PNN – Israel’s Times newspaper wrote in a report that the Israeli army relied too much on surveillance systems and remote control weapons, which were quickly disabled by Hamas drones and snipers.
According to the Pakistan News Network, quoted by The Times of Israel; Israel has long thought the high-tech security barriers on its border with Gaza, replete with barbed wire, cameras and robust sensors with sturdy concrete foundations, would be impenetrable — against tunnels and remote-controlled machine guns.
But after a sudden and devastating attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,200 people — the vast majority of them soldiers — Israeli military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to the media, revealed some of the system’s severe intelligence and operational flaws that dramatically broken this barrier and made it easy to pass through.
In this regard, the soldiers of the Israeli army, who were on duty, point to the shocking moments during which the Hamas forces in that area and in different places began their complex operations to break Israel’s “Iron Wall”.
As Israel experiences its worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, questions remain as to how the attackers were able to break through the heavily guarded border and run deadly rampages in the surrounding area before security forces arrived. Israeli military authorities have said that they will deal with these questions at the appointed time; But the military is currently devoting its resources and focus to the ongoing war.
This large-scale attack was carried out at dawn on Saturday with rockets from Israeli military and civilian areas, which included snipers firing, dropping explosives from drones on monitoring and communication towers, as well as bulldozers that were able to break through the fence of a six-meter double wall from 30 points (20 feet) to pass along the border.
More than 1,500 Hamas attackers quickly gathered in the area with trucks and motorcycles. Others joined them in the sea using gliders and speedboats to carry out their attacks on nearby villages and towns. The invading forces took a large number of military forces and some civilians as prisoners to Gaza.
But the main failure is said to have come from over-reliance on remote control of the border fence and inadequate defense of it. This issue allowed Hamas to use remote control drones to bomb and disable communication towers, monitoring centers and remote machine guns near the border, and then disable the security cameras by shooting snipers, which resulted in the immediate defenselessness of the border.
It took hours for Israeli military forces to connect the disconnected points and understand the magnitude of what had happened in the border towns so that they could send enough forces to defeat the attackers.
These operational failures were accompanied by an even greater intelligence failure related to Hamas’s years of secrecy in order to carry out this operation; Because Israel was mistakenly convinced that the Hamas group had given up on entering into an open conflict and was willing to keep calm and maintain secret coordination to reach a noiseless understanding with Israel.
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A patrol soldier stationed in Nahal Oz, across from Gaza City, said in a television interview from his hospital bed: “At 6:30 in the morning, the rockets started raining.” The soldier, identified only by the Hebrew initials “Yod”, told Israel’s Channel 12: “About 30” Palestinian armed men quickly occupied the army base and held it for 7 hours.
While the rocket rain continued for an hour and the base was in the hands of the attackers, the soldiers took shelter. Recalling those moments, he says: “I ran barefoot to the bomb shelter and after an hour we heard a voice in Arabic, they started shooting at the entrance to the base.”
Yod said the military was prepared for scenarios where a handful of armed attackers, or even 20 or more, could break through the fence; But the idea that “they could leave behind an army base is something I never imagined would happen.”
Sniper attacks
An Israeli army spokesman told AFP that in the opening moments of the massive attack, snipers were firing at observation posts along the 65-kilometer (40-mile) wall. Also, a soldier stationed at an observation post at the Kisofim base said that Palestinian gunmen “started shooting at surveillance cameras and it got to the point where we could no longer monitor the border.”
The soldier, who was identified in this report as “Lamed”, told Israel’s Channel 12 that it was “a crazy thing”, referring to the start of the attack by a group of attackers. “We were told that our only option was to … run for our lives to the situation room,” he says, referring to when his base was attacked.
Lamed said the security forces “didn’t know where to start”. “There were a lot of attackers and a lot [happening].”
Other soldiers shared similar accounts in social media posts and media interviews, all pointing to an initial mass attack that was able to disable the surveillance and communications systems that acted as a deterrent.
A big failure
The attack that followed was the worst in Israel’s 75-year history, prompting Israeli retaliatory attacks on Gaza and sparking a war that will not end soon. Hamas has continued to bombard southern and central areas with rocket attacks and has killed and wounded more people.
The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry says more than 1,400 people (as of Thursday) have been killed in Israeli airstrikes in the besieged Palestinian enclave. Israel says it will target the attackers’ infrastructure and all areas where Hamas operates or hides.
“This is a major failure for the intelligence system and the military establishment in the south,” said Yakov Amidor, a retired military general and former national security adviser. The survivors of the attacks in the areas near the Gaza border are shocked by the failure of the systems that were supposed to guarantee their security.
Inbal Reich Alon, 58, of the hard-hit Kibbutz Be’er said years ago, “After they built this fence, we believed we were safe.” But he immediately added, “But it was an illusion.”