Tag: invasion
Hamas practiced in plain sight, posting video of mock attack weeks before border breach
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hamas-practiced-plain-sight-posting-014551996.html
Hamas Was ‘Surprised’ by the Scale of Their Own Terror Attacks: Official
” 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.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hamas-surprised-scale-own-terror-200732767.html
‘There’s Going to Be a Lot of Soul-Searching in Israel When This Is Over’
“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.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/07/israel-hamas-attack-00120498
Hamas Timed Its Attack Deliberately. Now Israel Is Stuck With Four Bad Options.
“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.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hamas-timed-attack-deliberately-now-151255255.html
Ukraine’s Alternate Win Condition: Inside the Gamble on the War of Attrition
The History and Ethics of the Israel-Palestine Conflict with Dr. Benny Morris
Hamas has launched an unprecedented strike on Israel. Here’s what you need to know.
“A group of fighters from Hamas’s military arm, the Al-Qassam brigades, entered Israel Saturday — an unprecedented breach of the security apparatus that controls Palestinian movement in and out of Israel — killing at least 700 Israelis, and at least 2,243 were injured, according to the New York Times. At least 413 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2,300 injured, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza reports, both in retaliatory strikes and in gunfights. There have also been reports of Hamas fighters taking hostages back into Gaza, holding Israelis hostage in their homes, and of gunfights in southern Israeli towns. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated on Sunday that his office is working to confirm that Americans are among the missing and dead.
Hamas has launched thousands of rockets and mortars into Israeli territory after the initial barrage of at least 2,200 on Saturday morning with additional volleys happening throughout Saturday and Sunday. That number is indicative of the massive scale of this operation; in the whole of a 50-day war between Hamas and Israel in 2014, the group, alongside others, launched a total of 4,564 rockets and mortars into Israel.
“Our enemy will pay a price the type of which it has never known,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said about the attacks. “We are in a war and we will win it.” Under Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel has become increasingly hostile to Palestinians and encouraged Israeli settlements in parts of the West Bank, another Palestinian enclave.
Meanwhile, discussions about forming an emergency unity government between Netanyahu, Israel’s opposition leader Yair Lapid, and National Unity party leader Benny Gantz happened, but no clear resolution had been made as of Sunday.
The Israeli Defense Forces have already retaliated with airstrikes against Gaza, which has suffered from blockades by Israel and Egypt for years and has been described as an “open-air prison.” Meanwhile, Iran and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shia militant group based in southern Lebanon, have praised the attacks. Saudi Arabia, which is in negotiations to normalize relations with Israel, issued a statement calling for de-escalation, specifically calling out Israel for its “continued occupation, the deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights, and the repetition of systematic provocations against its sanctities.”
In Gaza, fears of a ground assault are growing as residents have been warned in a speech by Netanyahu to “leave now” after he threatened to turn Hamas strongholds “into rubble.” Many Palestinian civilians have sought shelter at schools set up by the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA, as Israel hits Gaza with repeated air strikes.”
https://www.vox.com/2023/10/7/23907296/israel-war-hamas-attack-rocket-strike-response-2023
This Gaza war didn’t come out of nowhere
“Gaza is in essence a refugee camp (about 70 percent of those living in Gaza come from families displaced from the 1948 war) and an open-air prison, according to human rights groups. The United Nations describes the occupied territory as a “chronic humanitarian crisis.” Israel has blockaded Gaza since Hamas assumed control of the territory in 2007, and neighboring Egypt to the south has also imposed severe restrictions on movement.
Between them, Israel and Egypt monitor the entry and exit of all people, vehicles, and goods. They have not allowed enough construction materials and humanitarian items into the occupied Gaza Strip to enable the battered territory to rebuild from recurring episodes of deadly Israeli bombardments that are allegedly meant to target Hamas, but that often include civilian death tolls in the very dense territory.”
https://www.vox.com/2023/10/7/23907912/israel-palestine-conflict-history-explained-gaza-hamas
Why did Hamas invade Israel?
“In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip — a policy called “disengagement” that was designed, in theory, to remove Israel from direct management of the Palestinian-populated territory. But in 2007, following tensions with the official Palestinian leadership, the militant faction Hamas took control of the strip by force. Since then, things have been worse for Israelis and (especially) Palestinians.
Israel imposed a strict blockade on Gaza, tightly restricting the flow of goods and people in and out of the territory, entrenching the military occupation. Hamas tunneled under the border wall to launch cross-border raids and fired rockets into Israeli territory. Israel would periodically hit Gaza with airstrikes, often targeting operatives from Hamas and other militant groups — but inevitably hitting civilians in the crowded Gaza Strip.
The perennially tense situation escalated to outright war at least four times since disengagement prior to the current conflict. These previous conflicts were horrific for civilians (and, again, especially Palestinians), but never saw any kind of fighting on the scale of today on Israeli soil.
As combustible as this setup has been, Israeli leadership saw it as essentially the best arrangement available to them. They believed that they could reduce rocket fire to an acceptable level, relying on the Iron Dome missile defense system. Israeli troops and border security measures could prevent major cross-border raids.
Targeted killings and shows of force could deter Hamas itself from escalating too much, as they’d always bear the brunt of the suffering in a true war. These periodic strikes have been euphemistically termed “mowing the grass,” a reference to the idea that the terrorist threat couldn’t be eliminated but could be reduced to a tolerable level.
Today’s events showed that these assumptions were badly mistaken.”
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“Israel is currently in the midst of a US-brokered negotiation to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia, a major follow-up to the Abraham Accord agreements struck with several Arab countries during the Trump administration. Normalization is widely seen among Palestinians as the Arab world giving up on them, agreeing to treat Israel like a normal country even as the occupation deepens.
Hamas could well be trying to torpedo the Saudi deal and even try undo the existing Abraham Accords. Indeed, a Hamas spokesperson said that the attack was “a message” to Arab countries, calling on them to cut on ties with Israel.”
https://www.vox.com/2023/10/7/23907323/israel-war-hamas-attack-explained-southern-israel-gaza