The deadly Hamas attack and Israel’s brutal retaliation have blown up a long-standing conflict resulting in huge human costs
Published Date – 11:59 PM, Sat – 14 October 23
Israel’s eyes are never far away. Surveillance drones buzz constantly over Palestinians in Gaza. The highly-secured border is awash with cameras and soldiers. Yet the militant Hamas group broke down Israeli border barriers and sent hundreds of militants into Israel to carry out a brazen attack that killed thousands and pushed the region into conflict.
Israel’s intelligence agencies have gained an aura of invincibility over the decades owing to their achievements. Israel has foiled plots seeded in the West Bank, allegedly hunted down Hamas operatives in Dubai and has been accused of killing Iranian nuclear scientists in the heart of Iran. Even when their efforts have stumbled, agencies like the Mossad and Shin Bet have maintained their mystique.
But the October 7 assault, the deadliest in decades, caught Israel off guard and plunged that reputation into doubt. “This is a major failure,” said Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “This operation actually proves that the (intelligence) abilities in Gaza were no good.”
However, some point to a wave of low-level violence in the West Bank that shifted some military resources there and the political chaos roiling Israel over steps by Netanyahu’s far-right government to overhaul the judiciary. The controversial plan has threatened the cohesion of the country’s powerful military.
More than 2,200 rockets were fired towards Israel on Oct 7 morning alone. The previous single-day record stood at 670 rockets
Israel withdrew troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, stripping it of a close handle on the happenings in the territory. But even after Hamas overran Gaza in 2007, Israel appeared to maintain its edge, using technological and human intelligence. It claimed to know the precise locations of Hamas leadership and appeared to prove it through the assassinations of militant leaders in surgical strikes, sometimes while they slept in their bedrooms. Israel has known where to strike underground tunnels used by Hamas to ferry around fighters and arms, destroying kilometres of the concealed passageways.
Despite those abilities, Hamas was able to keep its plan under wraps. The ferocious attack, which likely took months of planning and meticulous training and involved coordination among multiple militant groups, went under Israel’s intelligence radar.
Militants in Gaza have been firing rockets toward Israel every year since 2005. The intensity this time was astounding. More than 2,200 rockets were fired towards Israel on Oct 7 morning alone. The previous single-day record stood at 670 rockets, during the most intense day of 2021’s Guardian of the Walls operation.
Israel’s security services have come to rely increasingly on technological means to gain intelligence. Militants in Gaza found ways to evade that technological intelligence gathering, giving Israel an incomplete picture of their intentions. “They’ve gone back to the Stone Age,” said Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli general and founder of Israel Defense and Security Forum, a hawkish group of former military commanders. They weren’t using phones or computers and were conducting their sensitive business in rooms specially guarded from technological espionage.
A 40-mile-long security barrier, Iron Wall, separates Gaza from Israel and includes a sensor-equipped 20-foot-tall fence, hundreds of cameras and automated machine gun fire when sensors are tripped while Iron Dome, an air defence system, protects Israelis from rocket attacks emanating from Gaza. But both failed.
According to a New York Times report, Hamas disabled some of the Israeli military’s cellular communications stations and surveillance towers along the border with drones. The drones also destroyed remote-controlled machine guns that Israel had installed on its border fortifications.
“Ancient Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu stressed the importance of ‘knowing the enemy.’ “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles,” he wrote in The Art of War. The problem for the Israelis, and many modern militaries, is that they have become too reliant on intelligence instead of knowing the goals of their enemy and developing a deeper understanding of how they think and operate. That understanding may not prevent the next surprise attack, but it can help prepare the military defence,” says Liam Collins, Founding Director, Modern War Institute, United States Military Academy West Point, in The Conversation.
Did Israel Fail?
Israel has allowed up to 18,000 Palestinian labourers from Gaza to work in Israel, where they can earn a salary about 10 times higher than in the impoverished coastal enclave. The security establishment saw that carrot as a way to maintain relative calm. “In practice, hundreds if not thousands of Hamas men were preparing for a surprise attack for months, without that having leaked,” wrote Amos Harel, a defence commentator, in the daily Haaretz.
An Egyptian intelligence official said Israeli officials were focused on the West Bank and played down the threat from Gaza. Netanyahu’s government is made up of supporters of Jewish West Bank settlers, who have demanded a security crackdown in the face of a rising tide of violence there over the last 18 months. “We have warned them an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big. But they underestimated such warnings,” he said.
Israel captured the West Bank, along with Gaza and East Jerusalem, in a 1967 war. The Palestinians want all three territories, but there have been no peace talks in over a decade
“The timing of Hamas’ attack obviously was not accidental. It was planned to take place exactly on the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It was meant to crudely remind the Israelis that the Palestinians’ rights and aspirations are not a box to be checked off, as Netanyahu recently described when asked about the prospective normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia,” writes Dr Alon Ben-Meir, professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU.
Moribund Peace Processes
The September 13, 1993, secret negotiations in Oslo with President Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin, then Israeli prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), is remembered as a time of great hope, but also as the start of a process that ultimately did not succeed. Today, there is no lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians, there is no Palestinian state, and the Israeli occupation has expanded and deepened.
The so-called normalisation push between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which began under former President Donald Trump and was branded as the Abraham Accords, was hailed as “historic”. But the outbreak of war is threatening to derail the years-long diplomatic push to improve relations between Israel and its Arab neighbours.
“We are no longer putting the last nail in the coffin; we are about to throw the coffin into the sea! That is to say, the very subject of peace has disappeared. … We are in for some very dark years. There will be no going back,” writes Sammy Cohen, Emeritus Research Director (CERI), Sciences Po.
War Spreads
The risk of the war spreading beyond Gaza was evident when the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah fired anti-tank missiles at an Israeli military position and claimed to have killed and wounded troops. The Israeli army shelled the area in southern Lebanon from where the attack was launched.
On Oct 12, Syrian state media reported that Israeli airstrikes hit the international airports of the Syrian capital Damascus and the northern city of Aleppo, damaging their runways and putting them out of service.
Egypt has engaged in intensive talks with Israel and the United States to allow the delivery of aid and fuel through its Rafah crossing point (the only crossing point between Egypt and the Gaza Strip). However, it dropped the proposals, saying an exodus of Palestinians would have grave consequences for the Palestinian cause.
Gaza Strip: An Open-air Prison
In Gaza, where Hamas operates, 2.3 million Palestinians are crowded together in 365 km, making the Gaza Strip one of the most densely populated territories in the world. This narrow piece of land on the southeastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea is wedged between Israel to its north and east and Egypt to its south.
Israel has launched four major military assaults on Gaza — in 2008-09, 2012, 2014 and 2021. 4,000 Palestinians, more than half of whom were civilians, along with 106 people in Israel, were killed
An ancient trade and seaport, Gaza has long been part of the geographic region known as Palestine. During the 1948 war that established the state of Israel, the Israeli military bombed 29 villages in southern Palestine, leading tens of thousands of villagers to flee to the Gaza Strip, under the control of the Egyptian army.
Following the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbours, the Gaza Strip came under Israeli military occupation. Palestinians staged two major uprisings, in 1987-1991 and in 2000-2005, hoping to end the occupation and establish an independent Palestinian state. Since 2007, this territory has also been subject to Israeli maritime, air and land blockade, which almost entirely deprives it of contact with the outside world. Gazans are regularly cut off from water and electricity and depend mainly on international aid. Entries and exits from Gaza depend on authorisations by Israeli forces and are extremely rare, earning it the nickname “open-air prison”.
West Bank: A Dismembered Territory
In the West Bank, the Hamas attack was not condemned, and the Palestinian population even expressed its support through demonstrations. The Palestinian territory is completely dismembered. Colonisation is largely supported and accompanied by the Israeli government. More than 280 colonies and 710,000 settlers have been counted by the UN.
Since 2002, more than 700 km of wall have been built between the Palestinian territories and Israel. “It’s the Arab Wailing Wall”, the “wall of shame”. East Jerusalem too is increasingly occupied, even on the Esplanade des Mosques, which houses the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. The Hamas attack tellingly is named the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’
Then there is the political impasse. There have been no elections since 2006 in Palestine. The Palestinian Authority, recognised as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, has become an empty shell. Power is concentrated in the hands of Mahmoud Abbas, 87, who has lost the support of his population.
Rise of Hamas
Hamas, which refuses to recognise the existence of Israel, in 2006, won the Palestinian legislative elections. Despite the democratic conduct of these elections, the international community refused to allow a terrorist organisation to take power. Hamas therefore retreated into the Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile, internal destabilisation in Israel provided a breach from which Hamas could take advantage. The international situation is also changing. The balance of power is evolving, new balances are being created and the region is being reconfigured. This is evidenced by the agreement between Tehran and Riyadh, and the Abraham Accords, which normalised Israel’s relations with the Gulf countries.
1973 and 2023
The 1973 war was also a result of political failures. Israel, then governed by Prime Minister Golda Meir and influenced by her Defence Minister Moshe Dayan, had refused, in the years preceding the war, the diplomatic overtures of Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat. The Israeli government was determined to retain parts of the Sinai Peninsula — which Israel had captured in the 1967 war — even at the cost of peace with Egypt.
Netanyahu similarly ignored Egypt’s recent efforts to broker a long-term truce between Israel, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad. His government has preferred to keep the occupied West Bank rather than pursue the possibility of peace with the Palestinians.
The parallels of both wars are not just a matter of coincidence. Both began with surprise attacks on Jewish holy days. In 1973, it was Yom Kippur, a day of atonement for the Jews. This October 7, thousands of Israelis celebrated Simchat Torah, dedicated to the celebration of reading the Torah. The surprise attack by Hamas damaged the image of Netanyahu, who readily presents himself as Israel’s “Mr Security”.
Israeli Intelligence
Israel has one of the most capable and sophisticated intelligence enterprises at the international level. Shin Bet is the Israeli domestic security service, the equivalent of the FBI, which monitors threats within the country. On the foreign security side, Israel has Mossad, which is equivalent to the CIA. Then there is an Israeli military intelligence agency, similar to the US Defense Intelligence Agency — and there are other, smaller organisations within military intelligence that are focused on different intelligence issues.
—Javed Ali, a counterterrorism and intelligence scholar who spent years working in US intelligence
– Associated Press, The Conversation
