The Israeli occupation military’s 8200 signal intelligence unit stopped listening in to the handheld radios of Hamas operatives in Gaza a year ago, deciding it was a “waste of effort,” The New York Times reported noting that this was one of a series of failures that led to the shocking success of the Oct. 7 Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
In an extensive report on the intelligence failures, the paper also said on Sunday that US spy agencies had largely stopped collecting information on Hamas in recent years, believing that ‘Israel’ had contained the threat from the Palestinian resistance group.
Monitoring that network might have helped Ronen Bar, the director of the Israel Security Agency, or Shin Bet, realize at 3 a.m. on Oct. 7, a few hours before the attack, that the unusual activity he was seeing on the Gaza border wasn’t just another Hamas “military” exercise, the Times noted.
Israeli military also placed its confidence in “The Barrier,” the nearly 40-mile-long concrete wall that plunges underground to prevent tunneling. It included a high-tech surveillance system that relies on cameras, sensors and remote-controlled machine guns.
“Senior Israeli military officials believed that the combination of remote surveillance and machine-gun systems with the formidable wall would make it almost impossible to infiltrate Israel, and thus reduce the need for a large number of soldiers to be stationed at the bases,” the newspaper reported.
Hamas’s attack put paid to the idea that concrete and technology could be relied on. The Hamas fighters blew up cellular antennas and remote shooting systems along the fence with explosives precisely dropped from drones.
“In a conversation with military investigators two weeks after the attack, soldiers who survived the assault testified that the Hamas training was so precise that they damaged a row of cameras and communication systems so that ‘all our screens turned off in almost the exact same second,’” the Times reported.
There simply were not enough Israeli soldiers to fill the gaps once the technology was destroyed and the security barrier breached. Hamas terrorists poured through.
“We started receiving messages that there was a raid on every reporting line,” one soldier at the Gaza Division base told an Israeli news site.
“The forces did not have time to come and stop it. There were swarms of terrorists, something psychotic, and we were simply told that our only choice was to take our feet and flee for our lives.”
The Hamas rampage across western Negev communities went on for hours, with the Israeli soldiers’ response shockingly slow, (Something that has still not been explained).
After the fighting, Israeli soldiers found hand-held radios on the bodies of some of the Hamas fighters, “the same radios that Israeli intelligence officials had decided a year ago were no longer worth monitoring,” the Times reported.
Source: NYT
