“Israel made a huge mistake believing that a terror organization can change its DNA,” said Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Netanyahu. “We will not make it again.”
Three days after the deadliest attack in Israeli history, with at least 900 dead, the country is on the cusp of a long and bloody war in Gaza. More than 300,000 reservists have been called up to serve. But the capacity of Israel’s military, long revered here as a source of stability, suddenly feels like a question mark. Equally unclear is the end game for Netanyahu — with his Gaza containment strategy in ruins, some are calling for a full reoccupation of the territory.
Security experts say the war is the result of severe intelligence and military failures. Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants had been training for weeks near the Israeli border — drilling in rocket launches, kidnapping soldiers and “storming settlements,” Gazan media reported. Yet the assessment from the Israeli military was that Hamas had no appetite for another conflict, a line repeated by trusted media figures.
“The good news in the context of the Gaza Strip is that neither Israel nor Hamas want to see hostilities escalate, each for its own reasons,” columnist Yoav Limor wrote last month in the right-wing newspaper Israel Hayom.
Aharon Zeevi Farkash, former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ military intelligence branch, told Israeli radio station Reshet Bet that “after we are able to probe this, we will see that we knew almost everything. There were intelligence assessments hours before. The question is, did we understand what we knew?”
Analysts also point to a failure in political leadership. Netanyahu, they contend, allowed military preparedness to erode alongside Palestinian militant escalation as he pursued a contentious plan to weaken Israel’s judiciary — setting off months of furious protests that delighted the country’s adversaries.
“Israel, once a formidable regional power, has gradually eroded in faith, consciousness, self-assurance and humility,” Hasan Nasrallah, the chief of Hezbollah in Lebanon, crowed in August, as thousands of Israeli military reservists joined the anti-government demonstrations.
The IDF issued rare public statements in recent months, warning that military deterrence was deteriorating. Netanyahu and radical members of his cabinet derided the officials as part of the protest movement, and the protesters as “anarchists,” asserting that the status quo with the Palestinians would hold.
“The modus vivendi was that Hamas takes care of Gaza, Israel allows it to prosper, with the relatively small price that Israel paid every so often, with a round of violence in which Israel would kill thousands of Palestinians and Palestinians would kill dozens of Israelis — that was considered the best Israel could hope for,” said Eran Etzion, former deputy head of Israel’s national security council. “Now that strategic equation has been completely violated.”
Reserve Maj. Gen. Itzhak Brik told Reshet Bet radio on Monday that he has met with Netanyahu and other top leaders for years, and more frequently in recent months, urging them to formulate a long-term strategy for dealing with Palestinian terrorism.
“The chaos that has been going on in the past year has created a situation that we’re in now, of putting out fires,” Brik said. “A terror attack here, a terror attack there. They’re not dealing with building the army.”
Israel’s chaotic and delayed response to the multipronged assault was shocking to Israelis, who watched helplessly on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath and the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, as civilians in the south were left to fend for themselves against Hamas gunmen. Entire families were killed. Children and the elderly were taken to Gaza as hostages.
The surprise attack started around 6 a.m., with a barrage of rocket fire followed by cross-border attacks. Yet it wasn’t until late afternoon that buses and trains were mobilized to ferry soldiers south. It took some 10 hours for the first troops to arrive in towns overrun by militants.
Miri Regev, Israel’s transportation minister and a longtime Netanyahu ally, was in Mexico. Private citizens donated food, flashlights and other basic supplies to the reservists as they waited for hours to receive guidance.
The Gaza border, it soon became clear, was minimally manned, and it took hours to redirect units stationed in the West Bank, which has been the main area of focus for the military this year. Palestinian militancy has surged in the occupied territory, from Jenin to Jericho, and Israeli raids have been increasingly common and deadly. Some in Netanyahu’s far-right government had called to annex the West Bank. Gaza, by contrast, appeared stable.
“There was a need for more soldiers, so where did they take them from? From the Gaza border, where they thought it was calm,” said Farkash, the former IDF military intelligence chief. “Not surprising that Hamas and Islamic Jihad noticed the low staffing at the border.”
Hamas, designated as a terrorist group by Israel, the United States and the European Union, assumed power in Gaza in 2007 after Israel withdrew. For years, the group has been digging tunnels, amassing rockets and threatening to take hostages, part of a wider plan to “liberate Palestine.” It has publicly increased its cooperation with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon, which has stepped up its provocations in recent months along Israel’s northern border.
Netanyahu has downplayed these developments, presiding over an unofficial economic peace with Hamas — facilitating cash infusions to the strip and allowing thousands of impoverished Gazans to work day jobs in Israel. The arrangement helped “legitimize [Hamas’s] sovereignty in Gaza,” Etzion said.
As Israel grapples with the fallout from the attack, many in the south still feel isolated and alone. Much of the most reliable information on the situation there continues to come from citizen networks rather than military officials, who on Monday asserted that towns in the south were “recaptured” despite ongoing fighting with militants.
Gaya Calderon, who texted with her 16-year-old sister moments before she, their brothers and their father were abducted by militants and taken to the Gaza Strip, said that she and other relatives of hostages have received no help or guidance — either from the army or the government.
“I’m sitting at home, crying, but there is nothing I can do,” Calderon said. “We need them home.”