Israel-Hamas war: Shocking assault and intelligence failure

For decades the intelligence services of Israel and the United States shared an aura of invincibility, the best of the best. For America’s CIA, that ended on September 11, 2001. For Israel’s Mossad and Shin Bet, the myth ended on October 7, 2023.

That was the day militants of the Hamas group in Gaza launched a devastating assault by land, sea, and air on Israel, killing 800 people within the first few hours and kidnapping civilians who are now being held hostage in Gaza, their whereabouts unknown.

What al-Qaeda’s September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, and the cross-border raids on Israel have in common is that they required months of planning but came as complete surprises to intelligence services with vast resources, from electronic eavesdropping to sprawling networks of agents.

Relative to the population, the Hamas attack inflicted a greater toll of death and trauma on Israel than September 11 did on the United States. The population of the US was 285 million in 2001, Israel’s population now is nine million. The New York/Washington attacks killed just under 3,000. Israel’s equivalent would be more than 20,000.

What went wrong in detecting preparations for the Hamas attack will be a matter of months of investigations and might decide the fate of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The last time Israel was caught as flat-footed as today was 50 years ago when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel.

The then Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, became the target of criticism for having failed to prevent the war and resigned six months after Israel’s resounding but painful victory -2,656 soldiers killed.

Egypt and Syria plotted their attack at a time when electronic surveillance was not nearly as advanced as it is now. Today, the border with Gaza bristles with security cameras. Drones are monitoring movement on the other side of the 60-kilometre border wall.

Hamas gunmen breached it at several points, including near a kibbutz where a music festival attended by young people was in progress. The infiltrators killed 260 and seized several to take them to Gaza. Video of the massacre showed people fleeing in fear, bullet-riddled cars abandoned, and a terrified young woman manhandled and dumped into a pickup truck.

The assault, which included gunmen using motorized hang-gliders and speedboats, shocked security officials in Israel and the US, whose CIA works closely with Mossad, the foreign spy agency, and Shin Bet, which handles internal security and is responsible for Gaza.

“No national intelligence agency is omniscient or flawless, but this is just a colossal failure,” said Bruce Hoffman, a senior counterterrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It is just astonishing that this could occur.”

On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden confirmed that American citizens were among the hostages captured by Hamas and 14 had been killed.

“There’s no justification for terrorism. There’s no excuse,” Biden said. “Hamas does not stand for the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and self-determination. Their stated purpose is the annihilation of the state of Israel and the murder of Jewish people. They use Palestinian civilians as human shields.”

He did not dwell on the suffering of innocent civilians in densely populated Gaza as Israel retaliated to the Hamas operation with air strikes that killed at least 830 people, according to Palestinian authorities, and wounded more than 4,200.

US officials refrained from commenting on an announcement by Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant that “we are putting a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no gas,” he said in a video statement on Monday.

That this was no idle threat was obvious from the aerial video which showed Gaza, home to 2.3 million people in one of the most densely populated places in the world, in almost complete darkness.

In Geneva, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk said “sieges that endanger the lives of civilians by depriving them of goods essential for their survival is prohibited under international humanitarian law. This risks seriously compounding the already dire human rights and humanitarian situation in Gaza.”

As in previous military flare-ups in Gaza (2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021), events unfolded in similar ways: militants from Hamas, often small in numbers, attack Israel with rockets or mortars. Israel retaliates with air strikes that flatten entire neighbourhoods and regularly kill militants and civilians alike.

There is a simple phrase for this: collective punishment.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)

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