Israel’s Intelligence Disaster | For Hamas, Shattering Israel’s Sense of Security Is a Major Goal | The Reckoning, and more

What Israeli Intelligence Got Wrong About Hamas  (Elena Grossfeld, Foreign Policy)
Israel’s much-vaunted intelligence services failed to anticipate the Hamas attack—prompting comparisons between today and the similar failure 50 years ago to predict the Egyptian attack that launched the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. But there’s a strong chance that Israeli intelligence had the pieces it needed to detect an assault that involved the dispatch of perhaps 1,000 or more militants and more than 2,000 missiles. As in 1973, however, the power of preconceived ideas may have prevented the intelligence from being put together—especially given the toxic relationship between a far-right government and the intelligence services.
In 2023, 50 years and one day later, the dominant concept until last Friday was that Hamas was busy governing Gaza, aware of its limitations, and successfully achieving economic concessions from Israel and Qatar.
After years of undermining the Palestinian National Authority in its quest for statehood, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was content with what looked like a successful divide-and-conquer approach in his dealings with Hamas. Recognizing a militant organization affiliated with Hezbollah and Iran as the de facto ruler of Gaza, Israel conducted negotiations with Hamas using Egypt’s help. Israeli leadership was not the only group to be misled by Hamas as it continued to refrain from military actions. The latest round of protests and the subsequent increase in the number of Palestinian workers allowed to cross into Israel demonstrated Israel’s lack of interest in escalation and its ongoing cooperation with Hamas.
After investing billions of shekels in constructing physical, high-tech-enabled barriers on the Gaza border capable—or so their proponents believed—of preventing underground and overground breaches, Israeli politicians were sure that no political solution to the Palestinian issue was needed, and a “mowing the grass” policy, whereby a periodic military campaign designed to deter and degrade enemy capabilities would be launched, was sufficient. What became Israel’s preferred approach since the 2006 Lebanon War relied heavily on Israel’s technological superiority while avoiding a ground operation. Arising from the historical reality of the establishment of the state of Israel and the widespread Arab states’ hostility, this practice aligned seamlessly with the post-heroic-warfare approach, emphasizing the heightened value placed on the lives of Israeli troops and civilian adversaries.

The Israel-Hamas War Could Upend Global Energy Security  (Christina Lu and Olatunji Osho-Williams, Foreign Policy)
With its ample offshore natural gas resources, Israel has long dreamed of establishing itself as a major energy player in the Eastern Mediterranean, and in its more ambitious moments, even becoming a key supplier to Europe. But as the country reels from a devastating surprise attack by the Islamist militant group Hamas, the prospect of a full-blown war threatens to roil global energy markets, especially impacting the gas supply in the neighborhood—and with it, Israel’s energy ambitions. 
In the wake of Hamas’s weekend attack, European natural gas and global oil futures shot up by 14 percent and 4 percent respectively, reflecting wider uncertainty and fears of an intensifying conflict. Oil shot up because there are worries, again, that Iran might close the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint for nearly a third of seaborne oil. Natural gas prices went up firstly because Israel shut down a big offshore production platform in missile range of Gaza, and secondly because a pipeline in the Baltic mysteriously developed a hole, which Estonian officials attributed to “external” actors.
As fighting worsened on Monday, Israel asked Chevron to shut down production at the Tamar offshore field, which accounts for about half of Israeli domestic gas and is also a source of gas for Egypt and Jordan. There are bigger Israeli offshore fields, which are as yet unaffected, as well as smaller ones, but the onshore war is already having offshore effects.

The Reckoning  (Yossi Klein Halevi, The Atlantic)
Like so many other Israelis, I have forced myself to watch the unwatchable clips, trying to understand the new reality in which we find ourselves. The dead bodies paraded through the streets of Gaza while crowds defile them and cheer; the elderly woman forced to make a V sign while holding a gun, surrounded by laughing terrorists; the boy placed in a circle of Palestinian children, who mock and abuse him; the child captives.
The dimensions of our losses are incomprehensible. The latest army prediction is that the final death toll will be about 1,000—this from a population of 9 million. The suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, in the early 2000s, killed that many, but over four years, not in a single day. And the Israel Defense Forces’ ground offensive inside Gaza hasn’t even begun.
No less horrifying to Israelis was the unbearable ease with which the murderers went from house to house, kidnapping and slaughtering. Over and over, we ask one another the questions that have no answers: Why did it take the IDF a full day to reach those communities? Where were the police? Why did the desperate calls for help go unanswered?
Scarcely less frightening than the IDF’s failure to protect Israeli citizens at their most dire moment is that our leadership has effectively collapsed. Addressing the nation on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered little more than bluster and clichés, without inspiration. No Israeli cabinet minister has visited the wounded in hospitals, although that is standard procedure during times of crisis. The desperate families of the missing have pleaded with the government to meet with them, so far to no avail.
Clearly our leaders are afraid to face an outraged public. A cartoon in the newspaper Haaretz showed the members of the cabinet cowering under a table.
Israel’s most divisive government is presiding over one of the most sensitive moments in our history, when we desperately need leaders we can trust. But not only is this government the most politically extreme in our history; it is also the least qualified to decide matters of life and death. Collectively, the heads of the coalition have less military experience by far than the leaders of any previous government. Much of the country had lost faith in the government’s competence long before this week’s catastrophe. Now that judgment has been frighteningly confirmed.

Hamas’s Attack Confounds Middle East Experts  (Isabel Fattal, The Atlantic)
Hamas, an Islamist fundamentalist group formed in 1987 as an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, has controlled the Gaza Strip since it won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006—the last time elections were held in Gaza. These elections took place a year after Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza. In 2007, Hamas ousted its rival political party, Fatah, from the strip during a military conflict within Gaza. Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Israel, the European Union, Canada, Egypt, and Japan.
The group seeks the elimination of Israel as a country—a point of contrast between it and the Palestine Liberation Organization. (The PLO’s official position holds that a Palestinian state could be created in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, though the former PLO chairman Yasser Arafat walked away from American-led negotiations meant to create such a state.)

For Hamas, Shattering Israel’s Sense of Security Is a Major Goal  (Ben Hubbard, New York Times)
Mounting grievances fueled Hamas’s decision to attack, but the nature of that attack was shaped by a deep thirst for revenge built up over decades of conflict — a desire to see Israel bleed.

Hamas acted on that desire on Saturday, shocking the world by bringing the fight inside Israeli communities and shattering the sense that Israel could keep its conflict with the Palestinians elsewhere.
“What Hamas is doing is trying to flip the table back on the Israelis, saying you can’t forget about the Palestinian issue and we can undermine the myth of your invincibility,” said Tareq Baconi, the author of a book about Hamas in Gaza. “That in itself is a huge transformation in the Palestinian imagination, and I don’t think we can see or understand the implications of it yet.”
The conflict between Israel and Hamas has regularly erupted into bouts of tremendous violence in Gaza for more than a decade, but the scale of Hamas’s attack, and its taking of about 150 Israeli captives, has significantly raised the stakes on both sides.