2005-2006 by “one man, one vote, once” Hamas—as a possible “Singapore” with Hyatt and Four Seasons beaches, flush with hundreds of billions of dollars from the Gulf, Europe, the U.S. and the UN, is finally revealed as the farce it always was. That fantasy was simply antithetical to the Hamas nihilist charter, the logical manifestation of which was the slaughter inside Israel of hundreds of civilians.
BLM
BLM was always a corrupt, disingenuous operation—the craftier successor to the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton 1980s corporate shake-downs. But it is has finally jumped the shark with its sick support for Hamas murderers (note its recent posters glorifying Hamas’s hang-gliding butchery).
Its pro-death advocacy of Hamas is the pièce de résistance to the corruption and abdication of its leadership, the Kendi-con, and the lethal crime wave it helped spawn in major cities. Its racist agendas may linger for a while. But BLM is going the way of the 1960s Black Panthers—that is, one leading to general disgust, then to irrelevance, and finally to nothingness.
The still-remaining BLM murals in our major downtowns are already embarrassments and eroding reminders of the insanity that swept the country from 2020 to the present.
Campuses
Universities have now crossed the Rubicon in de facto condoning their crazed students cheering on mass death. They made the argument after George Floyd that the country must listen to their pseudo-moral lectures, and now they unashamedly broadcast what they have become—traitors to the idea of an enlightened free society, and kindred spirits to the anti-Semitism, intolerance, and fascism of 1930s German universities.
Degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Stanford will soon become, not resume badges, but either embarrassments or certifications of a mediocre education. Or both.
Universities all rushed to embrace “decolonization”, starting with empty and ahistorical virtue signals and ending up paralyzed, as thousands of their own students showed the world how ecstatic they were over news that babies were murdered and women raped.
In response, their invertebrate administrators and faculty sat frozen for days, calculating how best to issue “on the one hand…on the other hand” mush. The first serious politician who calls for the taxing of the huge incomes of their endowments, for yanking the government out of the student loan business and returning the moral hazard to the universities who impoverish their own students, will win overwhelming support.
The Gaza of Hamas is going down, but so are a lot of corrupt institutions and ideas that threw in with its lot.
I would recommend against the Nazi reference: the Nazis didn’t deny knowledge of atrocities until *after the war*, making them a bad contrast to current Palestinians.
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IDF Spokesperson: Hamas is at war against humanity, not just Israel
IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari on Hamas stealing fuel from UNRWA: Today, the United Nations revealed the true face of Hamas.
IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari on Monday released a new video in which he spoke about Hamas stealing six days’ worth of fuel from UNRWA, the UN agency for “Palestinian refugees”.
“Today, the United Nations revealed the true face of Hamas when they confirmed that Hamas stole fuel and medical equipment from UN offices in Gaza City,” said Hagari.
“The amount of fuel stolen is enough to power Gaza's water desalination for six days - I repeat. for six days.”
“Hamas is holding the people of Gaza hostage, cowardly using them as human shields. Hamas is at war against humanity, not just Israel,” stressed the IDF Spokesperson. “They terrorize Jews and Arabs. They seek deaths of Israelis and Palestinians.
“The Israel Defense Forces will destroy Hamas for the sake of Israel, Gaza, and the entire world,” he concluded.
UNRWA on Monday reported that Hamas terrorists stole fuel and medical supplies from one of its facilities in Gaza, but later deleted the original tweet which reported the theft.
Following the deletion of the post, Israel's Foreign Ministry asked, "Has Hamas also hacked into your Twitter account or are you just afraid to disappoint your terrorist friends?"
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Hamas weaponizes sympathy for civilians they help kill
Suffering in Gaza is real, though the false victimhood narrative gives Hamas benefits and deflects attention from saving the hostages and defeating the terrorists.
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
It’s a difficult balancing act, but most of the talking heads and pundits are managing to pull it off. Unlike the hard left, most liberals and Democrats have not abandoned sanity and embraced the open antisemitism that has been expressed at rallies for “Palestine,” in which Hamas is not just supported but justified. To the contrary, at least for the moment, the old bipartisan consensus in favor of Israel seems to have re-emerged since the unspeakable terrorist atrocities on Oct. 7. The vast majority of Democrats and almost all Republicans are solidly backing Israel’s right to defend itself and condemning Hamas, even as many of them also speak of their concerns about Palestinian suffering.
But only a week after the slaughter of men, women and children in the Jewish communities along the Gaza border and at a music concert attended by young adults—and with Israel still sifting through the wreckage, finding bodies of the slain and tortured victims of these atrocities, and preparing to bury some 1,400 people—the conversation about the conflict is shifting. To no one’s surprise, the headlines are now all about a “humanitarian crisis” and not a hostage crisis, even though the fate of the estimated 150 people, including 14 Americans, kidnapped by Hamas is still unknown. The suffering of Palestinians—President Joe Biden has been at pains to try and differentiate from the terror group, stating that “the vast majority of them have nothing to do with Hamas”—has become the world’s top concern.
Callousness about deaths in Gaza is wrong. So, too, are overwrought expressions of rage about terrorist crimes that lead to talk about wiping out the Palestinians or turning a place where so many people live into a parking lot.
However, Biden is wildly overstating his case about the level of support Hamas can count on. More important than that, the seemingly irresistible impulse on the part of Western politicians to deny that Hamas represents Palestinian aspirations is linked to a wave of sympathy for the Palestinians that is bound to influence administration policy as the war continues.
Though its statements of support continue to be exemplary, reports of administration pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to turn back on the flow of water and even electricity to Gaza so as to ameliorate the situation for civilians there is concerning. While the plight of those behind Hamas lines is, no doubt, difficult, the idea that Israel should make such gestures, in return for nothing from the Palestinians, and most particularly on the question of the hostages, is outrageous. That’s especially true when it is remembered that there are American citizens among those taken captive by the terrorists. While it is always expected that Israel must play by its enemies’ rules, the notion that American lives should be sacrificed in order to make gestures to ease Palestinian suffering makes all this even more appalling.
Once Israeli ground operations inside Gaza commence, the debate will shift even more away from the Jewish victims. At that point, understanding the distinction between concern about Palestinian suffering and commentary aimed at undermining or halting efforts by the Israel Defense Forces to take out Hamas will be more important than ever. And the longer this crisis goes on—and this is only the beginning of what may prove to be a protracted struggle—the line between those two realities is growing increasingly blurry. It is likely that the bipartisan consensus backing Israel won’t survive long once images from Gaza can be used to create a groundswell of anger about the impact of the war on Palestinian civilians.
The primary goal of many of those complaining about the IDF is to delegitimize any response aimed at stopping, let alone deposing, the Hamas regime that governs Gaza as an independent Palestinian state in all but name. The moment the first IDF unit crosses into Gaza, calls for a ceasefire will escalate, as will coverage of the impact of the operation on Palestinian civilians. No matter how careful Israelis will be about trying not to harm them, Israeli soldiers will still be demonized in the international media. Nor will those wringing their hands about dead Palestinians care about how much that caution will likely cost the IDF in terms of its own soldiers who will be killed and wounded because of their refusal to fire indiscriminately into areas—as many armies would do—where the terrorists are using civilians as human shields.
What is most infuriating about this discussion is the way most of the corporate liberal media takes it as a given that the number of Palestinian casualties means that Israel is routinely violating human rights or acting illegally. As non-Israeli military experts have attested, the IDF is the most moral in the world when it comes to going to extraordinary lengths to avoid harming civilians. Indeed, in 2014, the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, not only praised the IDF’s restraint during fighting with Hamas that year but sent a Pentagon team to Israel so it could learn how better to avoid hurting civilians.
Nothing to do with Hamas?
Still, it doesn’t really matter what the Israelis do or don’t do. Hamas is responsible for all deaths on both sides because of its decision to start the war not just by attacking Israel, but by deliberately sending people to commit unspeakable atrocities against civilians, many of them families.
As much as Hamas is trying to get civilians killed in order to undermine foreign support for Israel, Biden’s argument about most Palestinians having “nothing to do with them” is also flat-out wrong.
Hamas has governed Gaza for 16 years and though there has been some grumbling, the tyrannical Islamist rule the terrorist organization imposed has for the most part gone unchallenged by those living there. The unfortunate truth about the political culture of the Palestinians is that it valorizes terrorism and treats those who shed Jewish blood as gaining legitimacy for doing so. Hamas won an election in Gaza in 2006 and most observers believe that it would again defeat Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah Party if he ever held another one in Judea and Samaria. Few would dispute that Hamas’s unabashed calls for Israel’s destruction and terrorism—clearly spelled out in its own charter—are more popular than Fatah’s position. Its slightly more equivocal rejection of peace under any circumstances and financial support for terror, which is balanced by its reliance on Israeli security cooperation, are aimed at keeping Abbas alive and in power.
This is much like President George W. Bush’s reflexive use of the phrase about Islam being a “religion of peace,” which had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda’s Islamism, that he repeated endlessly after the 9/11 attacks. Biden and liberal pundits are desperate to separate the Palestinian people from Hamas. That argument would be stronger if Palestinians didn’t routinely take to the streets to celebrate terror attacks against Israel, passing out candy to children and hoisting them on their shoulders, weapons in hand. The cheers for the Hamas murderers when they returned in triumph to Gaza on Oct. 7, where they displayed their captives and the corpses of some of the Jews they had slain, only ended once Israel’s airstrikes against the terrorists commenced.
Once you acknowledge the truth about Palestinian politics, then you are forced to accept the conclusion that there is no solution to the conflict and that Israel has no choice but to persevere until there is a sea change in their neighbor’s political culture. Since the only chance of that is a total Israeli military victory over Hamas opposed by the West, there is nothing that will force Palestinians to admit that their century-long war against Zionism is over.
A narrative of victimization
It’s just as important to point out that the Palestinian narrative about the victimization of the people of Gaza by Israel is also false.
Gaza is poor and densely populated. But its problems are entirely the fault of the Palestinians, not Israel. Had the Palestinians ever opted for peace or compromise at any point in the last 75 years—let alone not allowing themselves to be ruled by Islamist terrorists—Gaza wouldn’t be mired in poverty or isolated, and they would have achieved internationally recognized statehood long ago. If the Palestinians used the billions in Western aid they receive on bettering the lives of people there rather than on building up a military infrastructure, Gaza also wouldn’t be an economic basket case or have to worry about the IDF.
The narrative about Palestinian victimization is a way to deflect attention away from the refusal of either Fatah or Hamas to make peace, as well as to create a false moral equivalence between Israel and the terrorists; between those who commit atrocities and those who seek to stop them. That rejectionism is so integral to their national identity that few Palestinians seem able to imagine life without it.
We should mourn the deaths of any Gaza civilians, though not those of the many terrorists who will pay the ultimate price for their crimes. But using concerns about those who will be killed because of Hamas’s actions to undermine support for Israel shouldn’t be confused with a concern for human rights or the welfare of the Palestinian people in general.
The only way to solve the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is to get rid of Hamas and convince the Palestinians to give up their sick fantasies about Israel’s extinction. It was those demented dreams that—rather than any justified resentment against Zionism—motivated the thugs who committed so many atrocities in the name of “Palestine.”
The complaints about Palestinian casualties, which are regrettable, should be directed at the authors of all the horrors that were unleashed on both Jews and Arabs on Oct. 7, including the hostages of multiple nationalities that languish somewhere in the Gaza Strip. Point to Hamas and its numerous Palestinian adherents, not Israel.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
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How Israel’s vaunted security services failed to stop attack
Operational failures and weaknesses led to worst breach of nation’s defenses in 50 years.
By Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley -
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL — Shortly before attackers from Gaza poured into Israel at dawn last Saturday, Israeli intelligence detected a surge in activity on some of the Gazan militant networks it monitors.
Realizing something unusual was happening, they sent an alert to the Israeli soldiers guarding the Gazan border, according to two senior Israeli security officials.
But the warning wasn’t acted upon, either because the soldiers didn’t get it or the soldiers didn’t read it.
Shortly afterward, Hamas, the group that controls Gaza, sent drones to disable some of the Israeli military’s cellular communications stations and surveillance towers along the border, preventing the duty officers from monitoring the area remotely with video cameras. The drones also destroyed remote-controlled machine guns that Israel had installed on its border fortifications, removing a key means of combating a ground attack.
That made it easier for Hamas assailants to approach and blow up parts of the border fence and bulldoze it in several places with surprising ease, allowing thousands of Palestinians to walk through the gaps.
These operational failures and weaknesses were among a wide array of logistical and intelligence lapses by the Israeli security services that paved the way for the Gazan incursion into southern Israel, according to four senior Israeli security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss a sensitive matter and their early assessment of what went wrong.
The brazen infiltration of more than 20 Israeli towns and army bases in that raid was the worst breach of Israel’s defenses in 50 years and shattered the nation’s sense of security. For hours, the strongest military in the Middle East was rendered powerless to fight back against a far weaker enemy, leaving villages defenseless for most of the day against squads of attackers who killed more than 1,000 Israelis, including soldiers in their underwear; abducted at least 150 people; overran at least four military camps; and spread out across more than 30 square miles of Israeli territory.
The four officials said the success of the attack, based on their early assessment, was rooted in a slew of security failures by Israel’s intelligence community and military, including:
■Failure by intelligence officers to monitor key communication channels used by Palestinian attackers.
■ Overreliance on border surveillance equipment that was easily shut down by attackers, allowing them to raid military bases and slay soldiers in their beds.
■Clustering of commanders in a single border base that was overrun in the opening phase of the incursion, preventing communication with the rest of the armed forces.
■And a willingness to accept at face value assertions by Gazan military leaders, made on private channels that the Palestinians knew were being monitored by Israel, that they were not preparing for battle.
“We spend billions and billions on gathering intelligence on Hamas,” said Yoel Guzansky, a former senior official at Israel’s National Security Council. “Then, in a second,” he said, “everything collapsed like dominoes.”
The first failure took root months before the attack, as Israeli security chiefs made incorrect assumptions about the extent of the threat that Hamas posed to Israel from Gaza.
Hamas stayed out of two fights in the past year, allowing Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller armed group in Gaza, to take on Israel alone. Last month, Hamas leadership also ended a period of rioting along the border, in an agreement brokered by Qatar, giving the impression that it was not looking for an escalation.
In calls, Hamas operatives, who talked to one another when tapped by Israeli intelligence agents, also gave the sense that they sought to avoid another war with Israel so soon after a damaging two-week conflict in May 2021, according to two of the Israeli officials. Israeli intelligence, they said, is now looking into whether those calls were real or staged.
The next failure was operational.
Two of the officials said that the Israeli border surveillance system was almost entirely reliant on cameras, sensors and machine guns that are operated remotely.
Israeli commanders had grown overly confident in the system’s impregnability. They thought that the combination of remote surveillance and arms, barriers above ground and a subterranean wall to block Hamas from digging tunnels into Israel made mass infiltration unlikely, reducing the need for significant numbers of soldiers to be physically stationed along the border line itself.
With the system in place, the military started reducing the number of troops there, moving them to other areas of concern, including the West Bank, according to Israel Ziv, a retired major general who commanded ground forces in the south for many years, served as the head of the Israel Defense Forces’ Operations Division from 2003-05, and was recently recruited into the reserves again because of the war.
“The thinning of the forces seemed reasonable because of the construction of the fence and the aura they created around it, as if it were invincible, that nothing would be able to pass it,” he said.
But the remote-control system had a vulnerability: It could also be destroyed remotely.
Hamas took advantage of that weakness by sending aerial drones to attack the cellular towers that transmitted signals to and from the surveillance system, according to the officials and drone footage circulated by Hamas on Saturday and analyzed by The New York Times.
Without cellular signals, the system was useless. Soldiers stationed in control rooms behind the front lines did not receive alarms that the fence separating Gaza and Israel had been breached, and could not watch video showing them where the Hamas attackers were bulldozing the barricades. In addition, the barrier turned out to be easier to break through than Israeli officials had expected.
That allowed more than 1,500 Gazan fighters to surge through nearly 30 points along the border, some of them in hang-gliders that flew over the top of the barricades, and reach at least four Israeli military bases without being intercepted.
Photos shared by one of the Israeli officials showed that scores of Israeli soldiers were then shot as they slept in their dorms. Some were still wearing their underclothes.
The second operational failure was the clustering of leaders from the army’s Gaza division in a single location along the border. Once the base was overrun, most of the senior officers were killed, injured or taken hostage, according to two of the Israeli officials.
That situation, combined with the communication problems caused by the drone strikes, prevented a coordinated response.
This kept anyone along the border from grasping the full breadth of the assault, including the commanders who rushed from elsewhere in Israel to launch a counterattack.
“Understanding what the picture was of the different terrorist attacks was very difficult,” said Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfuss, an Israeli commander who helped lead the counterattack.
At one point on the ground, the general encountered — by chance — a commander from another brigade. There and then, the two men decided which villages their respective units would try to retake. “We decided just between ourselves,” the general said. “And that’s how we went by, from one village to another.”
All of this meant it was hard, especially in the early stages, to communicate the gravity of the situation to the military high command in Tel Aviv.
As a result, no one there sensed the immediate need for massive, rapid air cover, even as social media emerged with reports of attacks in many communities.
It took hours for the air force to arrive over much of the area, even though it has bases just minutes away in flying time, according to two of the Israeli officials and survivors of the attacks.
The fallout has been catastrophic for Israel’s security, as well as potentially damaging to its reputation in the region as a reliable military partner.
Before Saturday, “Israel was an asset to many countries in the region on security issues,” Guzansky said. “The image now is that Israel is not an asset.”
The Israeli security services do not dispute the scale of their initial failure. But they say that it can be investigated only after the war ends.
“We’ll finish this,” said Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, a military spokesperson, as the army attempted to regain control of the communities Saturday.
But, he said, “You know that this will be investigated.”
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Personal comments.
Bleeding hearts have begun a campaign to allow Gazan Palestinians to immigrate to America. Their own Arab brothers don't want them. Why? Because time and again, wherever they go, they create problems. Read the history of Jordan. We know what has happened in Gaza.
Palestinians have been teaching generations of their children to hate. Their text books are full of hateful lessons. They dress their children, at 6, in uniforms and march them with toy guns while shouting "kill Jews" etc.
Obama and Biden purposely allowed fascist Islamists to come to America, relocate to districts so they could be voted into Congress and now these rabid radicals have basically taken over the Democrat Party. Ilhan Omar is a perfect example of what/who I am talking about.
A few days ago, according to the Director of The FBI, it is only a matter of time before we are likely to be attacked internally by radical Islamists who have flooded our nation.
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We Have a Lot of Jihadi Scum Living Among Us
By Matt Vespa
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Why Do Liberals Love Hamas So Much?
By John Nantz
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It Looks Like CBS and NBC News Fell Victim to Pro-Hamas Propaganda
By Matt Vespa
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On Eve of Speaker Vote, Ilhan Omar Repeats Claim Jim Jordan Is a 'Terrorist'
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Watch What Happens to These Hamas Terrorists When the IDF Arrives
By Matt Vespa
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