““The most common question is, where were the Israeli surveillance drones? The answer is everyone who should have called those drones was already dead,” said Israeli tech journalist Assaf Gilead.
The attack also sent shockwaves through the defense establishment in Washington and Europe, not least because Israel has become a key supplier of security and defense technology across the West.
Within Israel, failure of the military’s security technology fed into a broader sense of abandonment among citizens and victims, who called into news programs and texted family for help while gunmen rampaged for hours, unimpeded by Israeli soldiers.”
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“the group that both the U.S. and Israel regard as a terrorist organization managed to use sheer numbers to overpower Israeli radar, cameras and automatic machine guns, said retired Israeli Brigadier General Amir Avivi. First, Hamas launched thousands of rockets, and then its militants moved in.
They analyzed the places which are not covered by machine guns and they simply went to the places that were a bit less exposed,” Avivi said. “They also attacked cameras, [surveillance] headquarters, they used drones to throw grenades at tanks. It was multiple attacks on army positions and towards the 22 towns surrounding the Gaza Strip.”
Once fighters were inside Israel, they attacked the Re’im base where drone and surveillance operators were concentrated. Graphic footage posted online by Hamas showed masked gunmen firing into the base, and depicted Israeli soldiers who appeared to be shot dead.”
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““Perhaps what’s happened is the Israelis have become too reliant upon their technology and they should go back to some of their earlier techniques of just effectively infiltrating using human means,” she said.”
” A senior Hamas official said the militant group was taken aback by the effectiveness of its surprise multi-front attack on Israel over the weekend, saying that leadership expected their incursions to be halted by Israeli forces. “We were surprised by this great collapse,” Ali Barakeh told the Associated Press on Monday. “We were planning to make some gains and take prisoners to exchange them. This army was a paper tiger.” An unnamed diplomatic source elaborated on Hamas’ scuppered plans to the Middle Eastern news outlet Al-Monitor, saying, “They hoped to kill some Israelis, embarrass the [Israel Defense Forces] and return to Gaza with two or three kidnapped Israelis.” Now, with more than 1,200 Israelis dead as a result of the attacks and more than 100 being held hostage, Hamas “are very worried,” the source said. “They will face the entire Israeli army inside Gaza. That’s the tragedy of their success.” Ahead of an expected large-scale ground invasion over the Gaza border, Barakeh told the AP that Palestinian militants had “prepared well” for prolonged and total war.”
“I think the main reason this is happening now is because of the prospect of the U.S.-Saudi-Israeli deal. Hamas understands this is a huge transformative event, and they are trying to create a circumstance where it will be difficult for Saudi Arabia to do it right. This is not spur of the moment. What’s interesting is you had the Iranian supreme leader giving a speech this past week where he attacks the idea of normalization with the Zionist entity. This attack was clearly something planned over a long period of time: the fact that they had hang gliders, they had prepared to breach the fence, they did a barrage of rockets as a way of overwhelming Israel’s air defense system, Iron Dome.
There are reports I have seen that yesterday, Hezbollah [a Lebanese militant group backed by Iran that has links to Hamas] was telling UNIFIL [United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon] to stay on their bases. Meaning, they knew this was coming. The scope of the intelligence failure in Israel is almost equivalent to literally 50 years ago [when a coalition of Arab states attacked Israel on Yom Kippur, starting the Yom Kippur War]. This surprise is equivalent, although in 1973 we’re talking about Arab conventional armies. Now we’re talking about non-state actors, although backed by a state, Iran. [Tehran, Israel’s avowed enemy, has long supported proxy groups opposed to Israel].”
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“I think this is where the hand of Iran is also a very prominent one — that Iran clearly began to think that if there is this kind of a normalization deal, it’s a transformative event in the region. And not because suddenly it’s this coalition arrayed against them. It’s that you’re taking the religious content of the Arab-Israeli conflict out by having the custodian of the two holy mosques be in accord with the nation state of the Jewish people. In addition, there is just the prospect that you’re going to see these countries that are successful economically joining together and becoming more successful at a time when Iran economically is continuing to fail. They call themselves the resistance coalition but in truth, they’re the coalition of the failed and the failing states. So [Iran and Hamas] are being confronted by what could make them lag even farther behind.”
“they like to say that they are an elected government, which is narrowly true, but again, the last election, the last parliamentary election, was in 2006. The average person in Gaza is 18 years old. The median person is 18 years old, which means the last time there was a Palestinian election, most people in Gaza weren’t even born. So they literally have had no opportunity to choose their leadership. I’ve been going to Gaza for more than a decade now, and one thing that I find increasingly when I go is: There’s a level of popular anger and popular resentment aimed at Hamas. Of course, there’s anger towards Israel, there’s anger towards Egypt, both of which maintain a blockade on Gaza, but the group has lost a lot of popular support. It was elected in 2006, partly as a protest vote against Fatah, which is the nationalist party that controls the West Bank. It’s an incredibly corrupt party. People opted for Hamas in 2006 not necessarily because they agreed with the group’s ideology but because they thought it was a cleaner alternative.
It has turned out not to be that. Most people in Gaza think that Hamas is equally corrupt, and they think that it has done an atrocious job running the territory over the past 16 years, but they have no opportunity to change their leaders, and so they’re stuck with this unpopular, ineffective government.”
“Around the world, they find two conditions that make political parties more likely to accept electoral defeats: “when they believe they stand a reasonable chance of winning again in the future” and when they believe “that losing power will not bring catastrophe — that a change of government will not threaten the lives, livelihoods, or most cherished principles.”
In the 21st century, these conditions no longer held among the GOP’s conservative white base. Democrats were no longer a mere political rival, but avatars of a new and scary social order.
“Not only was America no longer overwhelmingly white, but once entrenched racial hierarchies were weakening. Challenges to white Americans’ long-standing social dominance left many of them with feelings of alienation, displacement, and deprivation,” Levitsky and Ziblatt write. “Many of the party’s voters feared losing … their country — or more accurately, their place in it.”
This, they say, is what made the party vulnerable to conquest by someone like Trump. Rather than fight the base in democracy’s name, traditional Republican elites like Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) acted as “semi-loyal democrats”: leaders who say the right things about supporting democracy and the rule of law, but value partisan victory over everything else — including basic, non-partisan democratic principles. This enabled the entire party to become a vehicle for an anti-democratic agenda.
“Openly authoritarian figures — like coup conspirators or armed insurrectionists — are visible for all to see. By themselves, they often lack the public support or legitimacy to destroy a democracy. But when semi-loyalists — tucked away in the hallways of power — lend a hand, openly authoritarian forces become much more dangerous,” they explain. “Throughout history, cooperation between authoritarians and seemingly respectable semi-loyal democrats has been a recipe for democratic breakdown.””