It could have been worse, and we really messed up.
Those are the two main takeaways from a Washington Post piece Sunday about what Hamas hoped to accomplish on October 7, and how the terrorist organization was able to lull Israel to sleep and deceive it.First, regarding how it could have been worse.
How did Israel mess up?
Now, regarding how Israel messed up.
The story paints a picture of Hamas conducting above- and below-ground military exercises while planning the attack for more than a year.The terrorists trained and collected intelligence on their targets by using “cheap surveillance drones to generate maps” and Palestinian workers allowed into Israel to work, “often in the same farming communities that were in Hamas’s crosshairs.” Though not sophisticated, the intelligence gathering was methodical and thorough, the report said.The precise plans for the attack were restricted to a tiny cadre of military leaders. The Post took at face value Iranian and Hezbollah claims that they did not have advance knowledge of the attack.And then there was the deception. The story retells how Hamas lulled Israel to sleep, hinting at newfound moderation and pragmatism – something Israel desperately wanted to believe.“To buttress that perception of moderation, clashes between Hamas and Israel ceased after 2021,” the report said. “The group notably refrained from jumping in on several occasions when its Gaza ally, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ, fired rockets or engaged militarily with Israel. To many in Israel, it was further evidence that Hamas had changed and no longer sought a bloody conflict. Some reports suggested that Hamas officials even passed along intelligence about PIJ to the Israelis to reinforce the impression that they were being cooperative.”And then, of course, Israel was off focus. It concentrated on an upsurge of violence in Judea and Samaria and was concerned with a flare-up in the North, as well as being preoccupied with the whole judicial reform.“The distractions and ruses worked,” the report said. “In Gaza, less than 50 miles from the West Bank, the arming and training of Hamas assault teams were largely ignored or dismissed.”Since the war began following the massacres on October 7, Israel has rightfully been focused more on fighting the war and destroying Hamas than on trying to figure out what went wrong and where it failed. Once the war is over, those questions will dominate the national agenda. The Post story gave a general outline of what happened. Answers to the question of how it happened – how Israel allowed it to happen – will be taken up by the various military and political committees and commissions that will be set up soon after the war ends.