On Oct 7 when Hamas launched a most meticulously planned and executed attack on southern Israel, they did it defeating a most sophisticated and well-guarded prison fence. The success of this operation stunned the world, benumbed the Israelis, and left them reeling.
Most observers conceded that this operation was nothing short of a miracle, and must have taken at least a year of painstaking planning and training.
But accompanying this, and parallel to it, was another miracle. And that was the total breakdown of the Israeli electronic surveillance system which monitored Gaza. There has been much speculation among experts about how this could have come about. There are various explanations being advanced about what may have happened. One is that the vaunted Israeli intelligence came to depend too much on electronic systems and not enough on human intelligence which was their main strength. Another is that Iran degraded their electronic systems which left them deaf and blind.
But both these explanations overlook the fact that Israeli intelligence has a large overlap with the U.S, Saudi, and Egyptian intelligence among others, and surely all these could not have been simultaneously degraded.
But even if the miracle of simultaneous degrading of all these networks is granted, the automatic response should have been to suspect that something was afoot, and troops should have been rushed to physically occupy the spaces which a ground assault would have to traverse.
In view of the repeated Egyptian claims that about ten days before the operation they had warned the Israelis that “something big” was cooking, deployment of troops should have been the automatic Israeli response. This should have been especially so because Oct 7 was a sacred Jewish holiday, and most of the attacks on Israel tended to take place either on the sabbath [ Saturdays] or sacred holidays.
Not only did this NOT happen, but the Israeli Army, punctilious about following military drills and SOPs, was miraculously absent and took a good twelve hours to respond to the most serious attack on Israel.
This twin failure of their electronic intelligence systems, and the time taken for the army to respond when all they had to cover was a very small distance, clearly smells of a rat.
The only rational explanation of this seems to be that the Israelis “allowed” this operation to take place. They would have found a couple of hundred casualties acceptable for their purposes. But what seems to have gone completely out of hand was the sheer extent of Hamas’ “success”, and the unacceptable toll of the dead and wounded which resulted.
And why would the Israelis have “allowed” this operation by Hamas is the real question.
The reason seems to be that for the first time Israel is being governed by an extreme right-wing government. Their three prime objectives are fairly well known: a] to drive out all the Palestinians from the sacred land of Biblical Israel, b] to have the Judaic religious law become the law of the land, and c] to build the third Temple, for which it would be necessary to pull down the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The whole year preceding the Hamas assault on southern Israel has been one of escalating government provocations targeting the Palestinians to elicit bloody counter responses from them. One of these provocations was the Operation House and Garden against Jenin on Jul 3, 2023, when Israelis attacked the refugee camp there with assault helicopters, tanks, and drones, ostensibly to clear out terrorists. This 48-hour operation, which left 12 Palestinians dead including 5 children, and the army left without taking a single prisoner! This attack was cited as a war crime by various humanitarian agencies.
The Israeli Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, was made the governor of the West Bank, effectively divesting the Palestinians of the little bit of self-governance that they had. No sooner that Smotrich became governor, he immediately ordered construction of new settlements which necessitated the eviction of many Palestinian families from their homes, and further killed any chance of a two-state solution in Palestine.
And when a reporter asked him that now that the Palestinians had become the majority population of Israel, what were the government plans to deal with this situation, he had no difficulty saying that the Palestinians had three options: to give up any claims of their civil rights [accept the status of serfs]; to leave Israel [accept expulsion]; or to die!
On Oct 5 Israeli storm troopers, without provocation, assaulted Palestinians at prayer in Al Aqsa.
And on Oct 7, came the revenge attack of Hamas. I believe this was expected by the Israelis and they deliberately disabled their electronic systems, and did not deploy their army, to allow Hamas a clear and unimpeded run. Shades of our very own May 9??
This has furnished Israel the excuse to visit their most brutal assault on the Palestinians yet. And now will begin their counter offensive. Given what has transpired in the preceding year, this will be the first phase of the final ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, if all goes according to plan.
The Israelis would know that if Hamas could plan and execute the Oct 7 assault, they would have prepared equally meticulously for the Israeli ground attack to come. But few generals would risk the sort of casualties that an attack on a built-up area would entail. And so, they ordered that all of the more than two million civilians living in Gaza, move out and camp in the Sinai. But with Egypt adamantly refusing to take in any refugees, and realizing that even if Egypt had agreed, this would have been an impossible operation to carry out, they’ve asked that the one million civilians in the northern half of Gaza vacate and move south.
The Israeli army will not launch their ground offensive till they have first flattened northern Gaza and ensured that all the defensive works of Hamas are flattened with it. They will probably use U.S supplied bunker buster bombs to ensure that the tunnels running under Gaza collapse before they move in.
What is holding the Israelis back is that they are not certain about how to go about rescuing their hostages. Besides, the eyes of the world are uncomfortably fixed on Gaza, and too brazen a massacre of Palestinian civilians would not go down well for them. And the move south of these civilians has been predictably tardy.
The U.S is involved in negotiations for the release of the hostages. These would have carried so much more weight had their two carrier fleets, dispatched to “save Israel from Hamas”, had instead come and stocked the hospitals of Gaza, and brought in food and water for the two million people besieged in Gaza for the last 17 years. These unfortunate prisoners of Israeli democracy have never had enough of either of these, or of anything else which makes life worth living.