While Palestinian militants fought their way into several Israeli communities and military installations, taking a number of Israeli soldiers prisoner and seizing military hardware, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have retaliated with airstrikes against the Gaza Strip.
Death toll on both sides keep rising and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly declared that his country is “at war”, vowing to drive the Hamas forces from the territories they “infiltrated” during this attack.
Dr. Meir Elran, a retired IDF brigadier general and a senior research fellow and head of three security programs at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told Sputnik that the attack began at about 6:30 a.m. on Saturday and apparently caught the Israeli forces completely by surprise.
“We were not really prepared for that. And this is really a major blow both to the intelligence and to the operation of the IDF. There is no doubt about that. We have to admit that,” he said.
Describing the attack as a “premeditated, pre-planned assault on the part of the Palestinian Hamas movement,” Elran admitted that the militants managed to successfully hide their preparations from the Israeli agencies that are supposed to uncover such plots beforehand.
“This just shows you that here in the neighborhood, here in the Middle East, things can happen. Even those things that you do not really predict will happen,” the former IDF officer mused, noting that, this “major failure” of the Israeli intelligence calls for a “very serious investigation.”
“I'm sure that we're going to do that. I'm sure that lessons will be taken. But unfortunately, it's happened. And as I said before, this was not the first time this happened to us,” he added.
Elran’s concerns were echoed by Dr. Simon Tsipis, an expert on national security, political science, and international relations, who argued that the current crisis has become probably one of the biggest failures for the Israel Security Agency (ISA), Israel’s internal security service.
While it is unclear at this time exactly how the Palestinian militants managed to obfuscate their preparations, Tsipis speculated that ISA might have been deliberately misled by its own assets in the Gaza Strip whose hatred of the Israelis prevails over their greed, as he put it.
According to Tsipis, the current situation was made possible in no small part due to the current political crisis in Israel whose “right-wing, radical government” likely regarded “provoking a war” as its only chance to stay in power.
“That is – and this is my personal opinion – this right-wing radical government led by Benjamin Netanyahu was practically on the verge of a breakup and collapse. Mere days before the current events, we had a number of fractures within the coalition,” he said, pointing out that many Israelis also became upset with Netanyahu’s government over his latest judicial reform.
The overall readiness of the Israeli armed forces was reduced by the actions of “many officers” who, having become disgruntled with Netanyahu’s government, said they will not report for duty, while Hamas militants thrived thanks to generous financial support from Arab states, Tsipis added.
He also observed that the current Hamas incursion is an unprecedented move for the movement which seems to have carefully planned its actions.
“Previously, a single boat could land on a shore and deploy" but they would have been "swiftly liquidated." Or there were previous instances where several militants managed to "sneak (into Israeli territory) by land. But right now, they are attacking across all fronts, so to speak,” Tsipis elaborated.
Despite all the media attention that the current escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has attracted, Tsipis argued that, at this point it is merely a “local clash” that is unlikely to transform into some regional or global conflict – assuming, of course, that some foreign actor, such as Hezbollah, does not attempt to use the situation to further its own goals, he added.