What has happened?
It is literally hard to express what has happened exactly for both side. However, that article aims to analyze the situation for both side as possible.
Palestine and Israel has a conflict for a long time. On one side; Israel aims to capture “the promised lands” as their own speech, and on the other hand Palestine aims to survive, protect their landings and try to capture Jerusalem totally. Both side aims their goals for religious purpose.
To summarize a bit, on 7th october Hamas started an attack to Israel. It started with some gunmen rushed into the Israel from border to a musical festival. Moreover, many more gunmen started to enter from the Israeli border in different points; after breaching the Gaza fence Hamas fighters went to door to door to take Israelis as hostages. On the other hand, thousands of missiles fired from Gaza side to Israel and Israel’s iron dome was collapsed.
Are there any intelligence vulnarabilities for Israel?
In Hamas attack, people started to wonder that whether Israel has any intelligence vulnarabilities or not for that incident. Many OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) sources stated that it is expected due to Jewish Holiday.
Intelligence agencies mostly act pro-active for their homeland security and always warn some other units agains possible threats. On the other hand, after a while those warnings left their place to ignorance due to frequency and accuracy. Moreover, people in public mostly believes that the intel should have come from MOSSAD which is Israel’s Intelligence Agency. Even most of the people believes that job belongs to MOSSAD, the intel should have come from Shin Bet which is Israel’s internal intelligence agency. Aside from that, there have always been sporadic attacks in Israel on special dates. And that increases the predictivity of the attacks especially on 7th Oct. The date clearly chosen spesifically due to its importance. It is based on the same date of Arab attacks on Yom Kippur War on 1973 between Arab-Israel.
Lack of Preparation
The attacks are neither the first nor the last in the history of Israel that’s why Israel needs to be well-prepared against any attacks. Aside from vulnerability of intelligence, there are not prepared agencies internally against any attacks. Shin Bet and even Mossad may fail on intel-side, on the other side IDF (Israel Defence Forces) can not be successful for defending at the beginning. Some media such as videos showing that attacking to outpost, and soldiers withouth equipments, not attacking or not interested with us.
Counteraction
The final problem is counteraction. At the beginning, the attackers did not face with a serious barrier to stop or slow their attacks. On the contrary, they forward easily and without defender. None or very few officers tried to stop the attacks. At least, IDF sent its special forces to the area and started an operation to clear the region.
To summarize; although Israel has a large experience on security, intel was inadequate. Internal security was not prepared well enough and they were late to sent special forces to the region.
All aside, Prime Minister Netanyahu could not act and decide clearly, His descisions were not totally based on defending of people, they were usually based on political anxiety. And so much people rally to protest it and they even wanted Netanyahu to stop counter-attacks to Hamas. In that case, it is expected that there might be protests against Netanyahu or government in the coming months.
Image Source:
Source:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67039975
https://www.ft.com/content/42bbe534-8a0d-4ba8-9cc6-f84936d87196
