-
Hamas duped Israel into thinking it cared more about economic stability than a war, Reuters said.
-
Meanwhile, it was practicing for an attack in plain sight, the report said.
-
Hamas trained its fighters on a mock Israeli settlement, learning how to storm it, Reuters added.
———
The Palestinian militant group Hamas built a mock Israeli town in Gaza and practiced attacking in plain sight — but Israel didn’t react, Reuters reported on Sunday.
Hamas militants launched a surprise offensive on Israel on Saturday, in what has been described as the worst breach in Israel’s defenses in decades.
The attack followed a careful campaign of deception by Hamas that ensured Israel was caught off guard over the weekend, an unnamed source, with connections to the group, told Reuters.
Despite convincing Israel that they had no interest in war, Hamas militants were practicing for the offensive in plain sight by setting up a mock Israeli settlement in Gaza to train its fighters.
Let’s not pretend that this isn’t a huge popularity boost for Netanyahu and the Israeli right. Now they have an excuse for years of military operations and populist propaganda. Israel has a military industrial complex that not even Iran can match. A plausible theory is that they just let it happen. Since they feel like it gives them carte blanche for unlimited retaliation. I fear we will see a Palestinian genocide in this decade.
The Israeli population is furious at Netanyahu for the intelligence failures that allowed this to happen. He may stick around for a unity government while military operations are conducted, but he’s gonna be toast after this.
Look at 9/11, the attack was over in less than a day and it shaped 2 decades of politics and retaliation. They have little reason to “let it happen”
They had warnings an attack was coming. They probably thought it would be pretty insignificant though rather then a proper offensive.
Theres some other good discussion of this already in this thread, to reiterate what others have said, its not unthinkable to belive that the government may have ignored those who warned of this, assuming they could politicize a minor attack, only to be caught completely off gaurd when a complex, multi pronged offensive appeared.
There’s a big difference between 9/11 and the WTC parking lot bombings. When warned of terror attacks in early 2000’s, America was probably thinking of the former rather then latter.
The conspiratorial me is having a hard time believing that Israel’s intelligence was kind of unaware that something big was brewing up.
In times like this people are getting united in their grief. Like this Netanyahu would get a green card to conduct a large scale military operation in Gaza, which of course would lead to even more civilian casualties and suffering, he will probably introduce some new legislation, giving him even greater rights to govern and escape justice and probably introducing even more restrictions in the area, which logically would only increase the tension.
I highly doubt that anything good will come out of this situation and that’s really sad.
I doubt they understood the scale, but I suspect that Netanyahu’s government was more than happy to plan to let Hamas strike first to kick-start the war the current administration has been trying to provoke since at least May.
This is absolutely correct. Israel wants this as bad as Hamas.
They may even actively and purposely looked the other way.
I don’t think the conspiracy theory that they had advance knowledge is true, if only because the immediate response was so chaotic. If they knew, they’d have at least had a plan to respond.
But one thing that’s not a conspiracy is that Netanyahu had a policy to strengthen Hamas as part of a cynical strategy to kill off the 2 state solution. Basically, undermine the more moderate Palestinian Authority by allowing Hamas to get more organized, rule Gaza without fresh elections, let Hamas-linked groups distribute aid, etc.
So, while I don’t think they knew about the current attacks, I do think they knew an attack would eventually, inevitably come and they thought it’d be worth it to have Hamas as a boogeyman.
This just further raises questions on whether Netanyahu was actually unaware or if this attack was allowed to happen to provide cover for his corruption charges.
With so many different blatantly apparent elements and the well known past efforts by the IDF and Israeli intelligence to prevent things like this, such a massive buildup toward the attack in plain sight seems impossible to have been missed.
Deliberately fiddling with the dial on Palestinian tension for political reasons is like Netanyahu’s go to move. I admit I would be a bit surprised if it turns out he green lit this. It’s a lot of Israeli lives and at this scale it looks a lot like incompetence, which is probably not ideal.
But it’s totally reasonable to discuss the question.
