Last Saturday Israel He stood up, startled by the unprecedented images that the television was spitting out. Hamas had launched a surprise attack from Gaza and hundreds of their militiamen roamed through towns and cities on the periphery of the Strip, shooting left and right and taking dozens of hostages as they went. The never seen. In the minds of the most veterans, memories of the Yom Kippur War, when the armies of Syria and Egypt They caught the country off guard during the holiest of Jewish holidays. Half a century and a day later, history repeated itself, this time coinciding with the end of the Feast of Tabernacles. But this time the attack did not come from two regular armies supported by the Soviet Union, but of a radical islamist guerrilla relatively small, isolated and without planes, tanks or warships.
In the terrible hours that followed, with hundreds of Israeli civilians and military personnel killed, the aura of invincibility cultivated for a long time by Jewish state It melted like a sugar. “It’s a capital errorboth of our intelligence system as of military apparatus in the south of the country,” Binyamin Netanyahu’s former national security advisor said on Sunday, Yaakov Amidror. With different qualifiers about the dimensions of failure, the questions have been repeated since then. How could Hamas circumvent one of the most guarded perimeters in the world? Why did he fail? Iron Domethe sophisticated anti-missile system co-financed by the US? Where was he Shin Bet and the military intelligence during the weeks of preparation for the attack? Or why did the Israeli military take so long to react?
Israel has hundreds of informants inside Gaza, where he knows everything from the family networks of each of its inhabitants to the color of their underpants, as they sometimes say hyperbolically. Also with sophisticated electronic spy systems, surveillance drones either sensors to monitor the perimeter of the Strip. But Hamas, which maintains a close military cooperation with Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, he seems to have learned. “The other party learned to deal with our technological domain and stopped using technology that could give them away,” the retired generator told ‘Reuters’ Amir Avivi, who was chief of the General Staff. “They have returned to the Stone age”, he added to explain that meetings in basements would have replaced communication by computer and mobile phone.
Did Egypt notify Netanyahu?
None of this is enough, however, to explain the colossal chain of errors. “None of the Israeli intelligence agencies tenia specific warnings“That Hamas was preparing a sophisticated attack,” maintains ‘The New York Times’, citing Israeli and American sources. Information that contrasts with that of the ‘Associated Press’, which assures that the Egyptian Intelligence Minister called Netanyahu 10 days earlier to tell you that “something unusual, a terrible operation” was brewing in Gaza.
As it has done other times in the past, Hamas even raised a replica of an Israeli village to train his militiamen and even recorded the maneuvers on video, according to several sources. He day D bombed with drones watchtowers on the Gaza perimeter, blew up the fence with explosives and flew over it with armed men paragliding; he sent to gunmen in speedboats across the Mediterranean and overloaded Israel’s anti-aircraft defenses with nearly 7,000 rockets and missiles in the first 48 hours.
Did Iran direct the planning of the attack?
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The Israeli leadership apparently erred on the side of arrogance, convincing itself that Hamas was not interested in escalation. “In the last year they have repeated that Hamas has been deterred by the results of previous campaigns and he doesn’t want a war”, writes the military correspondent of ‘Haaretz’, Amos Harel, referring to the Army General Staff. But above all his military were occupied in the West Bankwhere they have practically become the colonists’ private army. Both to protect them in their incursions and recurring pogroms in Palestinian villages to prevent reprisals from Palestinian armed groups.
What is clear is that the Hamas operation had to be planned for a long time, probably with external help. Not in vain, the ‘Wall Street Jornal’ publishes that its cadres met biweekly since August in Beirut with representatives of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and of Hezbollah to plan the operation. If true, that could give the ongoing conflict a even more explosive regional dimension, but at the moment both the Israeli Army and the US State Department have denied having any knowledge of the direct involvement of Iran in the Hamas attack on Israel.