At approximately 06:30 on Saturday, October 7, Hamas announced the beginning of a military operation against Israel, and in a short period of time fired 6000 rockets at Israeli targets. At the same time, up to 2900 Palestinian militants infiltrated Israel using motorcycles, bulldozers, hang gliders, boats, tractors and other vehicles, and opened fire in the town of Sderot.
According to Israeli authorities, Hamas infiltrated Israel through at least seven different border crossings, invading not only Sderot but also four smaller Israeli communities and two military bases. Israeli media reported that three other communities in the border area were taken over by Hamas.
The article was originally published on The Nordic Times on November 15, 2023.
A festival near Reím was attacked, resulting in at least 270 civilian deaths and several hundred people taken hostage to Gaza.
1400 killed
According to official reports, at least 1400 Israelis were killed in Hamas’s brutal attacks – including 1033 civilians, 275 soldiers and 58 police officers. Another 3400 were wounded and at least 247 were taken hostage in the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history.
Three days later, the Israeli military reported that over 1,500 Hamas fighters had been killed on Israeli territory and that the borders were essentially secure again. Following the Hamas attacks, Israel responded with extensive bombing of Gaza and vowed to destroy Hamas.
Many question how the Hamas attack could have been carried out without being stopped at the border. Journalist and author David Sörensen, in a documentary about the events, points out that Israel has one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world, and that the border between Israel and Gaza is the most heavily guarded in the world, with a security fence and sensors that detect any attempt at infiltration – even by small animals.
Yet Hamas has been able to breach the fence, destroy villages and homes, and begin murdering Israeli civilians without significant resistance.
– You have to understand that this is not a massive army invading Israel, it’s basically a low number of terrorists. The powerful military of Israel could have stopped them in a breeze, but they didn’t, says Sörensen, whose view is also shared by certain Israeli military officials.
“The people of Israel and Palestine have been sold to higher powers”
A woman who served in Israeli military intelligence and was part of the IDF forces during the 2014 Gaza war finds it inconceivable, based on her experience, that this many (if any) Hamas fighters could enter Israel without triggering an emergency alert.
– Listen to me, and listen to me well, there is no way in the world that anyone can approach the border without us knowing about it. The observers sit in the bunkers for hours, they can’t move their eyes, like this, they sit in front of a screen, there is no way in hell… They would wake me up at nights for a pigeon, for a stork that got too close to the border, for a cockroach that went under the barrier. How could 400 men enter with tractors?
– There is no way in my view that Israel did not know what was coming… What happened to the strongest army in the world? How come border crossings were wide open? Something is very wrong here, something is very strange, she continues.
Israeli journalist and civil rights activist Efrat Fenigson expresses similar doubts, noting that the military, which was supposed to protect Israeli settlements near Gaza, was instead mobilized to the West Bank for “security concerns”.
– Apparently, Israeli defense forces that were supposed to be around Gaza were placed around the West Bank because of security concerns so that the Gaza envelope was left unoccupied with military. They say around 60 to 80 percent of that area was left without the IDF forces that were supposed to be there, Fenigson says.
– This raises serious questions for me, anyway, about Israeli intelligence. What happened? Two years ago, there was a successful deployment of underground barriers with sensors to alert exactly on these kind of terrorist breaches, she continues.
American NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden also expresses skepticism about Israel’s alleged inability to anticipate the Hamas operation, given its access to advanced technology.
Fenigson suggests a cynical political game behind the events and criticizes the Netanyahu regime as “as corrupt as its predecessor”:
– If I was a conspiracy theorist I would say that this feels like the work of the Deep State. It feels like the people of Israel and the people of Palestine have been sold, once again, to the higher powers that be. At the same time, this is still very difficult to fathom, she says.
“Now they can do what they have wanted to do for decades”
It has previously been reported how Israel helped create and fund the forces that became Hamas in order to divide the Palestinians against popular PLO leader Yasser Arafat. However, Sörensen goes further, claiming that Hamas was a direct creation of Israel to legitimize excessive violence, oppression and invasions against the Palestinian civilian population.
– With every false flag operation it is always the same principle. Some entity wants to commit a horrendous crime but they don’t want to be blamed for it so they have to use another entity to shift the blame to, Sörensen says.
Sörensen points out that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli authorities have long sought to take over the entire Gaza strip and now see an opportunity to do so, to wipe out the Gaza strip and commit a terrible genocide against the Palestinian people.
– In this case it’s very clear, they use Hamas. Now they have the right to do something which they have wanted to do for decades. Completely eradicate the whole Gaza strip and commit horrendous homocide on the Palestinian people.
