Hamas’ attack on the Gaza Strip: Israel’s prime minister apologizes and says it will not make a small-scale attack
Mr. Bar thought that Hamas might attempt a small-scale attack. He discussed his concerns with Israel’s top generals and ordered the “Tequila” team — a group of elite counterterrorism forces — to deploy to Israel’s southern border.
They might have been better off if they had been listening to the traffic on the radios of Hamas. The signals intelligence agency in Israel, Unit 8200, stopped eavesdropping on those networks a year earlier because they believed it was a waste of time.
The Israeli defense officials said that until the start of the attack nobody believed the situation was serious enough to wake up Netanyahu.
Since gunmen from Hamas — the armed group that rules Gaza — burst through the border fence on Oct. 7, killing around 1,400 people in southern Israel and taking more than 220 more hostage, according to Israeli authorities, Gazans say they have been living inside of a nightmare. The Israeli military declared a Siege of the densely populated territory, cutting off electricity, water and medical supplies, in response to the attacks.
The most powerful military force in the Middle East had not only completely underestimated the magnitude of the attack, it had totally failed in its intelligence-gathering efforts, mostly due to hubris and the mistaken assumption that Hamas was a threat contained.
How is Israel going to manage this complex operation with little trust in Netanyahu? Just last Saturday he pointed to the heads of Israeli military intelligence and Shin Bet as responsible for missing the Hamas surprise attack while excusing himself of any blame. The prime minister was forced to back off his wartime recriminations. But the damage was done.
More than 1,400 people were killed, including many women, children and old people who were murdered systematically and brutally. Hundreds are held hostage or are still missing. The Hamas health ministry said that Israel had bombarded the Gaza Strip, killing more than 8,000 Palestinians and wounding thousands more. The Israeli military on Sunday signaled a heavier assault on Gaza, saying it had expanded its ground incursion overnight.
In support of Israel and Hamas, the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, during the September 11 terrorist attack on Mumbai, India, and the Israeli economy
He continued, “But on sober reflection and in hindsight, I now believe that the decision not to retaliate militarily and to concentrate on diplomatic, covert and other means was the right one for that time and place.”
In conclusion, said Menon, “by not attacking Pakistan, India was free to pursue all legal and covert means to achieve its goals of bringing the perpetrators to justice, uniting the international community to force consequences on Pakistan for its behavior and to strengthen the likelihood that such an attack would not take place again.”
I am watching the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza today and thinking about Manmohan Singh, one of the world leaders that I admire the most. A group of 10 Islamic extremists from Pakistan, known as Lashkot-e-Taiba, attacked India in November 2008 and killed over 160 people in Mumbai, including 61 people at two luxury hotels. What was Singh’s military response to India’s Sept. 11?
He stated in his letter that if a war had been fought, it would have set back progress of the Indian economy just when the world economy was in a financial crisis.
That is one reason I raised the Indian example. Israeli security and prosperity may be less affected by open-ended war to eradicate Hamas than by targeted use of force. Israel should be asking that question.
On a personal level, I am appalled by the reaction of those students and progressives who sided with Hamas against Israel — in some cases, even before it retaliated — as if the Jewish people were not entitled to either self-determination or self-defense in any part of their ancestral homeland. The backlash doesn’t consider that Israel is a multicultural society where almost half of graduating doctors are Arabs or Druze. Or that Hamas is a militant, Islamist organization that does not tolerate dissent or L.G.B.T.Q. individuals and has been dedicated to wiping the Jewish state off the face of the earth.
It is predicted that the Israeli economy will be depressed if it takes months to oust Hamas from Gaza. It will probably shrink over 10 percent on an annual basis for the last three months of the year. The economy is the fourth-best-performing economy in the O.E.C.D. and it was ranked by The Economist.
After Hamas slaughtered and kidnapped Israeli civilians in the early hours, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel knew he had no mercy for Gaza. “All of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in, that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble,” he said.
Netanyahu does not have a team of rivals supporting him. The prime minister is so low character that he will blame people for everything that goes wrong no matter what, even if it’s not the fault of them.
It is in Israel’s interest to allow a humanitarian cease- fire and prisoner exchange that will allow for a pause in its Gaza military operation and allow Israel to reflect on where it is going.
Such a pause could also allow the people of Gaza to take stock of what Hamas’s attack on Israel — and Israel’s totally predictable response — has done to their lives, families, homes and businesses. It was just a few days ago that thousands of Gazans were going to work in Israel on a daily basis or export agricultural products and other goods to Israel. What did Hamas think it would do to benefit the people of Gaza? Hamas has gotten way too much understanding and not enough hard questions.
I want to see the leaders of Hamas walk out of their tunnels and look at their people, the world and the media to understand why they thought it would be such a great idea to abduct and kill Israelis.
I have believed that you could reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a single line: conflict, timeout, timeout, conflict, timeout, conflict and timeout. The most important difference between the parties is what they each did during the timeouts.
The Gazan Bedouin Crisis During the Superblitz: How Many Live There, Where Do They Go? What Do They Think?
The Times publishes a lot of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some things to do. And here’s our email: There are letters to the New York Times.
The U.N. stated that thousands of people broke into warehouses during the power cut to get aid. Humanitarian efforts to send more aid to Gaza will be enlarged tomorrow, according to the Israeli military.
On Sunday, the Israeli military said that it had expanded a ground incursion overnight, and warned with increasing “urgency” that Palestinian civilians should move to the southern part of the coastal strip — although airstrikes have continued to kill people there, too.
“I felt that I had become blind and deaf, unable to see or hear,” Fathi Sabbah, a journalist based in Gaza, wrote on his Facebook profile on Sunday, after phone and internet service partly returned.
As phone and internet service begins to return to Gaza today, details of the fighting are expected to become clearer. The enclave was without power for a long time over the weekend. Palestinians said that airstrikes had cut off cell networks, making it harder for them to coordinate medical rescues, speak to family or share news about the fighting.
They had no idea if their loved ones were alive or dead. Emergency phone lines stopped ringing. Desperate paramedics tried to save people by driving toward the sound of explosions. The people were dead in the street.
In the wake of the attacks many Bedouins have lost their livelihoods at Israeli farms that were ransacked, creating extreme hardships for an already struggling community. “There are a lot of people who are suffering,” Ms. Ziadna said. “Many people are out of jobs. People are scared.
When Hamas fires rockets, people have nowhere to go. The largely aluminum roofs of the Bedouin homes turn into deadly shrapnel, which she called “knives.” Several people in one Bedouin community were killed by Hamas rockets.
Dr. Yasmeen Abu Fraiha, who grew up in the Bedouin town of Tel Sheva, said she rushed to her hospital in Beer Sheva as the staff scrambled to treat hundreds of patients that day, including victims who had lost limbs and others who had been shot, including Bedouins. They treated children, seniors and foreigners too.
A number of other people are missing, though the exact number is not immediately known, as the four members of the family who disappeared are still missing.
At least 17 people who were killed in the attacks on Israel were Bedouins in and around the city of Rahat, located in the south of the country. The Arab paramedic from northern Israel was one of the 260 people who were murdered at the all night music and dance festival.
A family were camping along the side of the Mediterranean Sea when they were attacked by Hamas outside the Gaza Strip.
The ground war is expected to see troops face bloody urban combat. Hamas is likely to booby-trap apartments and fire at Israelis from rooftops. Hamas could benefit despite Israel’s stronger military because of the densely packed streets of Gaza.
The blackout also complicated evacuation efforts. Hundreds of thousands of Gazans have left their homes as a result of Israel’s order to move to the south of the border with Egypt.
The Israeli military said two of its soldiers were injured overnight in northern Gaza, its first reported casualties of the expanded ground incursion. Follow our updates.
In a social media post that was deleted after a fierce backlash, Netanyahu publicly blamed Israel’s failures on Oct. 7 on the country’s heads of military intelligence and its internal security agency.
Is There a Cease-Fire in Gaza? — A New Perspective on the Mass Shooting of a Maine Paranoid
The man who shot to death 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, was paranoid and had made threats against his base, prompting an alert to state police, officials said.
Money is given to Israel to buy weapons. Then we give Palestinians money to pay for the damage done by those weapons. We keep doing the same things, repeating the same lines, but the violence just gets worse.
We are pretending to think that the cycle could have a different result this time. Like it’s all just a game with improbable but not impossible odds.
What I’ve Been Under Bombardment. There Must Be a Cease–Fire in Gaza: A Brief Reflection from Israel
Before I went to Israel, an editor tried to convince me it was a bad idea. “You’re a writer, and you like to choose pretty words,” the editor said. In Jerusalem, you can’t use pretty words. You have to use the careful words.” The editor was right about it. Writing about Israel is full of careful words and careless killing. We nitpick every last point until no reader can decipher what we’re saying anymore. We have decided the death tolls are not true. How do we know? What are the events happening? We could get hold of a cease-fire, but they say we can’t ask for one.
I can still feel the rage that surged — in the people who were around me and within my own mind — against a powerful nation that would kill like that, from a distance.
Gaza is a real place crammed full of real people. Indefatigable people, annoying people, hilarious people, duplicitous people, all the usual types of people. Lots and lots of children, so many kids you sometimes waded through them in the streets, scrambling and touching and hollering, tugging on your clothes, slipping hands into pockets. The children of Gaza were often nuisances. But a beautiful nuisance, an untamed burst of irrepressible life in harsh circumstances.
As Americans, we too should have learned this lesson over and over again. The United States couldn’t force a nation that had already been conquered to accept a U.S. occupation or defeat the Taliban. We may not want to know.
Source: Opinion | I’ve Been Under Bombardment. There Must Be a Cease-Fire in Gaza.
Gaza: What Happened When Warplanes Get Bombed, and How Israeli Defense Forces Were Used to Combat Insurgents
Getting bombed from the sky is a particular horror: The sense that death hangs quite literally over your head, invisible until it’s too late, and maybe it will hit you. This might be the moment. Or this. Or this. Every heartbeat hammering through your skull.
I’ve watched U.S. warplanes attack Afghanistan, and barely escaped a direct strike from a Russian MiG in Georgia, and lived for weeks under relentless Israeli bombardment in Lebanon.
But having spent time under bombardment, and having reported in Gaza, I have no time for these explanations. If diplomacy and international relations can acquiesce to this kind of war, then what is the point of diplomacy and international relations? What would happen if the strategy averts a worse outcome than it has already created?
Gaza residents were warned that they would get hell by Maj. Gen. Alian of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Israel knows this. Israel has bombed Gaza pitilessly before, but Hamas is still there. Israel turned parts of southern Lebanon to rubble, but Hezbollah is still there.