At dawn on Saturday, October 7, hundreds of militants from the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas entered Israel from Gaza, in the southwest, and attacked several towns and military bases, after breaking the bars of the border crossings with hydraulic shovels, overcome the wall of dozens of kilometers with a dozen armed men flying on motorized paragliders, and take over the beaches, a little further north, with frogmen with grenades and machine guns.
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Hamas says it launched about 5,000 missiles that day at Israel, whose government says there were 2,000. More than 900 Israelis died, including 260 young people massacred with automatic weapons while dancing at an electronic music festival at a kibbutz (agricultural cooperative) near Gaza, which ended at dawn on Saturday.
Other kibbutzim were attacked. In them, according to Tel Aviv, the militants blew up the security doors of the bunkers and murdered entire families in cold blood. At the end of the day, the terrorists returning to their refuges in Gaza took away 150 kidnapped civilians and soldiers, including the elderly, women and children.
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The bloody operation was baptized by Hamas leaders as ‘the Al-Aqsa flood’, in reference to the mosque esplanade in Jerusalem, of which Hamas declares itself protector. This is the worst armed attack against Israel since the Yom Kippur war – a holy day of the Jewish calendar – in October – as now – 50 years ago, when Syria from the north and Egypt from the south launched a surprise war against the regime. Tel Aviv.
After 20 days of war, Israel managed to win thanks to the support of the United States, which urgently supplied dozens of fighter planes, missile launchers and tanks. But just as then, this time Israeli military intelligence and defense forces have been harshly questioned for failing to foresee the attack and for their slow response.
Editorialists from the American and European press have questioned the flaws that the assault revealed, and which the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro described as “colossal failure” of a military apparatus “taken by surprise by an attack that was necessarily prepared for a long time” without the plans having been detected by Israel.
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Division and weakness
But the most delicate thing for Israel is that it faces this violent challenge at one of the most critical moments in its political history, burdened by internal divisions in the face of the drift of radical rightism by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu which, with its judicial reform that limits powers of the Supreme Court, threatens the separation and balance of powers.
“Israel is in an extremely vulnerable position and its enemies could take advantage,” French historian Frédérique Schillo, an expert on Israel, explained to Le Figaro. Many former military commanders have expressed their concern.”
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Israel is in an extremely vulnerable position and its enemies could take advantage. Many former military commanders have expressed concern.
The discontent among ex-military and reservists with Netanyahu’s policies has manifested itself in several ways, one of them being the strike declared weeks before the Hamas assault by more than 10,000 reservists who proclaimed that they would not fight to defend a country “that has stopped be a true democracy.”
Israel’s enemies know it. The leader of the Lebanon-based Shiite Hezbollah militia, Hassan Nasrallah, put it clearly months ago: “Israeli society,” he said on television in July, “has begun to decompose, in terms of its faith, its conscience and its self-confidence, and that pushes it towards its collapse, its fragmentation and, hopefully, its disappearance.”.
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“We forgot to be brothers and we received a war,” Israeli political commentator Amit Segal tweeted on his X account on Saturday afternoon.
Netanyahu is blamed for this division by a wide range of opposition, ranging from the left to the center-right. But the attack – and the need for unity to respond to the Hamas challenge – may end up strengthening the prime minister. Netanyahu has asked that the debate over intelligence failures be left for later: “Now we are at war.”
Still, the topics of discussion are already on the table. The main criticism has been that, in terms of anti-terrorist security, the Government had been working for months on a false premise: that Hamas, which has dominated the Gaza Strip with an iron fist for a decade and a half, was satisfied with the state of things.
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As Ran Halévi, a French historian expert in the political history of Israel, wrote this Monday in Le Figaro, “the bloodthirsty attack by Hamas marks the failure of Netanyahu’s strategy”, main defender of the thesis of a Hamas happy with the status quo.
Tel Aviv has been talking for years about Israel’s sophisticated air defense system, which was supposed to protect it from missiles launched from Gaza. But given the enormous number of thousands of rockets launched on Saturday, the system was unable to detect them in time. Rightly so, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo said this Monday that “cracks appeared in the great iron dome,” as the Israeli anti-aircraft system is known.
Antonio Pita, analyst and correspondent for Spain’s El País in the Middle East, cited another myth that collapsed on Saturday the 7th: “That the barrier on the border with Gaza – in which (Israel) has invested billions of euros and “It has sophisticated surveillance systems – (…) it was practically insurmountable.”
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Another premise that failed is that, thanks to its informants in Gaza, and monitoring by electronic and communications technology, Israeli intelligence could foresee any major operation that Hamas was preparing. According to an intelligence document circulated in several European embassies on Monday, “Hamas has not mentioned a word of its plans in electronic voice or text communications for some time.”
The same document shows the astonishment of European security services at the slowness of Israel’s military response. “Several hours after the multiple assault began, the military command in Tel Aviv was unable to organize a consistent defense,” a source familiar with the document in question told EL TIEMPO.
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Why did Hamas attack?
Hamas has never needed reasons to attack Israel. A declared enemy of the existence of the State of Israel, a radical anti-Semite, and convinced of the futility of dialogue and the effectiveness of terrorism, the Hamas leadership has always opposed the Oslo agreements, signed 30 years ago between the Organization for the Liberation of Palestine and Israel.
Agreements that, by the way, were never put into practice in their full dimension: the divisions between the Palestinians and the non-compliance of Tel Aviv – especially its right-wing governments –, added to the attacks and counterattacks against the civilian population on both sides. , led them to failure.
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The Hamas attack this weekend fully confirms this. Great irony: Hamas was born under the guise of a humanitarian organization and soon became an opponent of the Palestinian Authority government, for which it received secret support from Israel, which wanted to weaken the Authority..
As Javier Espinosa, an El Mundo analyst, recalled, Avner Cohen, former Israeli head of religious affairs in Gaza for 20 years until 1994, admitted in a talk with The Wall Street Journal that “Hamas, to my regret, is an Israeli creation.” , something he defined as “a huge and stupid mistake.”
Western analysts seeking an explanation for such a ferocious and enormous-scale attack at this time consider that the Israeli political crisis due to the divisions generated by the judicial reform promoted by Netanyahu may have served as an invitation to Hamas to act.
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After months of gigantic demonstrations by opposition political groups and civil society organizations, some of which led to violent clashes with the police and ultra-Orthodox groups of the pro-Netanyahu radical right, some insiders speak of delicate risks for the country.
“The true existential threat lies in the possibility of a civil war, as the Israeli military insistently repeats,” explains historian Schillo, citing the violence between opponents and defenders of the Government in Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv, days before the Hamas attack.
The real existential threat lies in the possibility of a civil war, as the Israeli military insists.
Although there is information that the preparation for the attack lasted more than a year, there is a geopolitical cause that may have determined that it occurred at this time. Since its birth, Hamas has received support from the Shiite government of the Ayatollahs in Iran. And that government has taken a very dim view of the rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Israel, a powerful political move that worries the regime in Tehran.
The Israeli response – with the siege of Gaza that began on Monday, and the very violent counterattack that Tel Aviv forces are expected to make in Palestinian territory – will mean that, as Le Figaro’s editorial said on Monday, Israel will be compromised ” its rapprochement with Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia, thus giving Iran a point.”
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Until Tuesday afternoon, The toll of the most violent confrontation in this area of the Middle East in half a century was terrifying: more than 900 Israeli civilians and soldiers dead, nearly 150 kidnapped, and on the side of the Hamas terrorists more than 1,500 killed in combat, as well about 800 civilians killed in Gaza.
But apart from this devastating count, which will surely increase with the Israeli counterattack where – as on previous occasions – the elderly, women and children will be sacrificed, the only thing certain is that peace, which perhaps was close 30 years ago, is the great sacrifice. . And perhaps, for a long time.
MAURICIO VARGAS LINARES
ANALYSIS FOR TIME
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