Some people are wondering where the Israeli Defense Forces were during those several hours when Hamas militants were free to roam around the areas that are close to Gaza.
One Israeli added, “The army completely failed as a quick-reaction force,” pointing out how some of the villages that came under attack were forced to rely on their own civilian protection forces while they waited for the IDF to arrive. “The army completely failed as a quick-reaction force,” one Israeli said. “The army completely failed as a quick-reaction force.”
It will take some time before we can get a complete explanation of why this occurred. However, it appears that the surprise, scale, and speed of the attack were sufficient to overcome the defenses, which were spotty and unprepared for what they encountered.
Hamas’s attack relied heavily on the element of surprise.
The Israeli intelligence service was not successful in getting inside Hamas’s planning for the strike. It would appear that the organization has embarked on a protracted campaign of deceit in order to create the impression that it is either unable or reluctant to carry out an aggressive strike.
Additionally, it maintained a high standard of operational security, most likely through avoiding the use of electronic communication.
After that, Hamas placed its faith in the extraordinary scope and speed of what was to follow.
Cover was provided by the launch of thousands of rockets. However, there were also strikes carried out by drones on the surveillance equipment that Israel has installed on the border fence in order to keep an eye on what is going on. The subsequent use of powerful explosives and vehicles resulted in as many as 80 breaches in the security perimeter.
Between 800 and 1,000 armed men streamed out of Gaza to attack numerous places, and they were assisted by motorized hang gliders and motorcycles.
It would appear that this strategy of attacking in large groups was successful in breaching Israel’s defenses, at least for the time being.
The Israeli command and control centers, which were already rather calm on a Saturday morning because it was also a religious holiday, would have been thrown into complete disarray as a result of such a diverse range of activities.
While some Hamas fighters targeted civilian neighborhoods, others went against military positions in Israel. It has come as a surprise to many people that these outposts had such a lax defense that they were easily conquerable, and photographs have been shared online showing Israeli tanks in the hands of Hamas.
And the gaps in the border fence remained open for a sufficient amount of time to enable the transfer of hostages into Gaza before tanks were eventually employed to shut the gaps in the fence.
It appears that there were holes in the defenses; in recent months, Israeli security and defense personnel had been focusing more of their attention on the West Bank than they had been on Gaza, which may have caused these gaps. In addition, Hamas may have anticipated that the disagreements among Israeli society regarding the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would further divert the attention of the security apparatus.
Since ancient times, the military and intelligence capacities of Israel have been regarded as the most advanced in all of the Middle Eastern countries and among the most advanced elsewhere in the world. But it’s possible that they overlooked the capabilities of the people they were competing against.
The attacks have been compared to the attacks that took place in the United States on September 11, 2001, when no one imagined that planes could be used as weapons. That was referred to as a “failure of imagination” quite frequently.
And the same lack of imagination may also be one of the problems for Israel, which leaves it unprepared for something as big as its adversary’s plan.
These questions will most likely be asked in the context of further in-depth investigations that will be carried out in the future. On the other hand, in the short term, we won’t be looking back so much as we’ll be concentrating on figuring out what we should do next.
