WORLD ROUNDUP: HAMAS ATTACKS Israel’s Intelligence Disaster | For Hamas, Shattering Israel’s Sense of Security Is a Major Goal | The Reckoning, and more
· Israel’s Intelligence Disaster
How the Security Establishment Could Have Underestimated the Hamas Threat
· What Israeli Intelligence Got Wrong About Hamas
Hubris and toxic politics fueled a mistaken belief in containment
· The Israel-Hamas War Could Upend Global Energy Security
If the conflict worsens, spillover effects could disrupt gas production and major shipping chokepoints
· The Reckoning
Israel must grapple first with its enemies, and then with the failures of its own government
· Hamas’s Attack Confounds Middle East Experts
Even those who understand the fundamentalist group best are struggling to understand what they are trying to achieve
· For Hamas, Shattering Israel’s Sense of Security Is a Major Goal
Rising domestic pressures and a desire to boost its anti-Israel credentials pushed Hamas to attack and most likely drove its decision to invoke terror
Israel’s Intelligence Disaster (Amy Zegart, Foreign Affairs)
Hamas’s devastating terrorist attack against Israel has unleashed the most violent and serious conflict the country has seen in half a century. Already, at least 1,000 Israelis (and 14 U.S. citizens) have been killed. It is an astronomical number for such a small country—equivalent to 30,000 Americans. About 2,900 more Israelis have been injured and an estimated 150 others, including toddlers, grandmothers, and foreign nationals, have been taken hostage. Meanwhile, at least 900 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip, and another 4,500 have been injured.
These figures are likely to rise. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared war, launched deadly airstrikes on the Gaza Strip—a densely populated Palestinian area controlled by Hamas that has been blockaded by Egypt and Israel for 16 years—and vowed to turn Hamas strongholds into ruins. With Hamas rockets raining down on Israeli cities, Israeli shells bombarding Gaza, and Hamas fighters threatening to execute hostages, fears of a broader regional conflagration are mounting.
In these early days, the fog of war is thick, and it is hard to anticipate exactly how the conflict will unfold. But this much is already clear: Hamas’s attack came as a shocking surprise. Israel’s billion-dollar, high-tech Gaza border wall was easily and quickly breached. Early reports suggest that Hamas fighters used unsophisticated weapons to overrun border security with cheap drones, bulldozers, and bombs, and that they traveled to inflict violence and take hostages on paragliders, motorcycles, and in a golf cart. Yet this was not an amateur-hour operation. The assault came by air, land, and sea, and attackers fanned out to capture and kill across multiple sites simultaneously. That kind of large-scale sophisticated operation takes careful planning, coordination, time, and practice.
