On Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, millions of Israelis were awakened by sirens. A deluge of rockets hit the country, as far as Tel Aviv and the outskirts of Jerusalem. Although almost all were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system, some caused damage and casualties.
For civilians living around the Gaza Strip, the situation was far worse. Families barricaded themselves in their safe rooms to escape Hamas terrorists who burned down houses, killed or took hostages. A rave party attended by 5,000 young people ended in gunfire and panic. The Sderot police station was occupied by Hamas commandos, who even managed to infiltrate the Israeli division headquarters, paralyzing it for several hours. The toll was heavy: over 250 killed, more than 1,500 wounded and dozens of hostages taken into Gaza, a nightmare scenario for Israel.
It's hard not to draw parallels with the Yom Kippur War, which was also triggered on a holy day in the Jewish calendar, almost 50 years to the day, by a combined surprise attack by the Syrian and Egyptian armies. There was the same astonishment, the same psychological shock. And yet, here again, there were plenty of warnings. In 1973, Golda Meir's Labor government ignored them, preferring the misleading assurances of military intelligence that the Arabs would not dare confront the supremacy of Tsahal. Here again, they dared to do so.
This fifth round of the Gaza war is very different from the others in that Hamas has succeeded in carrying out a combined attack by land, air and sea, and above all in occupying Israeli towns and villages, something that has not happened since the 1948 war. The resounding failure for Israel enabled the Islamist movement to present itself as the ultimate champion of the Palestinian cause, with tragic consequences on both sides of the border.
It's the same military failure. As in the early days of the Yom Kippur War, Tsahal was caught unawares, unable to analyze the weak signals or foresee the attack that loomed under the veil of military maneuvers. "Where are the soldiers, why can't we see Tsahal?" desperate residents said on television and social media on October 7, 2023. Before Saturday, three quarters of Israeli troops were in the occupied West Bank due to the upsurge in Palestinian attacks over the past year, exacerbated by the ultra-nationalist Israeli Netanyahu government in the total absence of any prospect of a settlement.
There's the same hubris, the same blindness on the part of Israel's military and political leaders. Yet for months, former officers had been warning the government. Four hundred former security officials, including the heads of Mossad, Shin Bet and the Israeli Police as well as national security advisors, were sounding the alarm over the much-maligned judicial overhaul project, which was plunging Israel into an unprecedented social, economic and political crisis. They accused the right-wing and far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu of having considerably weakened Israel's military strength through the dissension generated in the country as a result of this reform, believing it degraded democracy. Ten thousand reservists threatened not to serve an illiberal democracy.
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