This is what frustrates me so much about the deepening surveillance state: it just doesn’t work the way that its architects believe it will.
It makes sense that a high-tech barrier is relatively sparsely manned on a given day if the idea is to automate as much of the defense apparatus as possible. And it would be doubly embarrassing if the reports that Israel was warned of a potential attack were true.
Hamas got around Israel’s surveillance, because Israeli government led by Bibi got complacent and was busy doing geopolitics and selling surveillance tech to various regimes to spy on opposition and journalist.
Now there will be information leaking that it’s Iran and Russia helped, and new type of warfare, new tech, etc, which is true. But this is basically them saying “it’s not we who missed it, it’s that the enemy became more advanced” to deflect blame externally. When you rely on a breach sensor from a border fence, a camera feed and a remote machine gun, if it gets broken you need to repair it right way, and deploy a team immediately. DevOps reacts faster to a server outage than IDF reacted to a breach of security. IDF probably thought that if anything serious breqed in Gaza, Shabak would know. And Shabak probably thought, that in worst case scenario, they had sensors and remote machine gun at the border. This reasoning might upset many Israeli, but it’s a case of complacency and the political elite loosing perspective of what is important.
> Hamas got around Israel’s surveillance, because Israeli government led by Bibi got complacent
Correct.
> and was busy doing geopolitics and selling surveillance tech to various regimes to spy on opposition and journalist.
OK, that's just foolish. It's not the same people doing those thing.
Israel got complacent because it thought Hamas was more interested in improving things in Gaza than it was in attacking Israel. For example the border was more open just before the attack than it had been in many years.
So Israel relied to passive tech to warn them, and reduced its security posture. Hamas took advantage of that by going dark and not doing thing that tech would notice.
Hamas leadership’s sons and daughters live in NY and Qatar and drive bugattis or whatever is trendy now. Netanyahu dances around Putin, while Lavrov cozies up with Iran and Hamas. And with all this if one still thinks that hamas is improving lives in Gaza all of a sudden and not thinking about some terrorist attack, one is a idiot or too deep in the political game.
> So Israel relied to passive tech to warn them, and reduced its security posture. Hamas took advantage of that by going dark and not doing thing that tech would notice.
There is no such thing as a passive security tech. Their whole doctrine is preventive strikes and fast response time. They failed at both. A motorcade driving to the fence and blowing it up is literally what their whole system was designed to handle. This is why there are multiple lines and buffer zones. When the first gets breached, then get alerted, by the time the second one is reached, they should be looking at the intruder through the scope. Someone at the border with a bolt cutter or explosive trying to sneak in is what hamas has been doing for years. And sending some flying shit over the border has been going for years as well, whether its rockers, burning kites or drones. The fact that they were able to drop some explosives on towers with drones is just ridiculous. This application of low tech drones has been on display at scale since the beginning of Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was only a matter of time until it was applied by hamas.
>There is no such thing as a passive security tech. Their whole doctrine is preventive strikes and fast response time. They failed at both. A motorcade driving to the fence and blowing it up is literally what their whole system was designed to handle
they first bombed from drones observation cameras, remote controlled gun turrets and bombed some communication hub. so when everything made boom at same time in control center they simply lost picture and next thing they knew it's mortars falling on them and gates/walls been blown up.
there are also some guesses that some of the explosives could be placed on the fence during the protests in weeks before. de jure nobody supposed to be there. de fact if IDF shoots at legs, after few warnings, it makes appearance on all news publications
>This application of low tech drones has been on display at scale since the beginning of Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was only a matter of time until it was applied by hamas
yeap. this is why merkavas now have "grills" on top. blowing up drones weren't sent over the border there.
Security is always a game of cat and mouse. Defenses work best against what you are expecting, and what possibilities you can foresee.
Hamas changed tactics, and their defense held up reasonably well given that between 4 and 5,000 rockets were fired at Israel.
I'm not entirely sure how they could have prepared for paraglider ambushes short of having their soldiers be constantly patrolling, and thus being exposed, along the border.
information that Russia helped? Iran I can understand, but why would Russia help Hamas to launch a massacre? Russia's busy fighting one war already. Israel isn't even supporting Ukraine afaik. and they have nukes, and they're not known for being pushovers. I can't think of a compelling reason for Russia to have helped, only massive downsides.
The rumor is that Russia sold Iran information on the Gaza wall protection technology in exchange for the Iranian made drones they are using in Ukraine.
> I can't think of a compelling reason for Russia to have helped, only massive downsides.
Conversely (and oddly), I can't think of many downsides.
Getting another US ally embroiled in an extended war, an ally that the US currently holds more dearly than Ukraine, possibly helps in negatively effecting US aid to Ukraine and its appetite to prolong the war on Russia's side of the globe. Furthermore, Russia needs not have expended lots of its own resources to trigger such a war. And if can get more proxy millitias of the regional powers to enter the war, it'd be difficult for the US not to put its focus more on that area of the world.
It is unlikely that there is Russian involvement in my opinion, I cannot make out a motive either. Israel is partially dependent on a relationship with Russia for various reasons as well. The relationship is complicated, with ups and downs, and at times difficult because of the closeness to the US and Russias closeness to Iran/Syria.
If Israel isn't careful, it can find itself in a proxy conflict. I think Russias involvement in Syria and Iran is viewed professionally and not personal as far as that makes sense and for that matter.
There are many reports in media that the women manning the surveillance cameras made multiple reports to superior officials notifying of weaknesses in the fence and alerting that the Hamas was up to something.
People at all levels explicitly chose to ignore the warnings and consistently assumed the Hamas isn't a major danger. That mentality came from the top.
While I wouldn't put it past Netanyahu to run a false flag operation... I think if he was hoping for it his purpose would have been a takeover of the government, not the destruction of Gaza.
He's one of the main proponents of the Hamas for the past 30 years. With this he looks like an incompetent idiot (which he is).
I think there's a chain of stupidity, bureaucracy and incompetents at fault. Reading reports in the papers over the past week it's astounding how many things went wrong. The head of the Shabak (internal security division) was on base checking notifications the day before. They had a conference call to alert the army so they would be prepared for "something", but they didn't loop in the airforce. If they had then some early air support might have changed the picture completely.
head of shabak was called in closer to midnight and they were at meetings through entire night when entire mess started.
shabak forces (whatever it is) were one of the first to respond
Yes. There were many individual notices from multiple sources and yet no one put it all together to form a picture. Different branches didn't communicate and didn't elevate preparedness.
The REALLY frustrating thing is that a few months back there was an attack from the Egyptian side of the border in which calls for help went unanswered for hours. Air support was delayed, etc. It seems that no one took that seriously and backups weren't installed. The level of incompetence is astounding.
there is somebody who served in IDF and writes articles about it, been invited to radio as military analyst, etc.
a few days ago he wrote that IDF doesn't like to learn from somebodies else mistakes. It prefers to have a bloodboth (implied it's own blood) in order to reach some conclusions.
but in general it looks like it was mix of assumption that hamas won't try to do anything and that they are a bunch of fellah that cosplay army for purpose of raising money. not sure if it's incompetence or arrogance.
Going dark isn't really a new thing though? That's how Bin Laden stayed hidden for some long. They communicated by "the old ways" . The part I don't understand is why they don't have a few thousand hard core army members ready to go at a moment's notice situated somewhere central to the west bank and to Gaza and can logistically be anywhere along those borders within an hour or so. It took several hours for them to get to the area and the terrorists/murderers were long gone.
My theory is that such a group within their military and police exists, but they weren’t notified in time, and mostly learnt about it from internet rather than their official response channels. Good old negligence.
None of those are in anyway equivalent (and some are also a real stretch to call false flags) to what OP is implying was allowed to deliberately happen to Israeli civilians.
I know they aren't equivalent, I just think they show that actions that most people would consider unthinkable (the state lying to justify a war) are in fact relatively common. Israel sacrificing the few for the many is only unthinkable if you think states are generally just and care about their citizens.
Previous Israeli PMs involved in wars have all retired within two years or so. That’s what makes this conspiracy theory hard to believe. It would mean Netanyahu, the consummate politician thought “yeah, my future success depends on tanking the diplomatic process with Saudi Arabia and instead launching a bloody war with Hamas.” Yeah, right.
- Yom Kippur War (1973). Golda Meir, stepped down 1974.
- First Lebanon War (1982). Menachem Begin, stepped down 1983.
- Gaza War, Operation Cast Lead (2008). Ehud Olmert, stepped down 2009.
Not listing Levi Eshkol because he died of a heart attack a couple years after the Six Day War (1967).
But sure, the man in charge during the biggest fuck up in the history of the Israeli state deliberately fucked up so he could extend his career. And this fuck up can’t be played off as accidental or bad luck, it’s a direct consequence of his policy of coddling Hamas.
If you believe that he did it deliberately, welcome to my Bridge Emporium, we’re running discounts today!
It would be because it was so bad. But if this was something that Israel typically experiences, then I don't think Netanyahu would have anything to worry about.
Also he still is in his position and it is just prediction that he will be removed in the future. That doesn't mean much until it actually happen. He already supposed to be gone, but the coalition fell apart.
Counterpoint would be that in such a situation, all it would take is one credible leak to destroy the government's reputation, and there is a lot of incentive to blow the whistle since most people tend to not want to see the people they were working to protect being raped and murdered.
It could be the decision of just one or a handful of people. It's easy enough to take all the intelligence reports and decide to put them in a big pile and ignore them till next week.
If anyone asks, you had too much work and were snowed under by reports, and you didn't think waiting a week would matter.
Doubtful. These terrorist attacks are legitimately bad for Israel just like 9/11 was legitimately bad for the US. The attacks bait an overreaction, which then cripples the country's political cachet and financial prosperity. An invasion of Gaza followed by an occupation of 2 million people is expensive to a back-breaking degree for a country of only 10 million. The attack and response will stymie regional normalization talks. The status quo was working just fine for Israel.
I think this is a conspiracy theory. Israel was distracted by festivities, leadership didn't rank the info they were receiving correctly.
The previous status quo with no conflict was highly favorable to Israel, they don't win anything by a war as it won't solve any problems. They just want to make sure such attacks will not happen for a longer time.
Extremism is on the rise in Israel as well and even someone like Netanyahu understands this as a problem. Their enemies already completely embraced that, hence the attacks.
I doubt land claims are in their interest. I guess the strategy of more autonomy is off the table though and security forces will likely remain a long time.
This is really not a good article, and probably not likely to lead to a good discussion, due to the lack of hard information. It's all just speculation by supposedly well connected people on how they might have done it. I don't think it's likely we can have a productive discussion until some more hard information comes out on exactly what happened regarding counter-surveillance tactics actually used. It's just gonna be more speculation and partisan bickering. Hence, I flagged it, and I suggest others do so as well.
The attack comes amid a deep political crisis in Israel over the Netanyahu government's judicial overhaul, which has weakened the country's military, economy and society.
The plan, which will weaken the Supreme Court and other democratic institutions, has faced opposition from some of Israel's closest allies, including the Biden administration, and it has already destabilized the country's economy and military.
----
Of course, "helps" is a weasel word, but it must be a contributing factor.
Most takes on this matter have little appreciation for the underlying complexity.
The border fence was a $1 billion capital investment with sensors, automated machine guns, cameras, etc. that allowed the military to reduce the manpower needed to patrol the border. This is a good thing - patrol duty is mind-numbingly boring work that hurts morale, and there are always associated risks of getting hit by a sniper.
There are reports that Israel was warned. Sure - a handful of signals in an ocean of noise. Finding those signals (and wrangling apart conflicting signals) is why intelligence is necessarily an imprecise art and not a science, and why no defensive posture relies solely on intelligence.
Much ado has been made about judicial reform infighting weakening the Israeli security establishment, but all the public reporting points to issues with reservist volunteers, who are not essential for peacetime operations.
The far more banal explanation is that there was no dead-man's-switch monitoring on the border fence. The New York Times reported rumors that the attack started by Hamas knocking out the cell towers that were used by the remote sensors on the border fence to send monitoring data back to operators. Losing connectivity to so many parts of the fence at once should have immediately triggered high-severity alarms. It sounds like that didn't happen.
Why didn't that happen? Maybe a gross oversight on the part of the architects and contractors of the border fence. Maybe that alarm had fired once-too-many times in the past as a flaky-false-positive and it was disconnected instead of fixed. Maybe the dead-man's-switch component itself was broken somehow. Maybe someone took something offline for maintenance at what turned out to be the worst possible time, and alternative mechanisms (i.e. manned patrols) were not deployed during the maintenance, or maybe it simply didn't get turned back on, and nobody noticed because it's functionality is not used by operators on a day-to-day basis.
When so many people die, everyone wants to look for a scapegoat. But perhaps we should just, I dunno, build better systems instead?
This is getting quite offtopic, but if Palestinians weren't going to accept the Olmert Peace plan (map visible here: http://www.passia.org/maps/view/78 ) then there's nothing they would accept.
Olmert made multiple peace offer, historic ones. I linked to the one I meant. Wikipedia does not have an individual article on the one I linked, instead it's just summarized in the page on Olmert.
And there have been many other plans proposed by Israel - around 20 or so.
Palestinians rejected every single plan.
The Olmert one and the one Arafat rejected are especially notable because they gave Palestinians virtually everything they wanted. They still rejected them.
There's a reason Israel gave up on ever achieving peace - if they were going to reject those plans, there's nothing left to offer.
I mean clearly it did not give Palestinians everything they wanted if they rejected it. Indeed,
> This was unacceptable to Abbas, who had made it clear that he could allow over 60% of the settlers to remain in place, as long as the Ariel settlement, which formed a significant obstacle to Palestinian development, was removed.
I'm no expert on the situation in Israel/Palestine, and I doubt few of us here are. But for sure these proposals are extremely complicated and you have to be aware of a lot more than how the map looks like in order to fully judge the implications of a proposed peace plan.
Furthermore, it's very likely that actors like Iran were influencing Palestinian decisions, and if the proposal was not in their favor, they would go against it.
In any case, I find the view of outright dismissing Palestinians as not willing to take the best possible offer and only wanting war rather naive. The whole conversation around the topic, including people salivating over how to imprison people better with better technology, is so damn toxic.
> In any case, I find the view of outright dismissing Palestinians as not willing to take the best possible offer and only wanting war rather naive.
And yet, it's true. Are the Palestinians better off now? Are they likely to get a country via war? Nope.
They squandered their best opportunity, and they are unlikely to ever get it again.
You started this chain by saying Israel has done everything except try for peace and I think I've pretty conclusively proven that that is simply not true. Israel has tried, but Palestinians are unwilling to accept anything less than everything.
Or perhaps they need to try longer and harder. They're the ones with the bigger guns, more powerful allies, more overall resources and more stable government.
If you look into the history of settlements in the West Bank, the picture gets a bit more complex than "Israel has tried".
> But hey, let's geek out a bit more on the surveillance/civilian murdering technology!
You realize if they had better border monitoring technology, Hamas would never have succeeded in their terrorist attack, and then the retaliation we're seeing would never have occurred, right? It literally would have saved the lives of thousands of civilians on both sides.
Yes, I also realize that if all Palestinians were kept in chains, monitored and force fed, we could certainly save all the lives. This realization, however, doesn't get me excited on how to best execute it, nor does it feel like it's a lasting solution.
Not trying to find an excuse here, but most plans for peace were suggested at inopportune times and there always were factions that tried to inflame violence to make people discard the suggestions. A leader cannot just accept it with a broad backing, he might be inhibited politically.
That is why it is of utmost importance that peace processes are repeated until successful.
>The far more banal explanation is that there was no dead-man's-switch monitoring on the border fence. The New York Times reported rumors that the attack started by Hamas knocking out the cell towers that were used by the remote sensors on the border fence to send monitoring data back to operators
not cell towers. they dropped from drones bombs on remote observation systems, remotely controlled gun turrets and some local communication hub. there are videos of those drops
> grew too confident, in part because its technological sophistication lulled it into a false sense of security
Yeah, constant monitoring of plain communications of plain civilians do just that - detect gov-himself-induced unhappines and nothing of importance...
In the meantime EU tries to implement spy-tek on all civilians. Which just got even less sensible...
But what actually Hamas wanted to achieve ? Got media attention ?? What for ?? Or someone wanted to use stupid low level Hamas, dead now, soldiers into pushing Israel (and US) into accepting imperial territory gain ?
Hamas is a business model. Dead Palestinian civilians for money. So, first, of course, all Palestinians are civilian. And every Palestinian corpse is at least 10 dead people. Also there are no fighters. Of course, this is lying, but is perhaps the least problematic of their behaviors.
That's the business model: dead civilians for money from extremists and states.
So right now they're doing everything they possibly can, from firing rockets at an overwhelming military force, in an attempt to anger them, to force Palestinian civilians to stay in locations being bombed, to killing Palestinians themselves.
As a result: Hamas is not very popular in Palestine ... of course. I get that everyone claims the opposite, but most people are sane. If you try to kill them or try to force them to die ... you're going to lose a bit of popularity.
They came to power with a massacre. Yes, they won elections, but that didn't mean the Palestinian Authority gave them all control. It just gave them seats in the legislative council. They immediately killed people until they were the only one left, which Fatah tried to prevent. Needless to say, this is NOT what Palestinians voted for. Since then it hasn't really been any different, ever. There's movies of Hamas throwing civil servants of buildings.
It's very likely that even after Last week's attacks Hamas has still killed more Palestinians than Israeli.
65 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadIt makes sense that a high-tech barrier is relatively sparsely manned on a given day if the idea is to automate as much of the defense apparatus as possible. And it would be doubly embarrassing if the reports that Israel was warned of a potential attack were true.
Surely though the actual surveillance part is worse lol
Now there will be information leaking that it’s Iran and Russia helped, and new type of warfare, new tech, etc, which is true. But this is basically them saying “it’s not we who missed it, it’s that the enemy became more advanced” to deflect blame externally. When you rely on a breach sensor from a border fence, a camera feed and a remote machine gun, if it gets broken you need to repair it right way, and deploy a team immediately. DevOps reacts faster to a server outage than IDF reacted to a breach of security. IDF probably thought that if anything serious breqed in Gaza, Shabak would know. And Shabak probably thought, that in worst case scenario, they had sensors and remote machine gun at the border. This reasoning might upset many Israeli, but it’s a case of complacency and the political elite loosing perspective of what is important.
Correct.
> and was busy doing geopolitics and selling surveillance tech to various regimes to spy on opposition and journalist.
OK, that's just foolish. It's not the same people doing those thing.
Israel got complacent because it thought Hamas was more interested in improving things in Gaza than it was in attacking Israel. For example the border was more open just before the attack than it had been in many years.
So Israel relied to passive tech to warn them, and reduced its security posture. Hamas took advantage of that by going dark and not doing thing that tech would notice.
> So Israel relied to passive tech to warn them, and reduced its security posture. Hamas took advantage of that by going dark and not doing thing that tech would notice.
There is no such thing as a passive security tech. Their whole doctrine is preventive strikes and fast response time. They failed at both. A motorcade driving to the fence and blowing it up is literally what their whole system was designed to handle. This is why there are multiple lines and buffer zones. When the first gets breached, then get alerted, by the time the second one is reached, they should be looking at the intruder through the scope. Someone at the border with a bolt cutter or explosive trying to sneak in is what hamas has been doing for years. And sending some flying shit over the border has been going for years as well, whether its rockers, burning kites or drones. The fact that they were able to drop some explosives on towers with drones is just ridiculous. This application of low tech drones has been on display at scale since the beginning of Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was only a matter of time until it was applied by hamas.
they first bombed from drones observation cameras, remote controlled gun turrets and bombed some communication hub. so when everything made boom at same time in control center they simply lost picture and next thing they knew it's mortars falling on them and gates/walls been blown up.
there are also some guesses that some of the explosives could be placed on the fence during the protests in weeks before. de jure nobody supposed to be there. de fact if IDF shoots at legs, after few warnings, it makes appearance on all news publications
>This application of low tech drones has been on display at scale since the beginning of Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was only a matter of time until it was applied by hamas
yeap. this is why merkavas now have "grills" on top. blowing up drones weren't sent over the border there.
Interesting. I haven't even heard of this. Do you have any sources that prove this or at least give some credibility?
Hamas changed tactics, and their defense held up reasonably well given that between 4 and 5,000 rockets were fired at Israel.
I'm not entirely sure how they could have prepared for paraglider ambushes short of having their soldiers be constantly patrolling, and thus being exposed, along the border.
Then again, I'm just a dog on the internet.
This is a rumor I heard, I don't endorse it.
Conversely (and oddly), I can't think of many downsides.
Getting another US ally embroiled in an extended war, an ally that the US currently holds more dearly than Ukraine, possibly helps in negatively effecting US aid to Ukraine and its appetite to prolong the war on Russia's side of the globe. Furthermore, Russia needs not have expended lots of its own resources to trigger such a war. And if can get more proxy millitias of the regional powers to enter the war, it'd be difficult for the US not to put its focus more on that area of the world.
If Israel isn't careful, it can find itself in a proxy conflict. I think Russias involvement in Syria and Iran is viewed professionally and not personal as far as that makes sense and for that matter.
People at all levels explicitly chose to ignore the warnings and consistently assumed the Hamas isn't a major danger. That mentality came from the top.
He's one of the main proponents of the Hamas for the past 30 years. With this he looks like an incompetent idiot (which he is).
I think there's a chain of stupidity, bureaucracy and incompetents at fault. Reading reports in the papers over the past week it's astounding how many things went wrong. The head of the Shabak (internal security division) was on base checking notifications the day before. They had a conference call to alert the army so they would be prepared for "something", but they didn't loop in the airforce. If they had then some early air support might have changed the picture completely.
The REALLY frustrating thing is that a few months back there was an attack from the Egyptian side of the border in which calls for help went unanswered for hours. Air support was delayed, etc. It seems that no one took that seriously and backups weren't installed. The level of incompetence is astounding.
a few days ago he wrote that IDF doesn't like to learn from somebodies else mistakes. It prefers to have a bloodboth (implied it's own blood) in order to reach some conclusions.
but in general it looks like it was mix of assumption that hamas won't try to do anything and that they are a bunch of fellah that cosplay army for purpose of raising money. not sure if it's incompetence or arrogance.
https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/america-t...
And your conspiracy theory requires literally thousands of people to be in on it.
- Yom Kippur War (1973). Golda Meir, stepped down 1974.
- First Lebanon War (1982). Menachem Begin, stepped down 1983.
- Gaza War, Operation Cast Lead (2008). Ehud Olmert, stepped down 2009.
Not listing Levi Eshkol because he died of a heart attack a couple years after the Six Day War (1967).
But sure, the man in charge during the biggest fuck up in the history of the Israeli state deliberately fucked up so he could extend his career. And this fuck up can’t be played off as accidental or bad luck, it’s a direct consequence of his policy of coddling Hamas.
If you believe that he did it deliberately, welcome to my Bridge Emporium, we’re running discounts today!
Also Netanyahu doesn't look like the kind of a guy that has shame that would make him step down.
Also he still is in his position and it is just prediction that he will be removed in the future. That doesn't mean much until it actually happen. He already supposed to be gone, but the coalition fell apart.
What success? Israel was already successful - the border with Gaza was quiet, attacks were few. What else exactly were they supposed to gain?
If anyone asks, you had too much work and were snowed under by reports, and you didn't think waiting a week would matter.
The previous status quo with no conflict was highly favorable to Israel, they don't win anything by a war as it won't solve any problems. They just want to make sure such attacks will not happen for a longer time.
Extremism is on the rise in Israel as well and even someone like Netanyahu understands this as a problem. Their enemies already completely embraced that, hence the attacks.
Axios reports
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/07/hamas-attack-invasion-israe...
The big picture:
The attack comes amid a deep political crisis in Israel over the Netanyahu government's judicial overhaul, which has weakened the country's military, economy and society.
Links to:
https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/israel-judicial-overhaul-re...
Why it matters:
The plan, which will weaken the Supreme Court and other democratic institutions, has faced opposition from some of Israel's closest allies, including the Biden administration, and it has already destabilized the country's economy and military.
----
Of course, "helps" is a weasel word, but it must be a contributing factor.
Turmoil never helps.
it weakened not army but outside perception of army strength and deterrence as result of this. and this was well known
The border fence was a $1 billion capital investment with sensors, automated machine guns, cameras, etc. that allowed the military to reduce the manpower needed to patrol the border. This is a good thing - patrol duty is mind-numbingly boring work that hurts morale, and there are always associated risks of getting hit by a sniper.
There are reports that Israel was warned. Sure - a handful of signals in an ocean of noise. Finding those signals (and wrangling apart conflicting signals) is why intelligence is necessarily an imprecise art and not a science, and why no defensive posture relies solely on intelligence.
Much ado has been made about judicial reform infighting weakening the Israeli security establishment, but all the public reporting points to issues with reservist volunteers, who are not essential for peacetime operations.
The far more banal explanation is that there was no dead-man's-switch monitoring on the border fence. The New York Times reported rumors that the attack started by Hamas knocking out the cell towers that were used by the remote sensors on the border fence to send monitoring data back to operators. Losing connectivity to so many parts of the fence at once should have immediately triggered high-severity alarms. It sounds like that didn't happen.
Why didn't that happen? Maybe a gross oversight on the part of the architects and contractors of the border fence. Maybe that alarm had fired once-too-many times in the past as a flaky-false-positive and it was disconnected instead of fixed. Maybe the dead-man's-switch component itself was broken somehow. Maybe someone took something offline for maintenance at what turned out to be the worst possible time, and alternative mechanisms (i.e. manned patrols) were not deployed during the maintenance, or maybe it simply didn't get turned back on, and nobody noticed because it's functionality is not used by operators on a day-to-day basis.
When so many people die, everyone wants to look for a scapegoat. But perhaps we should just, I dunno, build better systems instead?
Edit: just read the Wikipedia article about the plan. It, indeed, is more complicated than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realignment_plan
Olmert made multiple peace offer, historic ones. I linked to the one I meant. Wikipedia does not have an individual article on the one I linked, instead it's just summarized in the page on Olmert.
And there have been many other plans proposed by Israel - around 20 or so.
Palestinians rejected every single plan.
The Olmert one and the one Arafat rejected are especially notable because they gave Palestinians virtually everything they wanted. They still rejected them.
There's a reason Israel gave up on ever achieving peace - if they were going to reject those plans, there's nothing left to offer.
> This was unacceptable to Abbas, who had made it clear that he could allow over 60% of the settlers to remain in place, as long as the Ariel settlement, which formed a significant obstacle to Palestinian development, was removed.
I'm no expert on the situation in Israel/Palestine, and I doubt few of us here are. But for sure these proposals are extremely complicated and you have to be aware of a lot more than how the map looks like in order to fully judge the implications of a proposed peace plan.
Furthermore, it's very likely that actors like Iran were influencing Palestinian decisions, and if the proposal was not in their favor, they would go against it.
In any case, I find the view of outright dismissing Palestinians as not willing to take the best possible offer and only wanting war rather naive. The whole conversation around the topic, including people salivating over how to imprison people better with better technology, is so damn toxic.
And yet, it's true. Are the Palestinians better off now? Are they likely to get a country via war? Nope.
They squandered their best opportunity, and they are unlikely to ever get it again.
You started this chain by saying Israel has done everything except try for peace and I think I've pretty conclusively proven that that is simply not true. Israel has tried, but Palestinians are unwilling to accept anything less than everything.
If you look into the history of settlements in the West Bank, the picture gets a bit more complex than "Israel has tried".
You realize if they had better border monitoring technology, Hamas would never have succeeded in their terrorist attack, and then the retaliation we're seeing would never have occurred, right? It literally would have saved the lives of thousands of civilians on both sides.
That is why it is of utmost importance that peace processes are repeated until successful.
not cell towers. they dropped from drones bombs on remote observation systems, remotely controlled gun turrets and some local communication hub. there are videos of those drops
Yeah, constant monitoring of plain communications of plain civilians do just that - detect gov-himself-induced unhappines and nothing of importance...
In the meantime EU tries to implement spy-tek on all civilians. Which just got even less sensible...
But what actually Hamas wanted to achieve ? Got media attention ?? What for ?? Or someone wanted to use stupid low level Hamas, dead now, soldiers into pushing Israel (and US) into accepting imperial territory gain ?
That's the business model: dead civilians for money from extremists and states.
So right now they're doing everything they possibly can, from firing rockets at an overwhelming military force, in an attempt to anger them, to force Palestinian civilians to stay in locations being bombed, to killing Palestinians themselves.
As a result: Hamas is not very popular in Palestine ... of course. I get that everyone claims the opposite, but most people are sane. If you try to kill them or try to force them to die ... you're going to lose a bit of popularity.
They came to power with a massacre. Yes, they won elections, but that didn't mean the Palestinian Authority gave them all control. It just gave them seats in the legislative council. They immediately killed people until they were the only one left, which Fatah tried to prevent. Needless to say, this is NOT what Palestinians voted for. Since then it hasn't really been any different, ever. There's movies of Hamas throwing civil servants of buildings.
It's very likely that even after Last week's attacks Hamas has still killed more Palestinians than Israeli.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah%E2%80%93Hamas_conflict
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28896346
https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-condemns-6-informants-fo...