The Palestinian resistance was well-prepared to execute this operation. Female ‘watchers’ in the IDF warned their higher ups that something was up, but likely to a combination of male chauvinism rampant in Israeli society and deep-seated feelings of superiority vis a vis its opponents, the IDF did not take their reports seriously. Hamas used relatively cheap paragliders to get over the wall and also blew holes in the barrier.

This wall is often referred to as a fence, but it’s really a meticulously designed barrier to make sure not even one Hamas fighter would ever get through it. It’s hugely expensive. It must sting incredibly much to see something so costly fail so dismally. That this fence was breached and on such a scale, is truly mortifying for Israel. It costs a hell of a lot of money to keep this barrier in place. And then a small, underequipped band from a blockaded, underdeveloped area, smaller than East London, manages to pour through it in several spots.

Israel says there were about 30 breaches in total. The fence has dominating towers. It’s equipped with sensors. The next level would really be a line of killer robots like in the Terminator franchise, in regular circumstances this fence is a fierce deterrent. There are 50 caliber machine guns on this fence. A 50 caliber machine gun is truly a formidable weapon. In theory it can obliterate anything that Hamas can field in seconds. At the fence it is fired by remote control. It’s deadly efficient, but the guards need to know where the enemy is, otherwise it’s useless.

Note here how Israel makes itself vulnerable by designing ways to not directly endanger the lives of its soldiers. It does the same when it comes to tank warfare and refuses to let Israeli soldiers guard the tanks on foot in combat areas. This makes the tank vulnerable and helps the Palestinian resistance on the ground, even though they have no tanks at all.

The fence between Gaza and Israel is ten foot high. It’s 40 miles long. It extends underground to counter Hamas attempts to tunnel underneath it. It’s quite likely Hamas managed to tunnel underneath it anyway in some locations which may have made the surprise effect on October 7th complete.

Very little is known for sure about the Hamas tunnels which cover more than 600 miles. The blinding plan to disrupt Israel on the tactical and then the strategic level Hamas had as the express direct goal of this operation the capture of as many Israeli soldiers as possible to swap them for the thousands of the prisoners in Israeli prisons, which some are now calling ‘dungeons’ after reports, even in the mainstream media, have detailed how Palestinian prisoners are abused by their Israeli jailors.

Another motivation was to dissuade Arab countries from signing normalization deals with Israel. What does that really mean? Because Israel is not treated as a normal player, largely because of the way it treats the Palestinians, its illegal settlements and other violations of international law, the trade situation of Israel is not optimal. Normalization deals with neighbors can help boost trade.

Essentially talk of normalization is about money. If you hear about this in the future just think: ah, Israel and its Arab neighbors, though enemies on paper, want to get more of that green paper, meaning money. For the Palestinians these developments are painful to say the least.

On October 6th nobody was talking about a Palestinian state. The world seemed to happily move forward, while the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank were slowly wasting away. To see the world go on while your own people is suffering and being shafted must feel like quite the slap in the face, every day again, year in, year out. On October 7th not enough Israeli soldiers were in place to successfully respond to this incursion. About 1200 Israelis died and more than 3,000 were wounded.

It took the Israeli government a few hours to get into gear to deal with this crisis. Hamas did not really expect that non-Hamas members and unorganized mobs would also flow into Israel and start taking hostages as well.

It’s impossible that Hamas knew, on the morning of October the 8th, exactly how many hostages had been dragged back to Gaza or where they were or who was holding them. This victorious raid was so successful, in a military sense, that even the victor was surprised. Most of the surprise was being experienced on the Israeli side however. Hamas struck at Israel’s surveillance technology, overran intelligence centers, unplugged computers and combined with the overall surprise effect paralyzed the IDF. Thousands of rockets were flying all along the barrier to distract the IDF. Note how for this operation to succeed a lot of separate moving parts had to closely work in concert.

The IDF was stunned. A heavily equipped, but vulnerable bunny caught in the headlights. Too taken off guard to know how to use its superior weapons in response. Hamas also made clever use of drones. Fighters were briefed on which Israeli vehicles to expect and what the response time of these vehicles would be. Hamas fighters had detailed documentation on them instructing them how to deal with all types of armored vehicles the IDF operates.

IDF pilots meanwhile were flying blind. Nobody was instructing them what to do. They were making ad hoc decisions. They were winging it. Pun intended. They joined local WhatsApp groups to have the faintest clue what was going on. From up in the sky they could see people flowing back into Gaza, but they could not make out who those people were. Some decided to fire anyway and hoped for the best.

Once the IDF on the ground finally got an organized response going the Hannibal directive was 100 percent for sure executed. What does that mean? To prevent the major political liability of having to deal with hostages the Israeli leadership preferred to shoot anything that moved, including its own civilians. It’s hard to imagine any country that loves to label itself as a democracy would do such a thing to its own citizens.

Though the Bedlam hostage crisis comes to mind and the indiscriminate, rough handling of that crisis by Putin which also led to lots of dead civilians, including kids. Pilots shooting at the human waves rolling back into Gaza may have been applying the same tactic: killing our own citizens right now is better for the rest of our society than having to deal with a nightmare of a hostage situation.

Remember captured soldier Shalit. Exchanged for the staggering number of 1,026 Palestinian political prisoners years earlier. Imagine the shock that these fighters were so well prepared when Israel sees Hamas, and WANTS to see Hamas, as the most primitive club of erratic losers in the history of warfare. They could have seen it, if they hadn’t been so willing to dismiss the threat. Months before October 7th videos were posted online of Hamas attacking mock-ups of Israeli targets. Hamas training camps had visibly grown. Hamas didn’t even hide it was up to something, it was just not clear what exactly or when or if the whole thing was a bluff.

The build-up could be closely followed on all their channels. This is quite bizarre. Maybe this was done to galvanize support for the group. Maybe Hamas knew their enemy doesn’t take its capabilities seriously. Maybe they were training in plain sight so on October 7th Israel would think: oh, it’s just another one of their little war games. Let the boys toy around in their little sand box. The first waves breaching the fence contain 3,000 fighters who quickly flood into Israel. Arab media report a lower figure, namely 1,500.

Fighters have different roles. Some are now tasked with installing anti-tank weapons. This again shows how well-prepared and organized they are. Calls to emergency services overwhelm the Israeli emergency response system and calls in locations closest to the attack sites are rerouted to other locations. Pandemonium reigns.

There is footage of Israeli vehicles at overrun bases that were never started. Israeli soldiers were captured in their beds. Signs of the humiliating defeat the IDF suffered this day. From a military point of view not everything goes smoothly. When Hamas fighters do end up under fire on October 7th they often don’t know how to respond. Their wounded are not properly taken care of, too much energy is wasted trying to retrieve weapons of fallen comrades instead of focusing on the enemy. This points to a lack of trained commanders on the lower levels. That doesn’t take away that their raid was a success.

For once things went boom on the side with all the money, all the fire power, all the powerful allies, all the diplomatic channels at their disposal and 99 percent of the members of Congress in its pockets, to name just a few overwhelming advantages Israel has compared to its foe. The Israelis were observing a week long religious holiday. IDF troops were shifted to face a potential uprising of the West Bank where tensions had been running high because of escalating settler violence and ever expanding settlements and other forms of oppression. Three of the seven observation ballons along the fence were not in operation. Their 360 degree cameras needed maintenance. This took a long time to fix, because the camera is old and is no longer produced. American tax payers who help to fund all this will hopefully have some questions for Israel. One such balloon was cut loose by militants on the morning of October 7th.

Hamas collected info about Israeli defenses for years. They knew exactly in which spots they wanted to strike. They knew all the equipment they were facing. Unmanned drones dropped explosives on guard towers. These towers can spot anything six miles away. When the command centers are severed from the sensors Israel’s forces at the border with Gaza were indeed blind.

Although Hamas had been training for this sort of event, very few people knew all the details. Even Iran and Hezbollah were not made privy to all aspects. They only knew a major operation was in the works. They didn’t know about the date, the targets, the methods or the resources allocated. The Hamas fighters involved may not have known they were participating in a very real event and not an exercise until the very last moment.

The surprise effect was so maximized it looked to many the Israeli high command must be allowing this to happen. Talk of an Israeli inside job immediately started buzzing. The Israelis seemed to have the perfect motive. If Hamas misbehaved badly enough Israel could perhaps use this as an excuse to launch some sort of final solution for its trouble with the Palestinians, especially the more dangerous ones in Gaza.

The atrocities: the real, the distorted and the fabricated

Hamas has stated its leadership instructed their men to only target soldiers. In the chaos of the operation a lot depended on invidiual decisions.

If a Hamas fighter saw you run that day and couldn’t be sure who you were he probably shot to kill you. Once a Hamas member had you right in front of him and he was certain you were unarmed your chances of being killed by him went down and you were almost certain to survive. Of course, in all these situations your survival chances would have depended on who exactly you were confronting. Not every Hamas member acted the same way. This was not a localized attack with very clear central leadership. It’s better to imagine small clusters of fighters running around everywhere with different intentions, different moods, different experiences, different weapons, etc.

Hamas does not have the standardized equipment of a regular army. Its weaponry is a very mixed amalgam of the most different types, literally from all around the world and from practically every decade since World World II.

The biggest initial surprise for Hamas was definitely not the IDF reaction, it was the Nova music festival. They were almost certainly not expecting this. This party was still going on in the early hours of October 7th and Hamas blundered into it. From body cam footage it’s clear some of these revelers were directly targeted and some were taken hostage. As Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté and others have pointed out the people at the festival got caught in the crossfire between Hamas and Israeli security forces.

It’s worth emphasizing, again, that the Hamas members were not the only Palestinians pouring through the fence. Testimonies from a Thai worker show that the mob which followed in the steps of Hamas were caught up in a frenzy and looking to destroy property and to loot and to profit in some way from the chaos. Gruesome things happened on October 7th.

In some cases killings took place, and yes, some of the killers enjoyed their bloody acts. The rape claims have largely been thoroughly debunked though. It doesn’t look like Hamas even had time to go about raping. Documentary maker, Richard Sanders, one of the few people who dug extremely deep into the atrocities that happened that day, says, emphatically and repeatedly, that he could not find any evidence to support these rape claims. He says there is absolutely no evidence to support the idea Hamas used rape as a weapon that day or that more than two babies were killed. One baby was killed when shooters pierced a safe room with their bullets and one baby could not be saved by a C-section because the mum had died. That’s two babies too many, absolutely, but this simply doesn’t correspond with what we were initially told about what had taken place.

Some officials, journalists and Israeli civilians stubbornly and eagerly started spreading tales, and continue to do so, of even a million times more wicked deeds that… never happened. Anthony Blinken either fell for Israeli propaganda or chose to spread it or is so unprofessional in his role that he spreads unsubstantiated claims that could have dire consequences for millions if the public believes them.

He testified that on October 7th an Israeli man had his eyes gouged out. His daughter’s foot was amputated and his son’s fingers were cut off. The story ended with the death blow to anything that could make people see Hamas as human beings: after torturing this family to death they… sat down and had a meal. The message is clear: only the worst psychos in the world could do such a thing and be able to enjoy food immediately afterwards.

There is only one tiny problem with the story. It never happened.

No baby was put in an oven. We were all lashed with images of empty baby cots on the news, but there were no 40 beheaded babies. An Israeli radical, Yossi Landau, described how he saw a dead pregnant woman whose baby was cut out of her womb and stabbed to death. No proof has ever surfaced. This never happened. At least not on October 7th.

When did an event exactly like this one happen though? During the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon in 1982. These bestialities were perpetrated by phalangist militia allied with Israel. The Israeli military lit up the night’s sky so the militia could go into Palestinian refugee camps and butcher women and children. The Palestinian fighters in the area had agreed to a deal to move elsewhere. Image the repercussions of breaking people’s trust in such a vicious way. These killings are directly linked to the acts of future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk says this about those massacres of Palestinians in his book Sabra and Shatila: Inquiry into a Massacre:

“The massacre began immediately, and lasted for forty hours without stop … In the first hour, the gunmen killed hundreds of people; they were shooting at anything that moved in the alleys. They broke down front doors and wiped out entire families eating dinner. Some families were murdered in bed, still wearing their pajamas. In many homes, children, three or four years old, were found in their pajamas, and blood-soaked blankets … In many cases, the attackers dismembered their victims before killing them. They crushed the heads of children and babies against walls. Women and girls were raped before they were slaughtered with hatchets. Often, men were dragged out of their homes to be quickly and collectively executed in the street with hatchets and knives. The militants spread terror as they indiscriminately slaughtered men, women, children and the elderly … A woman’s arm was found chopped off at the wrist so that her jewelry could be stolen.”

It’s almost as if Israel read about those events and used them as inspiration to make the atrocities of October 7th sound even worse than they were. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a shockingly heinous crime inflicted upon the Palestinian in 1982 later resurfaced and was repackaged as something that the Palestinians did to an Israeli woman.

It’s become clear over the past nine months that the Israelis suspect the Palestinians of doing certain things, because they, the Israelis have in fact done them in similar situations. You know the word for that. Projection. It’s interesting that Israeli society assumed that the truth of October 7th was not bad enough to get the world on board with whatever reaction the Israelis were going to cook up. If I was to guess I would say this was done because liars are often scared they will not be believed, even when they do opt to tell the truth. Israel is so used to seeing its statements being met with skepticism, not by the media or by the US and European politicians, but by interested citizens all over the world.

This time they weaponized emotions to such a scale and with such a relentless intensity that the engines behind this propaganda barrage must have thought: this time we got them, we’re biting down hard and we’re never letting go. You know, finish them…

Although many voices, prominent and less prominent, quickly started questioning the bombastic horror filled narrative, the damage was done. With so many people in the world never looking past the headlines and only taking in headlines that confirm whatever pleases them you will find people in little American towns somewhere in the Midwest repeating the false claims that Hamas routinely beheads babies for decades to come.

Another reason to distort and magnify the very real atrocities committed was to distract from the military success of Hamas. With everyone focusing on the sickening carnage, real and fabricated, few people had time to pause and ask: what does this say about the actual fighting capabilities of the Israeli armed forces?

The shameless lying may also have been fear driven. If we don’t magnify this to the heavens the world and get the world on our side, right this second, then Hezbollah and Iran are going to join in and throw us into the sea! To outsiders Israel looks all powerful with its obligatory conscription, gigantic budget, endless financial support from the US and the constant smoke plumes from all the bombing it does, but that does not have to be the actual feeling of the Israeli high command or anyone else inside Israel. They may at all times be operating on the belief that Israel is always a mere weeks away of complete destruction if all its enemies attack at once.

Maybe that’s even another reason why they ignored Hamas. They were too busy thinking about scenarios in which Hezbollah and Iran and others might attack them. Hamas also obtained all the names of all the collaborators during the raid. On October 8th Israel’s eyes and ears inside Gaza were apprehended and eliminated. Leaving Israel blind, again.

The consequences for Israel

We’ve talked about the happened on the tactical level, we’ve talked about the atrocities, let’s now talk about the strategic consequences of this operation:

• Thousands of businesses are shutting down in Israel. At the time of writing about 46,000 businesses have been lost in Israel due to the war

• Israel’s reputation is severely tarnished because of its ruthless Gaza invasion

• Hamas cannot be defeated, so the goal is to make Gaza as unlivable as possible hoping that this makes it impossible for Hamas to hurt Israel. Ethnic cleansing is the result, further damaging Israel’s reputation and fueling the Palestinian resistance and inspiring other opponents

• Iran is stronger than ever and it’s a question of time before it becomes a nuclear armed nation

• Yemen will only get better at damaging Israel • no prospect of defeating Hezbollah

• Israel’s iron dome is fine now, but would not be able to deal with a sustained rocket offensive by Iran and Hezbollah for very long. Even now we saw that when Iran attacked many rockets were taken down by the Americans, with the Iranians committed to making it mostly a symbolic move

• Snitches on the payroll of Israel inside Gaza eliminated

• many Israelis have left the country, professor Mearsheimer says 500,000 have left since October 7th

• it cannot pull out of Gaza, because that would be equal to admitting defeat, even if it were to claim it had been successful. It’s too obvious that Hamas hasn’t been defeated. Hamas returns to places where they seemed defeated before. Well, they don’t return, they were never gone

• Especially Democratic voters in the US are turning their backs on Israel and Arab Americans will be an important factor in the upcoming presidential election. Explains why Biden recently held back some bombs Israel didn’t really need for a bit

• tension within Israeli society has grown, if the war ends now, who knows what dark turn those tensions might take • to have lasting success in Gaza now can only be achieved by killing a lot more Palestinians or by somehow driving them out (options there are limited)

• the world is zooming in on the violence perpetrated by the Israeli settlers in the West Bank, something that was on way fewer people’s radar before

• especially young people are no longer afraid to criticize Israel, criticizing Israel is becoming mainstream

• several countries are set to recognize Palestinian statehood. Talk of a Palestinian state is back, stronger than before

• Israel’s PR machine has failed miserably to sell this war to the international public, it’s become the laughing stock of the world. Its lies have severely undermined its credibility

• It has deprived itself of a large chunk of its Palestinian work force who do a lot of the dirty, hard work inside Israel at lower wages than Israelis

• not hard to guess how this will affect tourism in Israel

• with so many of its youngsters serving in the military for this long this must have some negative impact on its economy

• many of its soldiers will return with PTSD, which will have negative consequences for Israeli society. No matter how hard IDF soldiers are trying to convince us they are having fun, it’s not possible to commit such acts of violence and not have them hunt you

• shutting down any criticism of Israel by yelling the word ‘anti-Semite’ no longer works, that trump card is out of the deck

Hamas members expected Israel to react violently, but not on this scale. Some expected it to be about as bad as in previous brutal battering of the Gaza strip by Israel and some expected a version of that, but on steroids. Few, if any, expected this kind of insane disregard for Palestinian civilians.

Israel has destroyed everything in Gaza and it has, more than anyone, except for the Palestinians themselves, resurrected the vision of a free and independent Palestinian state, an end to the oppression of the Palestinians, and end to their dehumanization and an end to the black and white, silly Hollywoodian representation of this issue.

It’s not complicated.

You can’t oppress people for decades and get away with it.