"First We Fight, Then We Investigate" Israel Defense Forces

"There clearly were warnings and indications that should have been picked up."

"Or maybe they were picked up, but they didn't spark necessary preparations to prevent these horrific terrorist acts from happening."

Bradley Bowman, senior director, Center on Military and Political Power, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Washington

"We knew about the drones, we knew about booby traps, we knew about cyberattacks and the marine forces."

"The surprise was the coordination between all these systems."

Michael Milshtein, retired Israeli colonel, military intelligence

"I just was impressed with Hamas's ability to use basics and fundamentals to be able to penetrate the wall."

"They seemed to be able to find those weak spots and penetrate quickly and then exploit that breach."

U.S. army Lt.Col. Stephen Danner, combat engineer, retired

This image from video posted to social media by Hamas on Sept. 12, 2023 shows a live-fire exercise dubbed operation “Strong Pillar” outside Al-Mawasi, a Palestinian town on the southern coast of the Gaza Strip. (Hamas via AP)

 

On September 12 a two-minute propaganda video was posted by Hamas to social media, showing fighters using explosives to blast through a replica of Israel's high-tech "Iron Wall". The video then shows Hamas terrorist fighters sweeping through on pickup trucks and finally moving stealthily building by building through the streets of a full-scale reconstruction of an Israeli village while firing automatic weapons at paper targets of human silhouettes. A strategy rehearsed, documented and flaunted in full view of any interested enough to view it. 

The live-fire exercise showed fighters wearing body armour and combat fatigues with an operation including destruction of mock-upped concrete towers on the wall along with a communications antenna. Deadly practise for a deadly attack that was carried out on October 7-8 in Israel itself. Practise, it is said, makes perfect, and the deadly invasion was a perfect example of a rehearsal giving skills and confidence for a planned operation through scene-by-scene strategic orchestration.

Israel's security and intelligence services had no idea of an enactment rehearsal being carried forward to the gruesome, lethal reality of last weekend. Hamas, it seems, felt sufficiently emboldened to take some precautions not to be detected, but hubris led to their exultantly publishing a pre-operation preparation video. Which, if Israeli intelligence picked it up, which would have been easy enough to do, wasn't taken seriously. There were, in fact, it would appear, dozens of similar videos released by Hamas in the space of the last year, through Telegram.

The Associated Press matched the mocked-up town location to an area of desert outside Al-Mawasi, a Palestinian town on the Gaza Strip's southern coast. "Horesh Yaron" read a large sign printed in Hebrew and Arabic at the town's entrance gate. It was, in fact, the name of an Israeli settlement in what the legacy press persists in naming the Palestinian West Bank. Which led one intelligence expert to come to the conclusion that this was a deliberate effort to persuade Israeli intelligence that a Hamas raid would be planned for the West Bank, not Israel itself.

 

Hamas terrorist fighters are shown storming a mock-up Israeli military base complete with full-size model of a tank with an Israeli flag on its turret, in a separate video posted to Telegram last year. The modus operandi is similar to that of the Israel town's rehearsal video; terrorists moving through cinder-block buildings grappling with and overwhelming others acting as Israeli soldiers before taking them hostage.

 

The barrier in question, considered to be so high-tech as to be impregnable, is a "smart fence", six-metres in height, cameras able to 'see' in the dark, razor wire and seismic sensors able to detect tunnel digging over 200 feet below. Guard posts that were formerly manned were replaced with concrete towers topped with remote-controlled machine guns.

Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system intercepts rockets launched from Gaza City on May 10, 2023. (Mohammed Abed/AFP)

"In our neighbourhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts. At the end of the day, as I see it, there will be a fence like this one surrounding Israel in its entirety", stated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when the high-tech fence was being contemplated before its installation. He was absolutely correct that Israel needed protection from 'wild beasts' but the monstrous Hamas beasts planned well and orchestrated even better to connive and prosecute a horrendous butchery of human life beyond anyone's wildest nightmares.

 

The invaders used explosive charges to explode areas of the wall, then followed up with bulldozers to flatten the breaches so their colleagues could stream through on motorcycles and pickup trucks, to be followed by civilian Palestinian men looking for action and loot. Some of the deathly atrocities can be attributed to the enthusiasm of Palestinian wannabes alongside the terrorists themselves. Seems the common stock-in-trade among Palestinians. 

Palestinians from the Gaza Strip enter Kibbutz Kfar Aza on Oct. 7, 2023 amid a massive assault by the Hamas terror group. (AP Photo/Hassan Eslaiah)

Cameras and communications gear bombarded by commercial off-the-shelf drones adapted with hand grenades and mortar shells, copying strategic moves from Ukraine's battlefields. The roboguns were targeted by snipers hitting their exposed ammunition boxes which exploded. Armed with assault rifles, terrorists sailed over the broken defences slung under paragliders. Rockets, crude, but improved to the point of being able to strike distances such as reaching Tel Aviv also came into play.

 

One hole at the heavily fortified Erez border crossing was over 70 metres wide. As the Hamas terrorists streamed through by their hundreds, a single Israeli battle tank rushed to the attack site, was attacked and destroyed in an eruption of fire. Radio towers and radar sites were disabled by Hamas, so Israeli commanders were kept in the dark about the extent of the unprecedented attack. 

Palestinian terrorists take control of an Israeli tank after crossing the border fence with Israel from Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. (SAID KHATIB / AFP)

A nearby army base was struck and an intense firefight ensued with Israeli troops before the post was overrun, dozens of Israeli soldiers killed. At that point the estimated thousand terrorists fanned out across southern Israel's countryside to attack kibbutzim, towns and villages and a music festival. During the invasion, a search of the bodies of some of the dead Hamas terrorists revealed detailed maps in their possession, showing planned zones and routes of attack. 

 

Four days later Israeli authorities announced that bodies of about 1,500 Hamas terror fighters had been recovered. A Beirut-based senior Hamas official revealed that the group had received supplies, financial support, military expertise and training from its allies, including Iran and Hezbollah, insisting the recent operation breaching Israel's border defences was attributable to Hamas's self-agency, and it alone knew of the timing of the event, it alone wanted to take credit for disabling the defences of Israel's border. 

 

And it alone wishes to take credit for slaughtering defenceless families in their homes, for raping and mutilating Jewish women before killing them, for murdering children along with their parents, for abducting elderly women, young girls and infants. Ample evidence has been found of grisly, brutal murders, including beheadings, incinerations, and utterly devastating loss of human life. Women taken as sex slaves paraded naked in Gaza streets to the acclaim of their residents.

 

An entire society befouled by the devastatingly inhuman exploits of the world's latest iteration of an Islamofascist ideology of death and destruction. One, moreover, so inured to shame at its raw brutality that it takes pride in taking videoed records of the atrocities it commits, flaunts them on social media with the certain knowledge that while they may inspire loathing by civilized members of society, they will elicit admiration and joy from their many supporters who have infiltrated the world of the West.                      

"The fence, no matter how many sensors ... no matter how deep the underground obstacles go, at the end of the day, its effectively a metal fence."

"Explosives, bulldozers can eventually get through it."

"What was remarkable was Hamas's capability to keep all the preparations under wraps."

Victor Tricaud, senior analyst, Control Risks consulting firm, London