It makes sense that a high-tech barrier is relatively sparsely manned on a given day if the idea is to automate as much of the defense apparatus as possible. And it would be doubly embarrassing if the reports that Israel was warned of a potential attack were true.
Now there will be information leaking that it’s Iran and Russia helped, and new type of warfare, new tech, etc, which is true. But this is basically them saying “it’s not we who missed it, it’s that the enemy became more advanced” to deflect blame externally. When you rely on a breach sensor from a border fence, a camera feed and a remote machine gun, if it gets broken you need to repair it right way, and deploy a team immediately. DevOps reacts faster to a server outage than IDF reacted to a breach of security. IDF probably thought that if anything serious breqed in Gaza, Shabak would know. And Shabak probably thought, that in worst case scenario, they had sensors and remote machine gun at the border. This reasoning might upset many Israeli, but it’s a case of complacency and the political elite loosing perspective of what is important.
Correct.
> and was busy doing geopolitics and selling surveillance tech to various regimes to spy on opposition and journalist.
OK, that's just foolish. It's not the same people doing those thing.
Israel got complacent because it thought Hamas was more interested in improving things in Gaza than it was in attacking Israel. For example the border was more open just before the attack than it had been in many years.
So Israel relied to passive tech to warn them, and reduced its security posture. Hamas took advantage of that by going dark and not doing thing that tech would notice.
Hamas changed tactics, and their defense held up reasonably well given that between 4 and 5,000 rockets were fired at Israel.
I'm not entirely sure how they could have prepared for paraglider ambushes short of having their soldiers be constantly patrolling, and thus being exposed, along the border.
Then again, I'm just a dog on the internet.
Surely though the actual surveillance part is worse lol
Axios reports
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/07/hamas-attack-invasion-israe...
The big picture:
The attack comes amid a deep political crisis in Israel over the Netanyahu government's judicial overhaul, which has weakened the country's military, economy and society.
Links to:
https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/israel-judicial-overhaul-re...
Why it matters:
The plan, which will weaken the Supreme Court and other democratic institutions, has faced opposition from some of Israel's closest allies, including the Biden administration, and it has already destabilized the country's economy and military.
----
Of course, "helps" is a weasel word, but it must be a contributing factor.
Turmoil never helps.
This is a rumor I heard, I don't endorse it.
> So Israel relied to passive tech to warn them, and reduced its security posture. Hamas took advantage of that by going dark and not doing thing that tech would notice.
There is no such thing as a passive security tech. Their whole doctrine is preventive strikes and fast response time. They failed at both. A motorcade driving to the fence and blowing it up is literally what their whole system was designed to handle. This is why there are multiple lines and buffer zones. When the first gets breached, then get alerted, by the time the second one is reached, they should be looking at the intruder through the scope. Someone at the border with a bolt cutter or explosive trying to sneak in is what hamas has been doing for years. And sending some flying shit over the border has been going for years as well, whether its rockers, burning kites or drones. The fact that they were able to drop some explosives on towers with drones is just ridiculous. This application of low tech drones has been on display at scale since the beginning of Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was only a matter of time until it was applied by hamas.
The border fence was a $1 billion capital investment with sensors, automated machine guns, cameras, etc. that allowed the military to reduce the manpower needed to patrol the border. This is a good thing - patrol duty is mind-numbingly boring work that hurts morale, and there are always associated risks of getting hit by a sniper.
There are reports that Israel was warned. Sure - a handful of signals in an ocean of noise. Finding those signals (and wrangling apart conflicting signals) is why intelligence is necessarily an imprecise art and not a science, and why no defensive posture relies solely on intelligence.
Much ado has been made about judicial reform infighting weakening the Israeli security establishment, but all the public reporting points to issues with reservist volunteers, who are not essential for peacetime operations.
The far more banal explanation is that there was no dead-man's-switch monitoring on the border fence. The New York Times reported rumors that the attack started by Hamas knocking out the cell towers that were used by the remote sensors on the border fence to send monitoring data back to operators. Losing connectivity to so many parts of the fence at once should have immediately triggered high-severity alarms. It sounds like that didn't happen.
Why didn't that happen? Maybe a gross oversight on the part of the architects and contractors of the border fence. Maybe that alarm had fired once-too-many times in the past as a flaky-false-positive and it was disconnected instead of fixed. Maybe the dead-man's-switch component itself was broken somehow. Maybe someone took something offline for maintenance at what turned out to be the worst possible time, and alternative mechanisms (i.e. manned patrols) were not deployed during the maintenance, or maybe it simply didn't get turned back on, and nobody noticed because it's functionality is not used by operators on a day-to-day basis.
When so many people die, everyone wants to look for a scapegoat. But perhaps we should just, I dunno, build better systems instead?
they first bombed from drones observation cameras, remote controlled gun turrets and bombed some communication hub. so when everything made boom at same time in control center they simply lost picture and next thing they knew it's mortars falling on them and gates/walls been blown up.
there are also some guesses that some of the explosives could be placed on the fence during the protests in weeks before. de jure nobody supposed to be there. de fact if IDF shoots at legs, after few warnings, it makes appearance on all news publications
>This application of low tech drones has been on display at scale since the beginning of Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was only a matter of time until it was applied by hamas
yeap. this is why merkavas now have "grills" on top. blowing up drones weren't sent over the border there.
not cell towers. they dropped from drones bombs on remote observation systems, remotely controlled gun turrets and some local communication hub. there are videos of those drops
People at all levels explicitly chose to ignore the warnings and consistently assumed the Hamas isn't a major danger. That mentality came from the top.
it weakened not army but outside perception of army strength and deterrence as result of this. and this was well known
Edit: just read the Wikipedia article about the plan. It, indeed, is more complicated than that.
Olmert made multiple peace offer, historic ones. I linked to the one I meant. Wikipedia does not have an individual article on the one I linked, instead it's just summarized in the page on Olmert.
And there have been many other plans proposed by Israel - around 20 or so.
Palestinians rejected every single plan.
The Olmert one and the one Arafat rejected are especially notable because they gave Palestinians virtually everything they wanted. They still rejected them.
There's a reason Israel gave up on ever achieving peace - if they were going to reject those plans, there's nothing left to offer.
> This was unacceptable to Abbas, who had made it clear that he could allow over 60% of the settlers to remain in place, as long as the Ariel settlement, which formed a significant obstacle to Palestinian development, was removed.
I'm no expert on the situation in Israel/Palestine, and I doubt few of us here are. But for sure these proposals are extremely complicated and you have to be aware of a lot more than how the map looks like in order to fully judge the implications of a proposed peace plan.
Furthermore, it's very likely that actors like Iran were influencing Palestinian decisions, and if the proposal was not in their favor, they would go against it.
In any case, I find the view of outright dismissing Palestinians as not willing to take the best possible offer and only wanting war rather naive. The whole conversation around the topic, including people salivating over how to imprison people better with better technology, is so damn toxic.
Conversely (and oddly), I can't think of many downsides.
Getting another US ally embroiled in an extended war, an ally that the US currently holds more dearly than Ukraine, possibly helps in negatively effecting US aid to Ukraine and its appetite to prolong the war on Russia's side of the globe. Furthermore, Russia needs not have expended lots of its own resources to trigger such a war. And if can get more proxy millitias of the regional powers to enter the war, it'd be difficult for the US not to put its focus more on that area of the world.
You realize if they had better border monitoring technology, Hamas would never have succeeded in their terrorist attack, and then the retaliation we're seeing would never have occurred, right? It literally would have saved the lives of thousands of civilians on both sides.
If Israel isn't careful, it can find itself in a proxy conflict. I think Russias involvement in Syria and Iran is viewed professionally and not personal as far as that makes sense and for that matter.
That is why it is of utmost importance that peace processes are repeated until successful.
Yeah, constant monitoring of plain communications of plain civilians do just that - detect gov-himself-induced unhappines and nothing of importance...
In the meantime EU tries to implement spy-tek on all civilians. Which just got even less sensible...
But what actually Hamas wanted to achieve ? Got media attention ?? What for ?? Or someone wanted to use stupid low level Hamas, dead now, soldiers into pushing Israel (and US) into accepting imperial territory gain ?
That's the business model: dead civilians for money from extremists and states.
So right now they're doing everything they possibly can, from firing rockets at an overwhelming military force, in an attempt to anger them, to force Palestinian civilians to stay in locations being bombed, to killing Palestinians themselves.
As a result: Hamas is not very popular in Palestine ... of course. I get that everyone claims the opposite, but most people are sane. If you try to kill them or try to force them to die ... you're going to lose a bit of popularity.
They came to power with a massacre. Yes, they won elections, but that didn't mean the Palestinian Authority gave them all control. It just gave them seats in the legislative council. They immediately killed people until they were the only one left, which Fatah tried to prevent. Needless to say, this is NOT what Palestinians voted for. Since then it hasn't really been any different, ever. There's movies of Hamas throwing civil servants of buildings.
It's very likely that even after Last week's attacks Hamas has still killed more Palestinians than Israeli.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah%E2%80%93Hamas_conflict
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28896346
https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-condemns-6-informants-fo...
Interesting. I haven't even heard of this. Do you have any sources that prove this or at least give some credibility?
And yet, it's true. Are the Palestinians better off now? Are they likely to get a country via war? Nope.
They squandered their best opportunity, and they are unlikely to ever get it again.
You started this chain by saying Israel has done everything except try for peace and I think I've pretty conclusively proven that that is simply not true. Israel has tried, but Palestinians are unwilling to accept anything less than everything.
If you look into the history of settlements in the West Bank, the picture gets a bit more complex than "Israel has tried".