On the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Israelis woke up to a sustained attack on multiple southern towns near the border with the Gaza Strip (half of the so-called "Palestinian Authority"). This isn't the usual vicious but random spasm of slaughter in which Hamas likes to engage. It appears to have been very well planned and executed, with thousands upon thousands of rockets barraging Israeli residential areas from the southern border to north of Tel Aviv. It is also an invasion: Hamas used bulldozers to demolish Israeli border barriers, enabling an unknown number of its assets to enter the country. That's different - as the locals quickly noticed:

We woke up at 6:30 a.m. to alarms, we thought it was the usual rocket attacks but we started hearing gunshots on the street, sounded like it came from the parking of our building. Then we realized something was unusual. We then started seeing Hamas people in pickup trucks. They knocked on the homes of residents, who thought they were Israeli soldiers. They took them hostage.

There are reports that the Israelis have lost control of parts of their territory, and that Hamas is now in charge of certain communities. The first part of this Telegraph montage gives you an idea of the infiltration:

As I write, over one hundred Israelis are dead, and near a thousand are injured. More have been kidnapped, and taken across the border into Gaza. Among the hostages are seventeen Nepalese citizens. Just one hospital in Beersheeba has sixty seriously injured in its emergency ward. In the southern citizen of Ofakim, a family has been seized in its home by terrorists armed with live grenades. In Sderot, the fire chief has been killed in a battle with Hamas. This is the biggest Palestinian assault on the Jewish state in decades, and is looking, proportionately and psychologically, like an Israeli 9/11.

It would seem to me improbable that Hamas could pull off anything as strategically calculated as this on their own.

That said, we know very little at the moment, so one must be cautious about the facts on the ground. My old shingle in the Holy Land, The Jerusalem Post, has a live feed, but one notices it has very little of the cellphone video and Tweets readers have come to expect in a breaking news story - which suggests not only a fairly major breakdown of communications, but also that a lot of the footage is too graphic and disturbing to publish. Here is one video that has made it out - a Hamas kidnapper cheering "Allahu akbar!" as he arrives back in Gaza with his prize:

And another:

If you can stomach it, here are streetfuls of Palestinians doing their usual happy dance as their heroes arrive back in town with dead Israeli bodies. The fitter ones climb up on the flatbed and start thwacking the corpse with sticks:

So these guys are doing all the things - targeting civilians, especially women and children - that the US and EU argue justifies the toppling of Vladimir Putin. Fortunately for them, the Palestinians enjoy a much better press. The Government of the United States reacted to the unprovoked invasion from a neighboring state by immediately urging Israel "to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing" - which is in striking contrast to its general approach in Ukraine:

When whoever does the weekend shift at the White House woke up, he/she/ze evidently felt that was going a bit far even for the Biden Administration and ordered the advice deleted.

For his part, Netanyahu has said simply: "We are at war." And, when you're at war, listening to Joe Biden is a luxury you can't afford.

So what's going on? As I said, it's not credible that Hamas could have pulled off anything this coherent unaided. For what it's worth, Obama and Biden's indulgence of Iran's nuclear ambitions destabilised the balance of power in the Middle East. That helped spur the Abraham Accords, under which Israel and the Sunni Arabs became new best friends. The Jerusalem-Riyadh axis is regarded as a threat by Tehran to its own hegemony. Did they decide to act on that threat? It will be interesting to see whose fingerprints are on this as the facts emerge.

We will update this post as news emerges.