It’s a question This Writer has asked many times in the days since it happened: what was Hamas trying to achieve when its people invaded Israel, attacked the IDF and took hostages back to Gaza? What did that organisation’s leaders think would be the result?
October 7 was an Israeli holiday – Yom Kippur – and also the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. As such, it was always possible that some kind of violence would happen.
Indeed, Israel was warned of a Hamas attack by Egypt – repeatedly – in the period before the attack. The Israeli government has denied this, but here‘s what an Egyptian intelligence official told The Times of Israel:
Jerusalem had ignored repeated warnings that the Gaza-based terror group was planning “something big.”
The Egyptian official said Egypt, which often serves as a mediator between Israel and Hamas, had spoken repeatedly with the Israelis about “something big,” without elaborating.
“We have warned them an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big. But they underestimated such warnings,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the content of sensitive intelligence discussions with the media, told The Associated Press.
This was confirmed by the USA:
“We know that Egypt has warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen,” Republican Michael McCaul tells reporters following a closed-door intelligence briefing for lawmakers on the crisis.
“I don’t want to get too much into classified, but a warning was given,” he says.
Given Israel’s propensity for lying, I think we should believe the Egyptians and the Americans on this.
So, with Israel looking the other way, Hamas’s Qassam Brigade launched an offensive with two strategies (this from The Cradle):
There is little to no credible evidence that Palestinian fighters had a plan to – or deliberately sought to – kill or harm unarmed Israeli civilians on 7 October. From the available footage, we witness them engaging primarily with armed Israeli forces, accounting for the deaths of hundreds of occupation soldiers. As Qassam Brigades’ Spokesman Abu Obeida made clear on 12 October:
“Al-Aqsa Flood operation aimed to destroy the Gaza Division (an Israeli army unit on Gaza’s borders) which was attacked at 15 points, followed by attacking 10 further military intervention points. We attacked the Zikim site and several other settlements outside the Gaza Division headquarters.”
Abu Obeida and other resistance officials claims that the other key objective of their operation was to take Israeli prisoners that they could exchange for the approximately 5,300 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli detention centers, many of whom are women and children.
Hamas Deputy Head of the Political Bureau of Saleh Al-Arouri, in an interview after the operation, stressed: “We have a large and qualitative number and senior officers. All we can say now is that the freedom of our prisoners is at the doorstep.”
I can see no sense in either of these objectives.
Destroying an arm of the Israeli Defence Force was only ever going to provoke violent retaliation – as we have seen over the 24 days since the incursion.
And taking hostages? In case you haven’t noticed, we have multiple eyewitness reports of IDF troops shooting, or even shelling, Israeli civilians in order to eliminate Hamas operatives. Here’s another one:
Even at the Israeli “peace rave”, which has been cited as the single deadliest attack committed by Palestinian fighters during their operation, videos emerged that appeared to show Israeli forces opening fire through a crowd of unarmed civilians, toward targets they believed to be Hamas members. ABC News also reported that an Israeli tank had headed to the site of the festival.
Whichever way you stack the information, it doesn’t make sense.
Hamas must have known an attack of the limited nature available to it could only lead to a response from Israel that would be several orders of magnitude more deadly, so launching the offensive seems to be insanity.
Israel’s behaviour seems equally irrational. Knowing the attack was coming, its leaders chose to ignore the warnings, wait for the attack to happen, and then murder their own fellow Israelis in order to manufacture international outrage to support a genocidal response.
Can anybody find anything wrong with my reasoning here?
I think there’s at least one very important piece of information missing from this. If anybody has it, please pass it on.
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