Блиски исток

How Years of Israeli Failures on Hamas Led to a Devastating Attack
Israeli officials completely underestimated the magnitude of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas, shattering the country’s once invincible sense of security.

It was 3 a.m. on Oct. 7, and Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s domestic security service, still could not determine if what he was seeing was just another Hamas military exercise.
At the headquarters of his service, Shin Bet, officials had spent hours monitoring Hamas activity in the Gaza Strip, which was unusually active for the middle of the night. Israeli intelligence and national security officials, who had convinced themselves that Hamas had no interest in going to war, initially assumed it was just a nighttime exercise.
Their judgment that night might have been different had they been listening to traffic on the hand-held radios of Hamas militants. But Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, had stopped eavesdropping on those networks a year earlier because they saw it as a waste of effort.
As time passed that night, Mr. Bar thought that Hamas might attempt a small-scale assault. He discussed his concerns with Israel’s top generals and ordered the “Tequila” team — a group of elite counterterrorism forces — to deploy to Israel’s southern border.
Until nearly the start of the attack, nobody believed the situation was serious enough to wake up Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to three Israeli defense officials.
Within hours, the Tequila troops were embroiled in a battle with thousands of Hamas gunmen who penetrated Israel’s vaunted border fence, sped in trucks and on motorbikes into southern Israel and attacked villages and military bases.
The most powerful military force in the Middle East had not only completely underestimated the magnitude of the attack, it had totally failed in its intelligence-gathering efforts, mostly due to hubris and the mistaken assumption that Hamas was a threat contained.
Despite Israel’s sophisticated technological prowess in espionage, Hamas gunmen had undergone extensive training for the assault, virtually undetected for at least a year. The fighters, who were divided into different units with specific goals, had meticulous information on Israel’s military bases and the layout of kibbutzim.
The country’s once invincible sense of security was shattered.
More than 1,400 people were killed, including many women, children and old people who were murdered systematically and brutally. Hundreds are held hostage or are still missing. (...)
A New York Times examination, based on dozens of interviews with Israeli, Arab, European and American officials, as well as a review of Israeli government documents and evidence collected since the Oct. 7 raid, shows that:
Israeli security officials spent months trying to warn Mr. Netanyahu that the political turmoil caused by his domestic policies was weakening the country’s security and emboldening Israel’s enemies. The prime minister continued to push those policies. On one day in July he even refused to meet a senior general who came to deliver a threat warning based on classified intelligence, according to Israeli officials.
Israeli officials misjudged the threat posed by Hamas for years, and more critically in the run-up to the attack. The official assessment of Israeli military intelligence and the National Security Council since May 2021 was that Hamas had no interest in launching an attack from Gaza that might invite a devastating response from Israel, according to five people familiar with the assessments who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details. Instead, Israeli intelligence assessed that Hamas was trying to foment violence against Israelis in the West Bank, which is controlled by its rival, the Palestinian Authority.
The belief by Mr. Netanyahu and top Israeli security officials that Iran and Hezbollah, its most powerful proxy force, presented the gravest threat to Israel diverted attention and resources away from countering Hamas. In late September, senior Israeli officials told The Times they were concerned that Israel might be attacked in the coming weeks or months on several fronts by Iran-backed militia groups, but made no mention of Hamas initiating a war with Israel from the Gaza Strip.
American spy agencies in recent years had largely stopped collecting intelligence on Hamas and its plans, believing the group was a regional threat that Israel was managing.
Overall, arrogance among Israeli political and security officials convinced them that the country’s military and technological superiority to Hamas would keep the terrorist group in check.
“They were able to trick our collection, our analysis, our conclusions and our strategic understanding,” Eyal Hulata, Israel’s national security adviser from 2021 until early this year, said during a discussion last week in Washington sponsored by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank.
“I don’t think there was anyone who was involved with affairs with Gaza that shouldn’t ask themselves how and where they were also part of this massive failure,” he added.
Many senior officials have accepted responsibility, but Mr. Netanyahu has not. At 1 a.m. Sunday in Israel, after his office was asked for comment on this article, he posted a message on X, formerly Twitter, that repeated remarks he made to The New York Times and blamed the military and intelligence services for failing to provide him with any warning on Hamas.
“Under no circumstances and at no stage was Prime Minister Netanyahu warned of war intentions on the part of Hamas,” the post read in Hebrew. “On the contrary, the assessment of the entire security echelon, including the head of military intelligence and the head of Shin Bet, was that Hamas was deterred and was seeking an arrangement.”
In the resulting furor, Benny Gantz, a member of his war cabinet, publicly rebuked Mr. Netanyahu, saying that “leadership means displaying responsibility,” and urged the prime minister to retract the post. It was later deleted, and Mr. Netanyahu apologized in a new one.
On Sunday, Shin Bet promised a thorough investigation after the war. The I.D.F. declined to comment. (...)
“We started receiving messages that there was a raid on every reporting line,” testified one soldier, who was at the Gaza Division base on the day of the invasion, in a conversation with the “Hamakom Hachi Ham Bagehinom” (“The Hottest Place in Hell”) website.
“On every reporting line, swarms of terrorists were coming in,” the soldier added. “The forces did not have time to come and stop it. There were swarms of terrorists, something psychotic, and we were simply told that our only choice was to take our feet and flee for our lives.”
In a conversation with military investigators two weeks after the attack, soldiers who survived the assault testified that the Hamas training was so precise that they damaged a row of cameras and communication systems so that “all our screens turned off in almost the exact same second.” The result of all this was a near total blindness on the morning of the attack.
After the fighting had stopped, Israeli soldiers found hand-held radios on the dead bodies of some of the Hamas militants — the same radios that Israeli intelligence officials had decided a year ago were no longer worth monitoring.

How Netanyahu's Hamas policy came back to haunt him — and Israel
The Israeli leader and Hamas are deadly enemies — and allies in opposing a 2-state solution
Evan Dyer, CBC News

Israelis don't agree on much, especially lately, but polling shows they mostly agree that Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu is to blame for leaving Israel unprepared for Hamas's onslaught on October 7.
The accusations aimed at Netanyahu go beyond merely failing to foresee or prevent the Hamas attack of October 7, however. Many accuse him of deliberately empowering the group for decades as part of a strategy to sabotage a two-state solution based on the principle of land for peace.
"There's been a lot of criticism of Netanyahu in Israel for instating a policy for many years of strengthening Hamas and keeping Gaza on the brink while weakening the Palestinian Authority," said Mairav Zonszein of the International Crisis Group. "And we've seen that happening very clearly on the ground."
"(Hamas and Netanyahu) are mutually reinforcing, in the sense that they provide each other with a way to continue to use force and rejectionism as opposed to making sacrifices and compromises in order to reach some kind of resolution," Zonszein told CBC News from Tel Aviv.
'Keep Hamas alive and kicking'
This symbiotic relationship between Netanyahu and Hamas has been remarked on for years, by both friends and enemies, hawks and doves.
Yuval Diskin, former head of Israel's Shin Bet security service, told the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth in 2013 that "if we look at it over the years, one of the main people contributing to Hamas's strengthening has been Bibi Netanyahu, since his first term as prime minister."
In August 2019, former prime minister Ehud Barak told Israeli Army Radio that Netanyahu's "strategy is to keep Hamas alive and kicking … even at the price of abandoning the citizens [of the south] … in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah."
The logic underlying this strategy, Barak said, is that "it's easier with Hamas to explain to Israelis that there is no one to sit with and no one to talk to."
Netanyahu's critics say that Hamas — with its bloodthirsty rhetoric, open antisemitism and stated intention never to share the land — played into the hands of a prime minister who also wanted to be able to tell western governments that Israel has "no partner" for peace.
Supporting Hamas rule in Gaza, those critics say, allowed Netanyahu to confine the Palestinian Authority to the West Bank and weaken it, dividing the Palestinians into two mutually antagonistic blocs.
Hamas puts its finger on the scales 
Netanyahu first came to power in the 1996 election that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli extremist opposed to the Oslo Accords.
Early polls showed Rabin's successor Shimon Peres comfortably ahead.
Determined to sabotage Oslo, Hamas embarked on a ruthless suicide bombing campaign that helped Netanyahu pull ahead of Peres and win the election on May 29, 1996.
Today, some of the same extremists who called for Rabin's death hold power in Netanyahu's government.
Just two weeks before Rabin's assassination, a young settler extremist posed for the cameras with a Cadillac hood ornament he said he had stolen from Rabin's car. "Just like we got to this emblem," he said, "we could get to Rabin."
Today, that young man, Itamar Ben Gvir, is 45 years old and has eight Israeli criminal convictions — including convictions for supporting a terrorist organization and incitement to racism. Once he was rejected by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for his extremist views. Now, Israel's police must answer to him as Benjamin Netanyahu's minister of national security.
Many analysts believe one of the main goals of the Hamas attack on Israel was to derail the normalization talks underway between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which would have left the Palestinians on the sidelines.
In a remarkable speech last week in Houston, Saudi Prince Turki bin Faisal unleashed on Hamas for its atrocities and obstructionism. But he also had words for Israel.
"I condemn Hamas for further undermining the Palestinian Authority, as Israel has been doing," said the former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to the U.S. "I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.
"I condemn Israel for funnelling Qatari money to Hamas."
Prince Turki was referring to money that the Qatar royal family has been sending to Gaza for years, to the tune of about a billion U.S. dollars.
'Hamas is an asset'
Netanyahu's hawkish defence minister Avigdor Liberman was the first to report in 2020 that Bibi had dispatched Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and the IDF's officer in charge of Gaza, Herzi Halevi, to Doha to "beg" the Qataris to continue to send money to Hamas.
"Both Egypt and Qatar are angry with Hamas and planned to cut ties with them. Suddenly Netanyahu appears as the defender of Hamas," the right-wing leader complained.
A year later, Netanyahu was further embarrassed when photos of suitcases full of cash going to Hamas became public. Liberman finally resigned in protest over Netanyahu's Hamas policy which, he said, marked "the first time Israel is funding terrorism against itself."
Netanyahu's education minister Naftali Bennett also denounced the payments, and also quit.
The Palestinian Authority's Ahmed Majdalani accused the Qatari envoy of carrying money to Hamas "like a gangster."
"The PLO did not agree to the deal facilitating the money to Hamas that way," he said.
After both Bennett and Liberman fell out with Netanyahu, he was defeated by a new government that stopped the cash deliveries to Hamas. 
But that government lasted just 18 months. Then Netanyahu returned to power with new, more extreme partners who backed the policy of fostering Hamas to prevent a negotiated peace settlement.
Netanyahu's current finance minister, West Bank settler Belazel Smotrich, explained the approach to Israel's Knesset channel in 2015: "Hamas is an asset, and (Palestinian Authority leader) Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) is a burden."
Paying Hamas to weaken Oslo
On March 12, 2019, Netanyahu defended the Hamas payments to his Likud Party caucus on the grounds that they weakened the pro-Oslo Palestinian Authority, according to the Jerusalem Post:
"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Israel's regular allowing of Qatari funds to be transferred into Gaza, saying it is part of a broader strategy to keep Hamas and the Palestinian Authority separate, a source in Monday's Likud faction meeting said," the Post reported.
"The prime minister also said that 'whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for' transferring the funds to Gaza, because maintaining a separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza helps prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state."
Netanyahu insisted that neither the money nor the construction material given to Hamas would be diverted to military purposes. But today, the IDF finds itself showing how Hamas has done exactly that — by diverting and converting civilian funds and materials to warlike purposes.
The military tried to warn him at the time, former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot told the Ma'ariv newspaper. He said Netanyahu acted "in total opposition to the national assessment of the National Security Council, which determined that there was a need to disconnect from the Palestinians and establish two states."
"We Gaza border residents are paying the price for the lack of policy and the arrogance in facing terror," said Labor Party Knesset member Haim Jelin in 2019.
Those words would prove to be terribly prescient four years later.
Haim Jelin is a resident of Kibbutz Be'eri. The small community was devastated by Hamas on October 7. Roughly 130 of its residents were murdered, while others were taken into captivity in Gaza.
Catch-22 for two-state solution
Mustafa Barghouti, a physician and member of the PLO Central Council, was a key figure in talks between Hamas and Fatah that sought to unify the Palestinians in a single bloc that could negotiate a two-state peace.
"Each time we moved toward unity, Netanyahu would launch a campaign claiming that (Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud) Abbas is cooperating with terrorists," Barghouti told CBC News from Ramallah in the West Bank.
"But each time Netanyahu was asked, 'Why don't you negotiate with Abbas,' he would say, 'I can't negotiate with a Palestinian Authority that doesn't represent all Palestinians.' And so he would use Hamas and this division to justify his absolute objection to any negotiated peace agreement."
Barghouti said the current war has ended U.S. and Israeli hopes of Israel normalizing relations with neighbouring countries without first resolving the Palestinian issue.
"One of the main results of what has happened is to show that normalization between Israel and some Arab countries does not solve the problem," he said. "It re-established the Palestinian issue as the central issue in this whole knot."
"Most of the world thought that it could sideline this issue," said Zonszein. "Certainly the U.S. thought that. But now it's clear that it is the key to stability in the region as a whole."
Biden: U.S. wants two states
On Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden warned Israel to stop attacks by Israeli settlers — a key part of Netanyahu's coalition — on Palestinian civilians. Attacks have spiked this year.
"They're attacking Palestinians in places that they're entitled to be, and it has to stop," Biden said. "They have to be held accountable."
Biden also spoke about what the U.S. wants to see after the war.
"When this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next," he said. "And in our view, it has to be a two-state solution."
Neither Hamas nor Netanyahu share that vision.
As Netanyahu has pointed out, Hamas does not recognize Israel's right to exist and lays claim to all of the land "from the river to the sea."
And just twelve days before the Hamas massacres in southern Israel, Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly, holding a map of what he called "The New Middle East" that showed all of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights, as parts of an enlarged Israel, with no Palestinian state in sight.
Damage likely to be lasting
There is a widespread feeling in Israel that Netanyahu's career is finally ending. A trial on serious corruption charges looms in his future.
"He's finished. It's over," said Barghouti. "The problem is that the alternatives are no different from him when it comes to any Palestinian issue. They differ with him on other matters, but when it comes to Palestinians, I don't see any peace camp in Israel."
Hamas and Netanyahu may both prove harder to eliminate than their enemies hope. But even if they leave the scene, the damage to the two-state solution is not easily undone and the current war likely will make things worse, said Zonszein.
"I'm concerned that the fear and the trauma and shock of what happened is only going to make Israelis more scared of Palestinians, and Palestinians more scared of Israelis," she said. "And you see a lot of Israelis who are arming themselves now with personal firearms because they don't trust that the army and police will be there for them."
Nor will Gazans be easily reconciled to the restoration of a corrupt Palestinian Authority, especially one seen to be riding back to power on an Israeli tank.
"It's already lost most of its legitimacy and credibility on the street in the West Bank," said Zonszein. "There haven't been elections in 16 years and they don't have the ability to govern even the West Bank, so why would anyone think they have the ability to govern Gaza?"
Barghouti agreed the current Palestinian Authority and its leadership are at a dead end.
"No Palestinian leader will ever have legitimacy without free, democratic elections, and that is true whether he governs Gaza or not," he said.
"But in my opinion, Israel is not interested in a Palestinian government of Gaza."

Exclusive: 3 suitcases w 15 million dollars in cash entered Gaza today w the qatari envoy through Israel (Erez crossing point). The money goes to Hamas, to pay salaries of civil employees. Exclusive pic: pic.twitter.com/asmrOP0YFu

— Gal Berger גל ברגר (@galberger) November 8, 2018

The oppressive discrimination that the Israeli government imposes on millions of Palestinians in occupied territory -- the apartheid -- does not begin to be justified by security concerns. It is about dominance, land grabs, and demographic engineering. https://t.co/lTInQwHehi

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) October 21, 2023

Vilmos Tehenészfiú wrote:Paće gladi brkove.

паће wrote:

Vilmos Tehenészfiú wrote:Paće gladi brkove.

Паћету је криво што сам није први смислио ту фору.

fikret selimbašić wrote:

паће wrote:

Паћету је криво што сам није први смислио ту фору.

Ja tražio sliku strogog paćetovog pogleda.

Zar za skromnu i krhku hrvatsku antifašističku scenu nije štetan izlazak Židovske općine Zagreb iz Antifašističke lige? Da li ste taj razlaz mogao izbjeći?

Izrazito mi je žao što je došlo do istupanja Židovske općine iz Antifašističke lige. To su naši poznanici, neki od njih i prijatelji, s kojima smo godinama surađivali i kretali zajedno s akcijama u čiji su uspjeh samo rijetki vjerovali. Da li se to moglo izbjeći? Ni sad ne vidim kako je iznošenje jednog načelnog stava, osuda masovnog ubijanja civila, žena i djece, tko god ga počinio, moglo izazvati tako drastičnu reakciju. U trenutku kad je ŽOZ donio odluku o istupanju izjava je bila objavljena samo na Facebooku tajnika Lige. Isti dan, na portalu Novosti objavljen je moj tekst koji je proširena izjava. Vašim čitaocima je taj tekst lako dostupan, neka sami prosude što je u njemu neistinito, što je kolegama iz ŽOZ-a bilo tako neprihvatljivo.

Nemačka je odobrila domaćim firmama isporuku oružja i vojne opreme u Izrael gotovo deset puta veće vrednosti nego u 2022, prema podacima ministarstva ekonomije.

Nemačka vlada odobrila je domaćim firmama isporuku oružja i vojne opreme u Izrael gotovo deset puta veće vrednosti nego u celoj 2022, pokazuju podaci ministarstva ekonomije.

Vlada je do 2. novembra izdala dozvole za izvoz gotovo 303 miliona evra vrednog oružja u Izrael, prema podacima koje je dpa danas dobila od ministarstva ekonomije.

Del Cap wrote:

Nemačka je odobrila domaćim firmama isporuku oružja i vojne opreme u Izrael gotovo deset puta veće vrednosti nego u 2022, prema podacima ministarstva ekonomije.

Nemačka vlada odobrila je domaćim firmama isporuku oružja i vojne opreme u Izrael gotovo deset puta veće vrednosti nego u celoj 2022, pokazuju podaci ministarstva ekonomije.

Vlada je do 2. novembra izdala dozvole za izvoz gotovo 303 miliona evra vrednog oružja u Izrael, prema podacima koje je dpa danas dobila od ministarstva ekonomije.

Zato su Ukrajinu drndali za svaku granatu i svaki tip oružja, te ne može, te mora dozvole, te da rat ne eskalira, te ajd neko pre nas.....

Del Cap wrote:BREAKING: War cabinet minister Benny Gantz says the 'war here is for our existence and for Zionism' and there are 'no limitations on the duration of the current ground operation'