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?
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
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.
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.
That is why it is of utmost importance that peace processes are repeated until successful.
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".