Assault Reflects Israeli Security Failures --- Hamas-led attack punctures country's aura of invincibility; U.S. 'had no intel'.

"TEL AVIV -- "Where is the Israeli military?" Tamir Erez said he kept asking himself as explosions rang out and bullets flew over his home in Mefalsim near the Gaza Strip border.

He fled town with his children holding their heads down so they couldn't see the bodies of dead Israelis killed by Palestinian militants.

"It will take a long time for us to recover from this day," Erez said.

Israel's failure to anticipate an attack on Saturday that left hundreds of soldiers and civilians dead and militants rampaging through villages punctured a sense of invincibility built on its vaunted military and intelligence apparatus. It left the world questioning what went wrong and Israel's leaders facing pressure to retaliate with overwhelming force.

Hamas's attack also caught the Biden administration by surprise, several senior U.S. civilian and military officials said.

"I'm confident we had no intel," said retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, who said he was in Israel this year, including touring defenses at one of the kibbutzim in southern Israel that was overrun by Hamas.

Montgomery said a senior U.S. military officer in the region got on a plane and returned to the U.S. in recent days, implying that wouldn't have happened if Washington knew an attack was coming.

The assault came as Israel faces its most difficult series of threats in the decades since what remains the country's greatest security failure, the Yom Kippur War, the surprise attack launched 50 years ago this month by Egyptian and Syrian forces.

Iran has provided unprecedented coordination among the forces of several militant groups, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and stoked deadly conflict in the West Bank, putting Israel at risk on three fronts.

Using rockets, paragliders, motorcycles, pickup trucks, and boats, Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip launched a coordinated attack that showed an unexpected level of sophistication.

Israeli forces appeared to be caught completely by surprise as Hamas militants in Gaza used bulldozers to tear down the security fence with Israel and streamed into the country.

"Clearly this was a well-planned operation that didn't just emerge overnight and it's surprising it was not detected by Israel or any of its security partners," said Brian Katulis, vice president of policy at the Middle East Institute think tank in Washington. "It's hard to think of a security failure of this magnitude in Israel's recent history."

Israeli security leaders had played down the threat from Hamas in recent months, as the group abstained from conflicts started by its smaller ally in Gaza, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. There was a sense that Israel, with its Iron Dome air defense systems, had rendered ineffective Gaza's main threat of short-range rockets.

The Israeli military in September confidently characterized Gaza as being in a state of "stable instability," suggesting that the dangers posed by Hamas militants were largely contained.

Recent Israeli intelligence assessments of Hamas were that the militant group had shifted its focus to trying to stoke violence in the West Bank and that it was looking to avoid launching major attacks from Gaza in an effort to avoid the kinds of punishing Israeli military responses that have devastated the isolated area in the past.

In many respects, Saturday's surprise attack was a low-tech assault that relied more on the element of surprise than advanced weaponry. Palestinian militants armed with machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and pistols were able to stream into Israeli towns and military bases with surprising ease.

"It's unbelievable," said Meir Elran, a researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. "Everybody was talking about Hamas being quiet and being stable. This whole structural concept is shattered just in front of our eyes in a very devastating ugly manner."

Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank in Washington, described Saturday's attack as a remarkable military and intelligence failure by Israel." [1]

 

If millions of people don't want you on their land, they'll find a way to make trouble for you, no matter how many expensive toys you have. Cheap, and therefore abundant, mass-produced missiles easily bypass expensive, and therefore rare, anti-missile defense capabilities. Against their will mobilized green youth, including girls, only impedes action of professionals in holding their own against motivated and therefore well-prepared fighters. Israel is an example of how to go wrong waging modern warfare.

 

1.World News: Assault Reflects Israeli Security Failures --- Hamas-led attack punctures country's aura of invincibility; U.S. 'had no intel'. Nissenbaum, Dion; Peled, Anat.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 09 Oct 2023: A.9.