Israel attack exposes shocking intelligence failure as Iran arms Hamas militants
The Israel-Palestine conflict explained with our expert, The Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan.
On Saturday night – as celebrations of the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah wound down – the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas launched a violent assault on Israel.
What is happening in Israel?
Hamas attacked by land, sea, and sky, catching Israeli forces off guard.
As many as 5000 rockets were fired into Israeli territory as militants poured across the border from Gaza. Military bases were captured. Dozens of army officers were abducted and held hostage.
Civilians, too – women, children, and the elderly – were taken into Gaza. Thousands of civilians on both sides were killed or injured in the assault, while others escaped – terrified – into schools and bomb shelters.
What is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying?
By Sunday morning, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had declared Israel was at war.
Mr Netanyahu said: “What happened today has never been seen before in Israel and I will make sure it doesn’t happen again. This war will take time. It will be difficult. Difficult days are ahead of us, but we will win.”
The Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan says this is a “shocking and barbaric and savage attack, with some of the most appalling scenes we‘ve witnessed in modern conflict.
“(We’ve seen) pictures of Hamas carrying triumphantly the half-naked bodies of Israeli women in they’ve slaughtered in villages in southern Israel, children, elderly people kidnapped as hostages, civilians pulled out of their cars and killed,” Sheridan said.
Who is Hamas?
“The Australian government proscribes Hamas as a terrorist organisation and its right to do so.”
Sheridan describes this as “the most significant attack on Israel, I would say, in decades.
“This will reverberate throughout the Middle East I would say for decades.
“Israel has been shown to be vulnerable here, vulnerable to savage, barbaric attack.
Are Hezbollah and Iran supporting Hamas?
“But a number of non-state actors have amassed big forces on Israel‘s borders. Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Islamic Jihad and others among some of the Palestinian territories.
“And they are funded and supported by Iran and by other actors in the Middle East. And clearly, they have enough capability just to pose an existential threat now to Israel.
How will Israel fight back?
“And I think Israel is going to have to take very, very fierce action to re-establish its security.
“I predict a quite a long conflict, very bloody and terrible months ahead.
The Hamas operation exploited shocking weaknesses in Israel’s intelligence capabilities.
White House officials also revealed they hadn’t received information to suggest the deadly plot was in the works.
Why didn’t Israeli intelligence predict the attack?
Greg Sheridan: “So Israeli intelligence services are famed as the best in the world. And that’s because Israel has always been on a knife edge of survival.
“And in a sense, it’s become a bit complacent in recent years because it’s been so successful. But they’re not supermen. You know, they’re not gods, they’re not miracle workers.
“And they’ve always relied on a great deal of human intelligence and a great deal of signals intelligence.
“Now, Hamas is funded by Iran and is part of a great big movement of anti-Semitic hatred throughout the Arab and Islamic world in the Middle East.
How Hamas turned off mobiles to plan attack
“And they have clearly watched the lessons of failed counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they’ve taken themselves out of high tech communications.
“So plainly, they don’t use mobile phones or the internet anymore for the most sensitive operations.
“So Israel’s tremendous capabilities at electronic intelligence weren’t relevant.
“Hamas is much more ruthless than any other Palestinian group.
“You know, when they first took over, they celebrated their victory by throwing gay people off the tops of buildings and so on, because they a very, very extremist terrorist, anti-Semitic cult, really almost a death cult.
“And they are savage on anyone they consider may have breached the confidence of their workings or collaborated with Israel or anything like this.
“Nonetheless, through all the Palestinian movements and through all the Arab states, Israel has traditionally had very good intelligence sources, both human intelligence and electronic intelligence.
“What is shocking about this is that this is a very, very large operation, Thousands and thousands of rockets, hundreds and hundreds of terrorist infiltrators willing to break through the wire barriers, come into Israel on gliders from Gaza over the top of the barriers and land in Israel proper from the sea.
“Now, they’ve killed hundreds and hundreds of Israelis. We don’t know how many that slaughtered civilians. So the fact that they could do such a big and co-ordinated operation without Israeli intelligence getting even a sniff of it. That’s the intelligence failure.”
What is Israel’s opposition saying?
Prime Minister Netanyahu entered talks with his political opponents on Saturday night in hopes of unifying Israel’s government against Hamas – at least temporarily.
The current political climate means that’s easier said than done.
“Israel suffers from defects in its constitutional system, which reflect the emergency in which the state was born.
“There was no time really to write a proper constitution. So like New Zealand or the United Kingdom, Israel doesn’t have a constitution and only has one house of parliament.”
What about Israel’s Supreme Court?
“The main restraint on the government is the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court has become too arrogant and too powerful.
“It says that it can overturn government appointments and so on. So there’s a case for reforming the power of the Supreme Court.
“But on the other hand, Netanyahu – influenced by people way to the right of him in his own government – was trying to strip too much power from the Supreme Court.
“Now, this has just been one of the lines of division within Israeli society which has emerged in recent years. Israel has become very affluent and especially at the top end. But at the bottom end, it’s still quite poor.
“And Israel really relied on heroic, magnificent social solidarity. You know, all the men and a lot of the women served in the Army. Everybody did their three years. Nobody was above service.
“Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother was killed in the army.
“But Israel has been evolving away from that, now it’s a very high tech society.
The top people are very, very wealthy and very liberal.
What about ultra-Orthodox Israelis?
“At the same time, the ultra-Orthodox having a lot of kids. So they’re a growing proportion of the economy and they don’t like that like that liberalism. And also they don’t serve in the army.
“Now, that‘s all the backdrop of the conflict. I am very confident that Israel will come together at this moment. Now, they might not come together you know, permanently. But they’ll come together at this moment.
Is Israel’s army calling up civilians?
“As I understand it, every able-bodied man is being called up into the army who haven’t served in the Army for 20 years, are going back into uniform, left or right.
“Everybody in Israel will, I think, work to defeat Hamas and to prevent Hezbollah from striking in the north.”
Will Netanyahu create a war cabinet?
“I think Netanyahu is trying to produce a government of national unity,” Greg Sheridan said.
“I think that would be a very good idea, strictly temporary government of national unity. I mean, that’s not the solution to Israel’s political problems in the long run. But for 12 months or something.
“And I do think that this conflict is an existential threat to Israel, and every Israeli will respond with the full measure of devotion to their state.
Will the Israeli diaspora go home to fight?
“And I would expect a lot of Israelis living abroad will go back to Israel to join in the conflict, which is what has always happened in the past.
“So there’s a huge Israeli diaspora around the world. And I would I would think that many, many able bodied men in that diaspora will go back to lend their lives to the support of Israel’s survival.
The global reaction to the conflict has been swift, too.
What are Albanese and Biden saying about Israel?
Here’s US President Joe Biden: “There‘s never justification for terrorist attacks, and my administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering. Let me say this as clearly as I can. This is not a moment for any party hostile to Israel to exploit these attacks, to seek advantage. The world is watching.”
On Sunday morning, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke to the ABC’s Insiders program about the situation.
The Prime Minister said: “Well, this is an abhorrent attack on Israel. This is indiscriminate civilians being targeted, killed and murdered. And as well, many of them being taken as hostages.
“This is a dreadful circumstance that people didn’t see coming, wasn’t foreshadowed, a shock attack. I spoke to the Australian, the Israeli ambassador to Australia, who’s in Israel this morning, and he, of course, was very shaken, as you would expect.
“And this action is ongoing. It must stop. Israel has a right to defend itself, which is what it is doing.”
What will Hamas do now?
Meanwhile, Hamas leaders called on other Palestinian groups to join their deadly campaign.
Hezbollah – a Shiite Muslim political party based in Lebanon – threatened to weigh in, bringing potentially 100,000 precision missiles to the fight.
Iran, too, said it would back the Palestinian fighters.
And that means a much bigger conflict could be on the cards.
What is the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict?
The conflict between Israel and Palestine ratcheted up at the beginning of the last century, mostly due to wars fought elsewhere.
Jewish people – who fled persecution by Nazis and other groups in Europe – looked further afield for land to establish a new homeland.
They settled on a wedge of land between Egypt and Jordan. Today, we know it as Israel – the world’s only Jewish state.
But at that time, the land was controlled by Arab Muslims – or Palestinians – who’ve resisted Israeli occupation ever since.
Where do Palestinians live? What is the Gaza strip?
Most Palestinians now live in areas known as the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which were established following wars in 1948 and 1967.
An increasingly right-leaning Israel occupies both territories, but Gaza has been controlled by the fundamentalist Islamist Hamas since its election in 2006.
Various attempts to split the land and implement systems of shared governance have largely failed – and so a handful of deadly military operations have been launched by both sides over the past few decades.
So you could say that the deadly assault on southern Israel by Hamas shouldn’t have come as a surprise – but it did.
Here’s Greg Sheridan again: “The military failure is that Israel has always known that this sort of thing is a possibility.
“The southern towns of Israel are accustomed to rocket fire. They’ve got bomb shelters and safe rooms and all the rest of it.
“You know, the civilian men and a lot of the women have access to firearms because they’re used to the idea that there will be the odd terrorist infiltrator who might try to kill them.
“And they have to provide for their own security. And there are also deployments of the Israeli Defence Force in the south. These deployments have obviously been quite light. And they’ve been overwhelmed in some cases by Hamas.”
“Now, Hamas has a long record of murdering innocent civilians. It hasn’t in the past really had much success against Israeli soldiers.
“But it seems that with overwhelming numbers and a lot of firepower.”
Who has armed Hamas?
“One of the lessons of this is that non-state actors can get enormous firepower from Iran and elsewhere,” Greg Sheridan said.
“A number of Israeli military bases were overwhelmed. The small military bases, not great big military bases, but nonetheless, a number of them were overwhelmed.
“A number of Israeli tanks were taken captive. A number of Israeli soldiers were killed. A number were taken captive as hostages.
“So as well as the intelligence failure it’s clear that Israel didn’t have enough military forces in place to deal with this kind of swarming attack.
“Of course, it’s the most difficult attack to deal with, a swarming attack not with formed groups of people to whom you can strike effectively from the air, but a swarms of swarms of people suddenly climbing over your fence and so forth.
“Nonetheless, this is a military fight. Israel has been able to defeat all of its enemies hitherto, including massed Arab states.
“You know, in the West, wars faced six or eight Arab armies against it, defeated them all, not without cost on any occasion, but for Israeli military bases to be overrun and numbers of soldiers to be killed and numbers to be taken hostage, that’s a military failure on top of the intelligence failure.”
How will this affect Benjamin Netanyahu?
The dual blunders could spell the end of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Prime Ministership.
Greg Sheridan: “I think it‘s very hard for Netanyahu to survive this. To survive at all, he needs a massive military victory.
“But this terrible, shocking event, although it’s not Israel’s fault, it is an intelligence failure and also a military failure by Israel.
“And Netanyahu’s great strength has always been national security and empowering the intelligence services and backing the military.
“He’ll ultimately have to take responsibility for this as prime minister.
“Golda Meir was the prime minister during the Yom Kippur War when Syria and Israel and Egypt embarked on a shock, surprise attack on Israel. 10,000 Israeli soldiers, I think, died in that war.
“And Israel was under terrible military pressure. Now, ultimately, Golda Meir had a military victory, but it did also destroy her prime ministership.
“I imagine the same thing will happen with Netanyahu, although it’s intensely unpredictable. I make no prediction with confidence, except that in the next weeks I think every Israeli is likely to put aside their political differences and just struggle to make sure that Israel survives.
“I mean. The Jewish world has suffered 2000 years, at least, of shocking anti-Semitism. They set up Israel so that scenes like women being dragged off the street, killed, stripped and paraded around would never happen again.”
Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that this conflict will be long and difficult.
Greg Sheridan: ‘Hamas loves death’
Greg agrees that Israel’s retaliation will be fearsome and that many more lives are sure to be lost in the conflict.
“Israel, as always, will attempt to minimise civilian casualties. So Israel fights these barbarians with one hand tied behind its back because as much as any Western army it tries to not kill civilians.
“It’s never its objective to kill civilians. But of course a lot of civilians get killed in this kind of conflict, whereas Hamas intentionally kills civilians.
“Hamas loves death. Hamas embraces death.
“Both the suicide fighter and the death of its of its enemies.
“And you’d never would see Israelis pulling civilians out of cars and shooting them at point blank, parading, you know, half naked bodies of innocent civilians on the other side on their trucks.
“And so there’s no there’s no moral equivalence or functional equivalence between the two sides.
“But Israel will have to make a very fearsome response. It’s going to have to capture and interrogate a lot of Hamas operatives to find out how this was planned without Israel even knowing about it.
“It’s going to have to decapitate the Hamas leadership.
How many rockets do the Palestinians have?
“Now, if it decided to launch all of those within a few weeks, even Israel‘s famous Iron Dome can’t keep out that many rockets all at once.
“We don’t know how many has Hamas launched, but it might be 5000. Well, even as good as Iron Dome is, 5000 rockets launched in a day is going to get through Iron Dome.
‘And a lot of a lot of the rockets are going to get through and hit their targets. And that creates enough chaos for the terrorists to swarm over the borders there. Israel might have to take much more radical actions to secure its borders, especially its northern borders.
‘It’s going to have to fight Hamas. And at the same time safeguard its position in the West Bank and at the same time prevent Hezbollah from coming in from the north.
‘Now, if Israel were subject to conventional attack by Iran or Syria or some other neighbouring nation, it could then inflict devastating damage on the armed forces of that nation and on the capital of that nation and that nation would quickly have to stop fighting.
“But these non-state actors, which have become really vast armies themselves filled with anti-Semitic hatred and Islamist extremism, are obviously very, very difficult to cope with.
“So I predict this is going to be a long struggle. It could go a lot of different ways. I mean, one scenario that I’ve heard from Israel is that Hamas wants Israel to engage deeply in Gaza and for that to chew up a lot of Israeli forces.
Will Hezbollah attack Israel?
“Remember, Israel’s total population, only about 10 million people. It’s only a country the size of Greece, but it’s got enemies more numerous than the whole of North America sitting all around it.
“And if Gaza can get Israel to commit so many of its forces in the south, at that point, Hezbollah may well strike in the north.
“And, of course, if Israel is really. In distressed with a two front war of savage violence against civilians, savage unspeakable violence against civilians that might embolden other Israeli enemies, Iran or some of the worst groups in the West Bank.
“Now, to prevent that, Israel has to set up a system of deterrence. So its response is going to have to be very fierce. And while Israel has been a really successful and wonderful society in recent years, it’s obviously going to have to go back to being a much more militarily focused society.
Will Israel increase military service?
“And I think every you know, every man already spends three years in the Israeli army. I think every woman spends two years in the army.
“Well, I think that’s probably going to become much more intense and perhaps even for a longer period. And Israel’s going to need to use a lot of weapons and a lot of people are going to die. Palestinian civilians in Gaza will suffer, but they’ve suffered under Hamas anyway.
“There’s not another aspect of democracy or human rights in Gaza.
“The same may very well happen to the people of southern Lebanon if Hezbollah launches an attack.
“There’s a nihilism and a savagery and a brutality about these attacks on Israel, which is kind of insane.
“And it’s very difficult for a rational democracy to deal with insane attackers. But it certainly Israel will want to re-establish a stable system of deterrence and denial.
“I’ve been down on the border with Gaza, and really it’s only a wire fence that separates Gaza from Israel. Well, maybe that’s not going to be sufficient going forward.
“Maybe they’re going to have to be much stronger physical barriers. Maybe there’s going to have to be a permanent Israeli presence inside Gaza.
“Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 in the hope that it would settle with Palestinians and have a peaceful Palestinian state quite soon thereafter.
“But of course, that’s proven to be impossible. So we can’t work out exactly how it’s going to go on. But the imperative for the Israeli government to make sure that they win this conflict and that it can’t happen again, can’t happen again for a long time, I think means that we’re going to see a lot of destruction and a lot of blood and a lot of terror. And it’s going to go for a long time.
“This is an existential threat to Israel. If Israel‘s response to this is not effective, then it will happen again and again and again.
“And Israel will ultimately be overwhelmed. It won’t exist. You’ll have hand-to-hand combat in Tel Aviv. That will be the end of the end of Israel.”
