A year on, there are still bitter recriminations over warnings missed by the Israeli military and intelligence services
In the late afternoon of 7 October, an Israeli software engineer in his mid-30s found himself driving down a deserted road parallel to the perimeter fence that separated Gaza from Israel. He had been fighting for hours with an AK-47 taken from a dead Hamas militant. Now he and three friends were headed to the town of Ohad to search for relatives who had gone missing.
“Only when we set off south did we understand how big this was. It was like an apocalypse,” the engineer, who did not want to be named, said last week. “There were hundreds of bodies of civilians inside their cars or on the road, hundreds of dead terrorists with their pickup trucks or motorbikes. There were dead police, army vehicles on fire. We were alone.”
He was among scores, possibly hundreds, of Israelis who headed independently to the combat zone around Gaza on the morning of the raid launched by Hamas on 7 October last year. Many were lauded as heroes by their compatriots, but that they were needed at all underlined the deep failures of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that, a year on, remain part of the traumatic legacy of the attack for millions of Israelis.
The continuing recriminations are part of a bitter broader argument over who to blame for the biggest security failure in Israel since the foundation of the country in 1948. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, has avoided accepting responsibility, though several senior military and intelligence officials have resigned or admitted their errors.
In all, about 1,200 were killed in the raid launched by Hamas. Most of the dead were civilians, many murdered in their homes or at a music festival. Victims included children and elderly people. A UN inquiry found reasonable grounds to believe that attackers committed sexual violence at several locations, including rape and gang rape. Hamas militants, and other extremists from Gaza who followed them, also seized about 250 hostages, of which approximately 100 remain in the territory.
Since the attack, Israeli media has picked over what went wrong. A picture has emerged of top commanders caught between their growing concern after warnings of a possible mass attack into southern Israel from Gaza, and the prevailing belief among senior officers and the top political leadership that Hamas had been deterred by repeated bouts of conflict. Many officials were convinced that huge sums of direct aid sent into Gaza from Qatar and other economic incentives such as permits for Palestinian labourers to work in Israel had also convinced Hamas, which had been in power since 2007, to forgo violence in at least the short term. At a counter-terrorism conference months before the attack, David Barnea, head of the Mossad, Israeli’s main foreign intelligence service, did not mention Hamas in a speech about potential threats to the country.
“We were complacent and lazy and suffered a sort of groupthink and we are going to pay a huge price for that,” one military intelligence officer, a specialist in Gaza, told the Guardian shortly after the 7 October attack.
A second big problem was the faith placed in the supposedly impregnable billion-dollar fence built around the territory.
Reservist officers who had served several tours around Gaza were shocked by a new attitude among IDF officers in the year before the attacks.
“There were vehicles that simply didn’t run, equipment that didn’t work, patrols that didn’t happen because there was no threat. When we asked how we were meant to fight back if there was a big attack, they told us … it just wouldn’t happen,” a reservist combat medic said last month.
“We were told that the first line of defence is Hamas because they’ve got too much to lose now by an attack and will themselves restrain their own people, and anyway then there’s the fence, which no one can get through. I actually argued with my senior officers over this but it went nowhere.”
Just days before the attack, a series of mistakes were made. Concerned local military commanders ordered assessments, which reported intense training by elite Hamas fighters, but failed to act. When dozens, possibly hundreds, of Israeli sim cards suddenly were connected to Israeli networks in the early hours of 7 October, Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, sent only a small team to the border. At a hastily convened meeting at about 3.30 am on 7 October, senior IDF officers remained unsure if the unusual Hamas activity in Gaza was a training exercise or preparation for an attack.
Source: The Guardian
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