On the morning of 7 October 2023, one of the holiest Jewish holidays, at 6:29am, the Palestinian factions carried out the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation, which began with an overwhelming assault by 1,500 fighters who poured out of the Gaza Strip and destroyed nearby Israeli defences.
Unable to respond in time to the attack, hundreds of Israeli citizens in nearby settlements were killed or kidnapped.
As US commentator Daniel Byman wrote for the US Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), “part of what Hamas wanted involved revenge for what it saw as past Israeli attacks and the constant Israeli occupation of the West Bank, arrest of Hamas leaders, isolation, and bombing of Gaza.”
“Until October 7, most Israelis could live their lives believing that Hamas’ situation and that of other Palestinians mattered little to them on a day-to-day basis. No longer.”
A year after these events, many of the pieces have come together to solve the puzzle that shocked the world at the time: how had the Israeli army broken down in the face of the Hamas attack?
It seems it was the result of a series of failures. At the intelligence level, it is apparent that the army had increased its operations outside Israel to monitor possible foes in the north and east while ignoring the Gaza Strip.
According to the Israeli newspaper the Jerusalem Post, “the observers of the Gaza Division were the first to detect the infiltration by Hamas terrorists into Israel and were quick to call up forces to thwart the attacks… [They] recognised the serious threat to the border fence and passed on report after report about multiple terrorists about to infiltrate from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory.”
A second problem was the Israeli army’s sluggish reaction, given its overconfidence in its technological superiority. According to US commentator Franz Stefan Gady, “as the October 7 attack showed, if the technologies underlying your conception of warfare are destroyed or overwhelmed and you lack boots on the ground, overreliance on technology creates a single point of failure.”
“Without traditional military assets such as larger scale, rapidly deployable forces, the Israeli army risks having no Plan B to quickly respond to a dynamic attack or other fast-evolving military situations.”
A third problem was a lack of reactivity. According to Eitan Shamir, director of the Centre for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, “it was the Shabbat holiday, you [the Israeli army] sent home between half and two thirds of the force for the weekend. The problem was that the security fence [around Gaza] was designed for a terrorist attack: six people here, ten people there, maybe 50 from different directions. This was the most extreme scenario the planners were thinking of. Not a full brigade; not 1,500 people.”
“Moreover, there was a little bit of luck for Hamas that we are learning about today. The cameras in the surveillance balloons had to be repaired, and no one thought it was urgent – they said ‘after the holiday.’”
The air force is one of the most rapid assets for responding to emergency calls for direct fire support to defending troops. However, this did not occur on 7 October, as no aircraft were prepared for combat. Even if they had been available, they would have engaged in battle without any intelligence or electronic support.
According to an interview with a helicopter pilot that appeared in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, “the Israeli Air Force’s entire helicopter array held a total of four helicopters on standby: two to be deployed immediately within minutes to the northern border (‘short standby’), and two more that could be added if necessary (‘long standby). That is all.”
“Following situation assessments before the holiday, it was decided that there was no need to shorten the standby for Gaza, and all the helicopters and crews on standby were transferred to Ramat David. The northern border is the hotter one. Since the 2014 Gaza War, we’ve been training for infiltration incidents, but we never imagined a reference scenario of this magnitude of a number of communities being infiltrated simultaneously.”
Success in surprising the opponent means gaining the initiative on the battlefield. However, the consequences of surprise do not last. It needs to be used swiftly to carry out an effective plan against the shocked enemy forces before they regain their confidence.
Australian Army Major-General Mick Ryan wrote of this that “Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar studied Israel and learned Hebrew there during his time in prison. He understands the Israelis well. He knows that if he can sustain the war, Hamas might continue degrading Israeli citizens’ confidence in their military’s ability to secure border regions.”
However, despite Sinwar’s successful military plan on 7 October, it lacked the strategic and political dimension to secure Palestinian rights and safety, resulting in the terrible outcome of the Israeli revenge during its operation against Gaza.
The Israelis set many objectives for their military campaign in the Gaza Strip, including the elimination of Hamas’ leadership structure, an important aspect of weakening the organisation as a whole. Weapons caches belonging to Hamas have been destroyed. Tunnels have been located and destroyed. Finally, there is the question of the release of the hostages.
Ryan said that “the Israeli army has relied on urban warfare and a ‘slicing’ strategy of strategise, locate, isolate, constrict and eliminate.” The objective has been to divide the Strip into multiple sectors, and then to find hostile elements and neutralise them.
The Israeli ground operation in Gaza has been accompanied by an air campaign that has destroyed more than 80 per cent of the Strip’s buildings. The campaign has resulted in an humanitarian crisis resulting in an International Court of Justice (ICJ) decision against Israel and applications from the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor for arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others for committing war crimes against the Palestinian people.
Mediators have intervened to try to arrange the exchange of prisoners and hostages from both sides. In November last year, 105 Israeli hostages and 240 Palestinians were freed. However, there are still 130 hostages left inside the Strip, and efforts to negotiate a ceasefire and to free them have stalled on Israeli intransigence.
The battle in Israel has attracted other parties, and since 8 October last year the Lebanese group Hizbullah has acted in support of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Hizbullah, like other Iran-backed militias in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen has launched limited attacks, giving the Israeli army enough time to restore the balance, as it appears that the Iranians have decided not to escalate the war.
The US has rushed fighter jets and redeployed navy carriers in the region, not only to protect Israel, but also to deter Iran.
On 13 April this year, Iran carried out a missile attack on Israel following the assassination of Brigadier General Mohamed Reza Zahedi, a senior Iranian Al-Quds Force commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), in Syria.
A week later, Israel conducted a limited air strike near Isfahan in Iran. It also targeted Ismail Haniyeh, director of the Hamas Political Bureau in Tehran, with Iran not responding but encouraging its militias to do so.
The Israeli leadership’s objective is to eliminate Hizbullah, but this was postponed at first in order to enter Rafah in the Gaza Strip and hunt down the last Hamas fighters. The city was a safe haven for Palestinians escaping the fighting in the north and centre of the Gaza Strip, and their humanitarian suffering were growing at the time.
In November 2024, Hizbullah launched an expanded rocket attack on Israel, causing the latter to increase its attacks on Lebanon, including through the recent cyberattacks and the assassination of Hizbullah’s entire military council.
In order to understand the developments that might be coming, Al-Ahram Weekly spoke to French experts General François Chauvancy, an expert on military doctrine with a career that has spanned more than 40 years, first in the regular army and then in NATO, and retired Colonel Michel Goya, an expert on military operations and a former assistant to the chief of staff of the French Armed Forces on military doctrine.
“The open war between Israel and Hamas will soon enter its second year. It is expanding in Lebanon, but it is unlikely that military operations will cease in Gaza until the Israeli hostages have been returned,” Chauvancy said.
“Since Israel is at war and its forces have been mobilised, it has achieved some success, in particular because of the unrealised threats or successive failures of Iran and Hizbullah.”
Over the course of a year of intense military operations, Hamas has carried out six ambushes, resulting in the deaths of more than four Israeli soldiers in the neighbourhoods of Shujaiya, Al-Maghazi, Juhr Al-Dik, Beit Lahiya, Tel Al-Hawa, Dawar Al-Amin, and the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas is still fighting the Israelis in Gaza despite its losses of personnel.
Commenting on this, Goya said that “Hamas can continue to fight because it is still there. The Israelis claim to have killed 17,000 fighters of Hamas and its allies, and with the seriously wounded and the prisoners, they consider that they have ‘tactically’ destroyed Hamas.”
The organisation still exists, but it “no longer has the capacity to carry out offensive operations against Israeli territory, whether to massively launch rockets or to cross the barrier with Israel. The threat against Israel is therefore considered neutralised.”
As the war enters its second year, the question is whether Israel can wholly eliminate Hamas.
“Since the Israelis do not want to occupy Gaza or only two corridors in it and there is no other solution to administer the territory, it has been abandoned to Hamas, which can still control it, recruit in it, and carry out harassment attacks against the corridors,” Goya said.
Chauvancy said that “one hypothesis would be that the Israeli government wants to ensure a relative and temporary peace in Gaza over the next five to 10 years, with the prospect by the end of this period that more peaceful solutions will have been found and applied.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 10 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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