The Greatest Threat to peace in the middle east aka Israel? = Netanyahu!

Netanyahu is drawing the US into war with Iran

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/9/netanyahu-is-drawing-the-us-into-war-with-iran

The Israeli prime minister’s persistent obsession with the Islamic Republic may finally drag the US into another disastrous regional war.



Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the 78th United Nations General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York on September 22, 2023 [File: Reuters/Mike Segar]


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent the past three decades sounding the alarm about Iran’s nuclear programme and threatening to attack the country on countless occasions. Most recently in September, he said in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly that Tehran must face a “credible nuclear threat” before his office corrected the record to “credible military threat”.

After Hamas’s attack on October 7, Netanyahu may finally be able to act on his threats. The gruesome scenes in southern Israel have provided the Israeli prime minister with the necessary pretext and international backing for a wider response.

Netanyahu has both a political and a personal stake in all this. A drawn-out regional conflict would block or at least postpone any official accountability for his utter failure to prevent Hamas’s attack from happening in the first place and could also put his multiple indictments on corruption charges on an indefinite hold.

Overnight, he transformed from a failed and embattled prime minister to a wartime leader, with opposition parties clamouring to join him in a national unity government.

He declared war and ordered an immediate retaliation against Hamas’s stronghold in Gaza. The Israeli army unleashed a vicious campaign of bombardment on the overpopulated Gaza Strip, killing more than 500 people, and preparing for a potential land invasion.

Netanyahu has not elaborated on the next phases of the war, but he has received the unconditional support of Western governments to do what it takes, as long as it takes, to “defend Israel”. The administration of US President Joe Biden has gone even further, providing Israel with more arms and ammunition, dispatching its most modern and sophisticated aircraft carrier, the Ford, along with a number of destroyers to the Eastern Mediterranean, and beefing up other forces stationed in the region, enough to start World War III.

Biden’s motivation for the escalatory deployment is, reportedly, strategic deterrence, meant to ensure that “no enemies of Israel can or should seek advantage from the current situation”. But historically, Israel has never allowed any foreign boots on its soil, and is in no need of the US armadas to take on Hamas.

Biden’s incentive, therefore, could also be political, ie to ensure that the GOP doesn’t exploit the Israeli drama at his expense ahead of the presidential elections in 2024. Already, Republican opponents have tried to link Biden’s recent prisoner swap deal with Iran, which involved the unfreezing of $6bn in Iranian assets, to the Hamas attacks.

But Netanyahu and his fanatic ministers may have something very different in mind for the US deployment, that goes beyond military deterrence and political posturing. He may try to widen the scope of the war to include Iran.

His government has already accused Iran of supporting and directing Hamas’s operation, as it has previously done about other Palestinian attacks on Israelis. Scores of Israel supporters and neoconservatives, as well as media pundits in the US and Europe, have joined in by making the case for Iranian involvement.

The Wall Street Journal even reported – based on interviews with unnamed local sources – that Iranian officials and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were directly involved in orchestrating and planning the attacks over several weeks.

US officials have said they haven’t seen evidence of Tehran’s involvement, yet.

For its part, Iran has called the attack a spontaneous Palestinian action in self-defence, but officials have not tried to hide their glee at Israel’s misfortune. They have expressed confidence that the attack will deter further Arab, meaning Saudi, normalisation with Israel, and eventually lead to its downfall.

Meanwhile, Iran’s ally the Lebanese Hezbollah has praised the Hamas operation and engaged the Israeli forces in the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms, threatening greater involvement if Israel enters Gaza.

Iran and its allies’ temerity may well come back to haunt them, just as Israel’s hubris did – leading to its utter humiliation at the hands of Hamas fighters. Neither Iran nor Israel is learning from history, as they continue to escalate their proxy conflict towards war.

For years, the Israeli army and secret services have sabotaged the Iranian nuclear programme and targeted Iranian assets abroad. Iran for its part has supported various client armed groups in the Middle East, attacking US and Israeli allies.

Despite his bluster and bravado, Netanyahu couldn’t and wouldn’t attack Iran, without a green light and support from the US. But the bloody attacks are a game-changer, giving the Israeli prime minister the perfect opportunity to realise his fantasy of crushing Iran, by tricking the Biden administration into war.

This will not be easy considering Biden’s presumed commitment to end “the forever wars”, reflected in the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. His administration has also moved to prioritise the great power competition with China and Russia, especially after the latter’s invasion of Ukraine.

But in reality, the US has not withdrawn from the Middle East, it has merely moved around its forces and military assets in the region. Biden himself has vowed to “not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia, or Iran”.

Once the case against Tehran’s role in the attacks has been fully articulated by Israel and the US, they might first try to pressure it into facilitating the release of Israeli captives taken by Hamas – a top priority for Netanyahu.

If Iran refuses and chooses to use Hezbollah as leverage against Israel, this could well trigger a wider confrontation that draws in the US with incalculable consequences. Unfortunately, in the adulterated world of Washington politics, unconditional US support of Israel is the only thing that Republican and Democrats agree on.

It is crucial to remember that the situation in 2023 is vastly more challenging and complicated than the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which ended in utter disaster for the US and Iraqis. A repeat against Iran is sure to be far worse for all concerned.

Editorial | Netanyahu Bears Responsibility for This Israel-Gaza War

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2023-10-08/ty-article-opinion/netanyahu-bears-responsibility/0000018b-0b9d-d8fc-adff-6bfd1c880000?v=1696969365537




The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to key positions, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.

Netanyahu will certainly try to evade his responsibility and cast the blame on the heads of the army, Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet security service who, like their predecessors on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, saw a low probability of war with their preparations for a Hamas attack proving flawed.

They scorned the enemy and its offensive military capabilities. Over the next days and weeks, when the depth of Israel Defense Forces and intelligence failures come to light, a justified demand to replace them and take stock will surely arise.

Netanyahu's government is responsible for the ’23 Israel-Gaza debacle

October 7, 2023: A date that will live in infamy in Israel

Netanyahu: First goal is to purge Israel from enemies, then exact huge price

However, the military and intelligence failure does not absolve Netanyahu of his overall responsibility for the crisis, as he is the ultimate arbiter of Israeli foreign and security affairs. Netanyahu is no novice in this role, like Ehud Olmert was in the Second Lebanon War. Nor is he ignorant in military matters, as Golda Meir in 1973 and Menachem Begin in 1982 claimed to be.

Netanyahu also shaped the policy embraced by the short-lived “government of change” led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid: a multidimensional effort to crush the Palestinian national movement in both its wings, in Gaza and the West Bank, at a price that would seem acceptable to the Israeli public.

In the past, Netanyahu marketed himself as a cautious leader who eschewed wars and multiple casualties on Israel’s side. After his victory in the last election, he replaced this caution with the policy of a “fully-right government,” with overt steps taken to annex the West Bank, to carry out ethnic cleansing in parts of the Oslo-defined Area C, including the Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley.

This also included a massive expansion of settlements and bolstering of the Jewish presence on Temple Mount, near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as boasts of an impending peace deal with the Saudis in which the Palestinians would get nothing, with open talk of a “second Nakba” in his governing coalition. As expected, signs of an outbreak of hostilities began in the West Bank, where Palestinians started feeling the heavier hand of the Israeli occupier. Hamas exploited the opportunity in order to launch its surprise attack on Saturday.

Above all, the danger looming over Israel in recent years has been fully realized. A prime minister indicted in three corruption cases cannot look after state affairs, as national interests will necessarily be subordinate to extricating him from a possible conviction and jail time.

This was the reason for establishing this horrific coalition and the judicial coup advanced by Netanyahu, and for the enfeeblement of top army and intelligence officers, who were perceived as political opponents. The price was paid by the victims of the invasion in the Western Negev.

The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.

Israel Has Never Needed to Be Smarter Than in This Moment

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/opinion/israel-hamas-.html






By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist

I have covered this conflict for almost 50 years, and I’ve seen Israelis and Palestinians do a lot of awful things to one another: Palestinian suicide bombers blowing up Israeli discos and buses; Israeli fighter jets hitting neighborhoods in Gaza that house Hamas fighters but also causing massive civilian casualties. But I’ve not seen something like what happened last weekend: individual Hamas fighters rounding up Israeli men, women and children, looking them in the eyes, gunning them down and, in one case, parading a naked woman around Gaza to shouts of “Allahu akbar.”

The last time I witnessed that level of face-to-face barbarism was the massacre of Palestinian men, women and children by Christian militiamen in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, where the first victim I encountered was an older man with a white beard and a bullet hole in his temple.

While I have no illusions about Hamas’s long-established commitment to the destruction of the Jewish state, I am nonetheless asking myself today: Where did this ISIS-like impulse for mass murder as the primary goal come from? Not the seizing of territory, but plain murder? There is something new here that is important to understand.

Since I can’t interview the Hamas leadership, I’m drawing on my experience in the region, and here’s how I see it.

While this operation was surely planned by Hamas leaders months ago, I think its emotional origins can be explained in part by a photograph that appeared in the Israeli press on Oct. 3. A few Israeli government ministers had gone to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for their first official visit ever, to attend international conferences in late September and early October, and it got a lot of coverage in the Israeli press.

But having lived in both Beirut and Jerusalem, I was struck most by that unusual photo — an image that I knew would trigger completely different emotional reactions in both worlds.

It was taken by the team of Israel’s communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, who was attending a U.N. postal conference in Riyadh, as they were conducting a prayer service in their hotel room for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. One of them took a picture of a colleague wearing a traditional Jewish prayer shawl and yarmulke while holding up a Torah scroll with the Riyadh skyline in the window beyond.

For Israeli Jews, that picture is a dream come true — the ultimate expression of finally being accepted in the Middle East, more than a century after the start of the Zionist movement to build a modern democratic state in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. To be able to pray with a Torah in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and the home of its two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, is a level of acceptance that touches the soul of every Israeli Jew.

But that same photo ignites a powerful and emotional rage in many Palestinians, particularly those affiliated with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. For them, that picture is the full expression of the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supreme goal: to prove to all naysayers, indeed to rub their noses in the fact, that he can make peace with all the Arab states — even Saudi Arabia — and not have to give the Palestinians a single inch.

As far as diplomacy goes, that has been Netanyahu’s life’s mission: to prove to everyone that Israel can have its cake — acceptance by all the surrounding Arab states — and eat the Palestinians’ territory, too.

I have no idea whether the Hamas leadership saw that particular picture, but they have been fully aware of the ongoing evolution it reflects. I believe one reason Hamas not only launched this assault now — but also seemingly ordered it to be as murderous as possible — was to trigger an Israeli overreaction, like an invasion of the Gaza Strip, that would lead to massive Palestinian civilian casualties and in that way force Saudi Arabia to back away from the U.S.-brokered deal now in discussion to promote normalization between Riyadh and the Jewish state. As well as to force the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, which were part of the Abraham Accords produced by the Trump administration, to take a step back from Israel.

The essence of Hamas’s message to Netanyahu and his far-right ruling coalition of Jewish supremacists and ultra-Orthodox is this: You will never be at home here — no matter how much of our land our gulf Arab brothers sell you. We will force you to lose your minds and do crazy things to Gaza that force the Arab states to shun you.

Pay attention: Hamas did not send operatives to the Israeli-occupied West Bank (and it has plenty there) to attack Jewish settlements. It focused its onslaught on Israeli villages and kibbutz farms that were not part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“These were the homes of the people of pre-1967 Israel, democratic Israel, liberal Israel — living in peaceful kibbutzim or going to a life-loving disco party,” the Israeli writer Ari Shavit remarked to me. For Hamas, “Israel’s mere existence is a provocation,” he said. In one kibbutz alone, Be’eri, at least 108 people, including children, were just gunned down.

So how can America best help Israel now, besides standing behind its right to protect itself, as President Biden so forcefully did in his speech today? I think the U.S. needs to do three things.

First, I hope the president is asking Israel to ask itself this question as it considers what to do next in Gaza: What do my worst enemies want me to do — and how can I do just the opposite?

What Israel’s worst enemies — Hamas and Iran — want is for Israel to invade Gaza and get enmeshed in a strategic overreach there that would make America’s entanglement in Falluja look like a children’s birthday party. We are talking house-to-house fighting that would undermine whatever sympathy Israel has garnered on the world stage, deflect world attention from the murderous regime in Tehran and force Israel to stretch its forces to permanently occupy Gaza and the West Bank.

Hamas and Iran absolutely do not want Israel to refrain from going into Gaza very deep or long.

Nor does Hamas want the U.S. and Israel to proceed instead as fast as possible with negotiations to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia as part of a deal that would also require Israel to make real concessions to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which has accepted Israel as part of the Oslo peace accords.

But for Israel to do what is most in its interests, not those of Hamas and Iran, will likely require some very tough love between Biden and Netanyahu. One must never forget that Netanyahu always seemed to prefer to deal with a Hamas that was unremittingly hostile to Israel than with its rival, the more moderate Palestinian Authority — which Netanyahu did everything he could to discredit, even though the Palestinian Authority has long worked closely with Israeli security services to keep the West Bank quiet, and Netanyahu knows it.

Netanyahu has never wanted the world to believe that there are “good Palestinians” ready to live side by side with Israel in peace and try to nurture them. For years now he’s always wanted to tell U.S. presidents: What do you want from me? I have no one to talk to on the Palestinian side.

That’s how Israel reached a stage where the increasingly costly — morally and financially — Israeli occupation of the West Bank has not even been an issue in the last five Israeli elections.

Or as Chuck Freilich, a former deputy Israeli national security adviser, wrote in an essay in Haaretz on Sunday: “For a decade and a half Prime Minister Netanyahu has sought to institutionalize the divide between the West Bank and Gaza, undermine the Palestinian Authority, the P.A., and conduct de facto cooperation with Hamas, all designed to demonstrate the absence of a Palestinian partner and to ensure that there could be no peace process that might have required territorial compromise in the West Bank.”

Lastly, I hope Biden is telling Netanyahu that America will do everything it can to help democratic Israel defend itself from the theocratic fascists of Hamas — and their soul brothers of Hezbollah in Lebanon, should they enter the fight.

But Netanyahu’s side of the bargain is that he has to reconnect himself with liberal democratic Israel, so the world and the region sees this not as a religious war but as a war between the frontline of democracy and the frontline of theocracy. That means Netanyahu has to change his cabinet, expel the religious zealots and create a national unity government with Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid.

Unfortunately, Netanyahu is still prioritizing his coalition of zealots, whom he needs to protect him from his corruption trial and to complete his judicial coup that would neuter the Supreme Court of Israel. That’s really messed up.

And it is a very important reason Israel was caught off guard in the first place. Netanyahu was so wedded to this personal agenda that he was ready to divide Israeli society like never before — and splinter his own army and air force in the process — to get control of the courts.

I promise you that if and when there’s an inquiry into how the Israeli Army could have so missed this Hamas buildup, investigators will discover that the Israeli Army leadership had to spend so much time just keeping its air force pilots and reserve officers from boycotting their service to protest Netanyahu’s judicial coup — not to mention the time, attention and resources they had to devote to preventing extremist settlers and religious zealots from doing crazy things in Jerusalem and the West Bank — that they took their eyes off the ball.

America cannot protect Israel in the long run from the very real threats it faces unless Israel has a government that reflects the best, not the worst, of its society, and unless that government is ready to try to forge compromises with the best, not the worst, of Palestinian society.

Opinion  The Hamas horror is also a lesson on the price of populism

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/11/netanyahu-populism-weakened-israeli-security/





Israelis are struggling to understand what has just hit us. We first compared the current disaster to the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Fifty years ago, the armies of Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack and inflicted on Israel a string of military defeats, before the Israel Defense Forces regrouped, regained the initiative and turned the tables.

But as more and more horrific stories and images emerge about the massacre of entire communities, it dawned on us that what has happened is nothing like the Yom Kippur War. In newspapers, on social media and in family gatherings, people are making comparisons to the Jewish people’s darkest hours — as when the mobile killing units of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen surrounded and murdered Jewish villagers during the Holocaust, and when pogroms were waged against Jews in the Russian Empire.

I personally have family and friends in the kibbutzim Be’eri and Kfar Aza, and have heard many horrifying stories. Hamas had full control of these two communities for hours. The terrorists went from house to house, systematically murdering families, killing parents in front of their children and taking hostages, even babies and grandmothers. Terrified survivors locked themselves inside cupboards and cellars, calling to the army and police for help that failed to come until, often, too late.

My 99-year-old uncle and his 89-year-old wife are members of Be’eri. All contact with them was cut shortly after Hamas took over the kibbutz. They hid in their house for hours as dozens of terrorists went rampaging and butchering. I received word that they survived. I know many people who have just received the worst news of their lives.

My aunt and uncle are two tough Jews — born in Eastern Europe in the interwar years, they have already lost one world in the Holocaust. We grew up with stories about defenseless Jews hiding from the Nazis in cupboards and cellars, with no one coming to help them. The state of Israel was founded to ensure that this would never happen again.

So how did it happen? How did the state of Israel go missing in action?

On one level, Israelis are paying the price for years of hubris, during which our governments and many ordinary Israelis felt we were so much stronger than the Palestinians, that we could just ignore them. There is much to criticize about the way Israel has abandoned the attempt to make peace with the Palestinians and has held for decades millions of Palestinians under occupation.

But this does not justify the atrocities committed by Hamas, which in any case has never countenanced any possibility for a peace treaty with Israel and has done everything in its power to sabotage the Oslo peace process. Anyone who wants peace must condemn and impose sanctions on Hamas and demand the immediate release of all hostages and Hamas’s complete disarmament.

Moreover, irrespective of how much blame one ascribes to Israel, this does not explain the dysfunction of the state. History isn’t a morality tale.

The real explanation for Israel’s dysfunction is populism rather than any alleged immorality. For many years, Israel has been governed by a populist strongman, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a public-relations genius but an incompetent prime minister. He has repeatedly preferred his personal interests over the national interest and has built his career on dividing the nation against itself. He has appointed people to key positions based on loyalty more than qualifications, took credit for every success while never taking responsibility for failures, and seemed to give little importance to either telling or hearing the truth.

The coalition Netanyahu established in December 2022 has been by far the worst. It is an alliance of messianic zealots and shameless opportunists, who ignored Israel’s many problems — including the deteriorating security situation — and focused instead on grabbing unlimited power for themselves. In pursuit of this goal, they adopted extremely divisive policies, spread outrageous conspiracy theories about state institutions that oppose their policies, and labeled the country’s serving elites as “deep state” traitors.

The government was repeatedly warned by its own security forces and by numerous experts that its policies were endangering Israel and eroding Israeli deterrence at a time of mounting external threats. Yet when the IDF’s chief of staff asked for a meeting with Netanyahu to warn him about the security implications of the government’s policies, Netanyahu refused to meet him. When Defense Minister Yoav Gallant nevertheless raised the alarm, Netanyahu fired him. He was then forced to reinstate Gallant only because of an outbreak of popular outrage. Such behavior over many years enabled a calamity to strike Israel.

No matter what one thinks of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the way populism corroded the Israeli state should serve as a warning to other democracies all over the world.

Israel can still save itself from catastrophe. It still enjoys a decisive military edge over Hamas, as well as over its many other enemies. The long memory of Jewish suffering is now galvanizing the nation. The IDF and other state organs are recovering from their initial shock. Civil society is mobilizing like never before, filling many gaps left by governmental dysfunction. Citizens stand in long queues to donate blood, welcome refugees from the war zone into their homes and donate food, clothes and other necessities.

In this hour of need, we also call upon our friends throughout the world to stand by us. There is much to criticize about Israel’s past behavior. The past cannot be changed, but hopefully once victory over Hamas is secured, Israelis will not only hold our current government to account, but will also abandon populist conspiracies and messianic fantasies — and make an honest effort to realize Israel’s founding ideals of democracy at home and peace abroad.

Traders earned millions anticipating Oct. 7 Hamas attack, study says

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/12/05/traders-earned-millions-anticipating-oct-7-hamas-attack-study-says/

Israeli regulators are looking into a report claiming that investors earned millions of dollars by short-selling Israeli stocks days ahead of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, apparently profiting off foreknowledge of the bloody incursion, multiple media outlets reported Tuesday.

The unknown traders behind the activity placed bets against the value of a bundle of Israeli stocks five days before the massacre, leading to a “significant spike in short selling” of that fund, professors Robert J. Jackson Jr. of the New York University School of Law and Joshua Mitts of Columbia Law School wrote in a study published Monday.

Traders made similar bets against the value of “dozens” of Israeli companies that trade in Tel Aviv, the authors note.

“Our findings suggest that traders informed about the coming attacks profited from these tragic events,” Jackson and Mitts wrote.

Short selling is a trading strategy that allows investors to bet that the value of a stock will decline. Short sellers borrow shares in a company or fund and sell them at the current market price, with the expectation that the price of those shares will fall soon. If prices decline, investors buy shares back at the lower value and return them to the lender, taking the margin between the original share value and the new, lower value, as profit.

“The short selling that day far exceeded the short selling that occurred during numerous other periods of crisis, including the recession following the financial crisis, the 2014 Israel-Gaza war, and the covid-19 pandemic,” Jackson and Mitts wrote.

In one instance, investors short-sold the unusually high sum of 4.43 million new shares of Bank Leumi, an Israeli bank, on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in the Sept. 14-Oct. 5 period, Jackson and Mitts wrote — a 50 percent increase from the previous period.

The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange pushed back on initial claims by Jackson and Mitts that traders profited $859 million on the Bank Leumi short position, citing a mistake in their methodology. The authors then corrected that figure to about $8 million, but stood by their finding that 4.43 million shares had been short-sold.

The Washington Post could not immediately reach Israeli law enforcement officials for comment.

How Hamas exploited Israel’s reliance on tech to breach barrier on Oct. 7

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/11/17/how-hamas-breached-israel-iron-wall/


The Post's reconstruction shows how fighters neutralized key parts of the border fence, exploiting vulnerabilities created by Israel’s dependence on technology. (Video: The Washington Post)

https://d21rhj7n383afu.cloudfront.net/washpost-production/The_Washington_Post/20231115/6554c5b7270c3c2bbbeae9be/6556c9b3b711eb5ff5a0d375/file_1280x720-2000-v3_1.mp4

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/investigations/visual-forensics/see-how-it-happened/2023/11/16/4bfa0d3c-d3ff-4955-9f28-e3157379534c_video.html


In December 2021, Israel’s military said a high-tech upgrade to the barrier that had long surrounded the Gaza Strip would protect nearby Israeli residents from the threat of violence from militants.

“Today there is an obstacle, both underground and above, with advanced measures, that will prevent entry into Israel in the best possible way,” Brig. Gen. Eran Ofir, who led the project, said in remarks addressed to communities in range of Hamas rockets. The upgrade cost $1 billion and took three years to complete.

But this Washington Post video shows how on Oct. 7, Hamas exploited vulnerabilities created by Israel’s reliance on technology at the “Iron Wall” to carry out the deadliest single assault in Israel’s history. The video details how Hamas fighters neutralized long-range cameras, sophisticated sensors and remote-control weapons — a tactic known inside the group as the “blinding plan” — to breach the high-tech fence.

The Post reconstructed the attack by analyzing hundreds of videos and photos posted online, including visuals filmed on Oct. 7 and during preparations by Hamas fighters. We reviewed videos and audio recorded on body cameras worn by militants, scoured footage from Israeli security cameras and spoke to witnesses. We also examined maps and planning documents recovered from slain Hamas fighters.

As our examination reveals, The Post found footage showing 14 separate breaches of the barrier. By comparing the footage with maps, satellite imagery and other data, reporters pinpointed where the intrusions occurred — from the Erez crossing in the north to Kerem Shalom in the south. Israel said there were around 30 breaches in all.





Training videos showing militants attacking mock-ups of Israeli compounds had been posted to social media months earlier and were visible to all. We found that Hamas had also been expanding its training camps for several years, activity that is visible in widely available online maps. The Post geolocated those camps using terrain and other distinctive features that could be seen in the training videos.

Videos posted to social media after the attack began showed that Hamas fighters had been training for months on the tactics it used to breach the fence.

Yet Israel’s security establishment misjudged Hamas’s intentions, according to analysts. Officials believed that the group, which controls Gaza’s government, did not want war. Israel’s military had recently directed much of its attention — and shifted some of its troops — toward unrest in the occupied West Bank.

“We didn’t believe that Hamas had this capability, and so we didn’t see it coming,” Charles Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel, told The Post in an interview.

The Israel Defense Forces declined to respond to questions submitted by The Post for this story, saying that it would answer them “after the war.” The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is under pressure to resign because of the security and intelligence failure, also declined to comment.

New York Times report says Israel knew about Hamas attack over a year in advance

https://apnews.com/article/new-york-times-hamas-attack-israel-gaza-6088cad78f5e4153d671fe9b5b819308


JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s military was aware of Hamas ' plan to launch an attack on Israeli soil over a year before the devastating Oct. 7 operation that killed hundreds of people, The New York Times reported Friday.

It was the latest in a series of signs that top Israeli commanders either ignored or played down warnings that Hamas was plotting the attack, which triggered a war against the Islamic militant group that has devastated the Gaza Strip.

The Times said Israeli officials were in possession of a 40-page battle plan, code-named “Jericho Wall,” that detailed a hypothetical Hamas attack on southern Israeli communities.

It was unclear how the document was obtained by Israel, but the article said that it had been translated — indicating it may have been in Arabic and directly intercepted from Hamas.

The Israeli military declined to comment on the report, saying it was “currently focused on eliminating the threat from the terrorist organization Hamas.”

“Questions of this kind will be looked into in a later stage,” it said.

The document was seen by many Israeli military and intelligence officials, the report said, though it was unclear if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top leaders had seen it.

The document predicted that Hamas would bombard Israel with rockets, use drones to disable Israel’s security and surveillance abilities at the border wall, and take over southern communities and military bases. Another 2016 Israeli defense memo obtained by the Times said Hamas intended to take hostages back to Gaza.

The Oct. 7 attack — in which 1,200 people were killed and 240 people were abducted and taken to Gaza — would uncannily mirror the one outlined in the battle plan. But Israeli officials had brushed off the plan, the report said, dismissing it as “aspirational” rather than something that could practically take place, the report said.

The report comes amid public fury toward the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for failing to prevent an attack that appears to have been preceded by numerous warning signs.

The attack was planned in plain sight. A month before the assault, Hamas posted a video to social media showing fighters using explosives to blast through a replica of the border gate, sweep in on pickup trucks and then move building by building through a full-scale reconstruction of an Israeli town, firing automatic weapons at human-silhouetted paper targets.

In the video, the militants destroyed mock-ups of the wall’s concrete towers and a communications antenna, just as they would do for real on Oct. 7.

Adding to public outrage over the military’s apparent negligence, the Israeli media has reported that military officials dismissed warnings from female border spotters who warned that they were witnessing Hamas’ preparations for the attack. According to the media reports, the young women reported seeing Hamas drones and attempts to knock out Israeli border cameras in the months leading up to the attack.

Netanyahu has stopped short of apologizing for the attack, and has said that determining blame will have to come after the war is waged. Critics say he is attempting to escape responsibility for myriad intelligence failures leading to the deadliest day in Israeli history.

For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/

The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from





For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.

Hamas was also included in discussions about increasing the number of work permits Israel granted to Gazan laborers, which kept money flowing into Gaza, meaning food for families and the ability to purchase basic products.

Israeli officials said these permits, which allow Gazan laborers to earn higher salaries than they would in the enclave, were a powerful tool to help preserve calm.

Toward the end of Netanyahu’s fifth government in 2021, approximately 2,000-3,000 work permits were issued to Gazans. This number climbed to 5,000 and, during the Bennett-Lapid government, rose sharply to 10,000.

Since Netanyahu returned to power in January 2023, the number of work permits has soared to nearly 20,000.

Additionally, since 2014, Netanyahu-led governments have practically turned a blind eye to the incendiary balloons and rocket fire from Gaza.

Meanwhile, Israel has allowed suitcases holding millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through its crossings since 2018, in order to maintain its fragile ceasefire with the Hamas rulers of the Strip.

Most of the time, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015.

According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

While Netanyahu does not make these kind of statements publicly or officially, his words are in line with the policy that he implemented.

The same messaging was repeated by right-wing commentators, who may have received briefings on the matter or talked to Likud higher-ups and understood the message.

Bolstered by this policy, Hamas grew stronger and stronger until Saturday, Israel’s “Pearl Harbor,” the bloodiest day in its history — when terrorists crossed the border, slaughtered hundreds of Israelis and kidnapped an unknown number under the cover of thousands of rockets fired at towns throughout the country’s south and center.

The country has known attacks and wars, but never on such a scale in a single morning.

One thing is clear: The concept of indirectly strengthening Hamas — while tolerating sporadic attacks and minor military operations every few years — went up in smoke Saturday.

Just a few days ago, Assaf Pozilov, a reporter for the Kan public broadcaster, tweeted the following: “The Islamic Jihad organization has started a noisy exercise very close to the border, in which they practiced launching missiles, breaking into Israel and kidnapping soldiers.”

The difference between Islamic Jihad and Hamas doesn’t matter much at this point. As far as the State of Israel is concerned, the territory is under the control of Hamas, and it is responsible for all the training and activities there.

Hamas became stronger and used the auspices of peace that Israelis so longed for as cover for its training, and hundreds of Israelis have paid with their lives for this massive omission.

The terror inflicted on the civilian population in Israel is so enormous that the wounds from it will not heal for years, a challenge compounded by the dozens abducted into Gaza.

Judging by the way Netanyahu has managed Gaza in the last 13 years, it is not certain that there will be a clear policy going forward.

Israel’s high court strikes down Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul law

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/01/israel-supreme-court-judicial-reform-netanyahu/





JERUSALEM — Israel’s high court on Monday struck down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s polarizing law that sought to limit the court’s power over government decisions, putting the country on the brink of a constitutional crisis just three months after Israelis united behind the war effort in Gaza.

Netanyahu’s plans to overhaul the judiciary sparked nearly a year of widespread social unrest before the Israel-Gaza war. The unprecedented standoff drew international condemnation and extraordinary opposition from military and senior security officials.

Monday’s ruling comes at a sensitive moment for Netanyahu, who remains embroiled in a corruption trial and is facing calls for his resignation over his government’s failure to thwart the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel by Hamas, as well as its handling of the hostage crisis. The militant group killed about 1,200 Israelis and took about 240 hostage, according to Israeli officials.

Netanyahu’s Likud party was swift to condemn the court’s decision, calling it “in opposition to the nation’s desire for unity, especially in a time of war.” Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin, a key force behind the law, said the ruling threatened the unity needed “so our troops can succeed at the front.” He pledged to pass the entire overhaul package after the war ends.

Opponents of the overhaul welcomed the ruling but refrained from public celebrations.

“Today the Supreme Court faithfully fulfilled its role in protecting the citizens of Israel,” opposition leader Yair Lapid said on X, formerly Twitter.

The news came a day after Israel said it would be withdrawing some troops from the Gaza Strip this week, an indication that it may be changing its tactics on the ground even as it rebuffs calls for a cease-fire.

Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Sunday night that pulling back reservists “will significantly ease the burden on the economy and allow them to gather strength for the upcoming activities in the next year.”

Some critics of the judicial overhaul plan, which Netanyahu’s coalition introduced as a series of bills last January, said Israel’s domestic divisions weakened its ability to respond to regional threats.

Monday’s ruling concerned one part of the package, an amendment to Israel’s Basic Law — which serves in place of a constitution — that was pushed through and passed by Netanyahu’s far-right government in July. The altered law removed the right of the Israeli Supreme Court to block decisions made by government ministers that the judges deem “unreasonable.”

In striking down the law 8-7 on Monday, the top court’s ruling calls for the legislation to be removed. If Netanyahu’s government refuses to honor the ruling, the wartime country could face a constitutional crisis.

Netanyahu has not said whether he would abide by the decision.

Supporters of the legislation said it was a necessary corrective to an activist Supreme Court led by a clique of elite judges. Opponents said the law could lead to authoritarianism and pave the way for Netanyahu’s far-right and ultra-Orthodox backers to alter key foundations of Israel’s liberal democracy. In Israel’s parliamentary system, the high court is seen as the main check on lawmakers and the government.

Netanyahu returned to office in 2022 via a coalition of far-right lawmakers who say Israel should be a Jewish state over a democratic one. Among their key priorities is preventing a Palestinian state and annexing the occupied West Bank and other Palestinian land.

In exchange for support of the judicial overhaul, members of the prime minister’s coalition have supported Netanyahu’s bid for parliamentary immunity.

Weekly protests beginning in January 2023 against the proposal drew hundreds of thousands of people. Military pilots and soldiers threatened to boycott volunteer duty if the overhaul plan was not stopped.

In March, Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who warned of potential security problems if Israeli reservists walked out. Gallant was reinstated two weeks later.

President Biden, one of Israel’s staunchest allies, in March also came out against the law in a rare public disagreement. “I hope he walks away from it,” Biden said, adding that Netanyahu’s government “cannot continue down this road.”

But the legislation was swiftly overshadowed after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, and the country quickly united. Israel’s more than 300,000 reservists mobilized for war. Anti-government protesters called off demonstrations. Lapid and opposition figure Benny Gantz proposed a broad emergency government that the parliament passed days later.

The resulting war on Gaza has killed nearly 22,000 people and injured more than 57,600 others, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Netanyahu has vowed to eliminate Hamas from the Gaza Strip, which Israel blockaded in 2007 when the militant group seized power.

The war has wide support in Israel, where most Israelis serve in the military. Domestically, however, there is growing frustration over a lack of clarity by Netanyahu’s government over what happens to Gaza after the war ends.

Brothers in Arms, a group of reserve soldiers who had opposed the overhaul, said in a statement Monday that its members “stand behind the independence of the Supreme Court, respect its ruling, and call all to abstain from division and hatred.”

“After Oct. 7, Israel cannot return to the division and chasms between parts of the nation,” they said.

Amnesty says Israel committing acts of genocide in Gaza. Here’s what to know.

The declaration by one of the world’s most prominent rights organizations is likely to intensify a debate that has raged for months over Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/12/04/israel-gaza-palestinians-amnesty-genocide-report/

Amnesty International said in a report Wednesday that Israel is committing acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

The declaration by one of the world’s most prominent rights organizations is likely to intensify a debate that has raged for months over how to characterize Israel’s military campaign against Hamas, which has killed tens of thousands of people and left much of Gaza in ruins.

Israel’s government says it is fighting a war of self-defense following the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, when militants killed some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and dragged another 250 hostages back to Gaza.

“The claims presented in this report are entirely baseless,” the Israeli military said in a statement to The Washington Post, saying it “is actively working to dismantle Hamas’ military infrastructure while adhering to its obligations under international law.”

What did Amnesty say?

In its 296-page report, the rights group detailed a series of military and political actions — from individual airstrikes to government decisions — that have caused death and serious bodily or mental harm on a massive scale. Taken together, the group said, Israeli was deliberately inflicting on Gazans conditions meant to bring about their physical destruction, in whole or in part — the internationally recognized definition of genocide.

“Amnesty International concludes that following 7 October 2023, Israel committed and is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” the organization said.

Although the report focused on a nine-month period between October 2023 and June 2024, the group said there has been no significant change in Israel’s conduct and that its offensive in Gaza has expanded in the months since it completed its research.

More than 44,000 Palestinians have been killed over nearly 14 months of fighting, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children.

Ninety percent of the population has been displaced, often multiple times, and civilian infrastructure — including hospitals, water plants and bakeries — have come under repeated attack. Israeli restrictions on aid deliveries and organized criminal looting have accelerated a hunger crisis, humanitarian groups say, leaving parts of Gaza on the brink of famine.

Israel says its military operations are aimed at eradicating Hamas, which has been significantly weakened over 13 months of war but remains the de facto authority in parts of the enclave. Amnesty concluded that Israel’s stated strategy does not preclude acts of genocide.

Such acts “can be the means through which a military strategy is accomplished,” said Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “What the law requires is that we prove that there is sufficient evidence that there is [genocidal] intent, amongst all the other complex intents that are going to exist in warfare.”

O’Brien said the group’s finding, the first of its kind by a major rights organization, should compel policymakers to rethink their support for Israel.

The group is calling on the United States, Israel’s main financial and diplomatic backer, to halt arms sales. “It’s important because the genocide is ongoing and will continue unless steps are taken to stop what’s happening on the ground,” O’Brien said.

What have courts found?

International courts have found that Israel is likely committing war crimes in Gaza, though a final legal determination on the question of genocide is likely to take years.

Last December, South Africa brought a case against Israel to the International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ highest court, alleging the country was in breach of its obligations under the Genocide Convention. The court ruled in January that Israel must do more to protect civilians to prevent the possibility of genocide, but did not order a halt to the fighting.

Last month, the International Criminal Court — the U.N. body that brings criminal cases against individuals — issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. A statement from the court said it found “reasonable grounds to believe” that Netanyahu and Gallant bear responsibility for crimes there, including the use of starvation as a method of warfare, as well as “murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

In a statement responding to the ICC’s arrest warrants, Netanyahu said Israel “utterly rejects the false and absurd charges” and called the court a “biased and discriminatory political body.” No war, the statement added, was “more just” than the one Israel has waged in Gaza after the Oct. 7 attacks.

The court also issued an arrest warrant for Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif, charging him with crimes against humanity in connection with the Oct. 7 attacks, including murder, torture, rape and the abduction of hostages. Deif was killed in a July airstrike, according to the United States and Israel, but the court said it could not confirm his death.

What does Israel say?
In its report, Amnesty said it had received “no substantive answers” from Israeli authorities despite “repeated attempts to engage” over nearly a year.

In a statement to The Post, the Israeli military said “the report’s allegations of genocide and intentional harm are not only unfounded but also ignore Hamas’ violations of international law, including its use of civilians as human shields and its deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians.”

Israel has vehemently denied accusations of war crimes and genocide throughout the war in Gaza, saying the charges are politically motivated and undermine the country’s legitimate right to self-defense.

Israel says it has a robust system of accountability that can assess allegations of abuse or criminality where they arise, and deal with them accordingly — negating the need for international prosecution.

What does the U.S. say?

While President Joe Biden has offered increasingly pointed criticisms of Israel’s conduct in Gaza — lamenting the civilian death toll, demanding Israeli authorities to do more to facilitate aid deliveries and bemoaning Netanyahu’s resistance to a ceasefire — his administration has continued to send arms to support the war effort.

“Our position on this has not changed, and we continue to believe that allegations of genocide are unfounded,” a State Department spokesperson said in response to Amnesty’s findings, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the department.

As the death toll in Gaza has mounted and political pressure has intensified, the administration has shied away from conclusive assessments about Israel’s compliance with global and U.S. laws. In May, officials concluded it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had violated international law with American weapons in Gaza but that there was insufficient evidence to halt arms transfers.

In October, The Post reported that the United States had received nearly 500 reports alleging that Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons for attacks that caused unnecessary harm to Gazan civilians, but had failed to comply with its own policies requiring swift investigations of such claims.

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