IDF Suffers Humiliating Failure in Face of 1,000 Hamas Invaders

 

By

 David Israel

Watch the tweet below. It shows IAF warplanes being towed out of their base for fear that invading Hamas terrorists would destroy them. It is perhaps the most poignant image of the Israeli Army’s total failure to anticipate, block, and repel the Hamas invasion of much of southern Israel on Shabbat Simchat Torah. These warplanes were supposed to be in the air, striking fire and fear against the enemy. Instead, they crawled sheepishly away from their base that was being overtaken.

The prevailing rumor in Israel today is that many of the thousand or so Hamas terrorists had entered Israeli territory several days before Shabbat and situated themselves outside several army bases belonging to the best elite and observation forces so that by the time the intense barrage of rockets from Gaza began, those bases had already been breached and many elite soldiers were killed.

The raids were from the sea, using small vessels, from the air with windsurfers, on the ground, exploding the border fence and ramming through the IDF checkpoints, and also through underground tunnels. Remember the border fence that’s as deep in the ground as it is high, bolstered by unpassable layers of cement? Turns out Hamas dug tunnels to points just short of the unpassable fence, stormed out of them, and passed it.

A security source told Walla that contact was completely lost with the IDF’s coordination and liaison headquarters at the Gaza Strip border very early on Shabbat morning, October 7, 2023, so a special IDF force that entered to cleanse the headquarters encountered a terrorist cell hiding in the buildings. Meanwhile, a special IDF force fought fiercely to free the Gaza Division, which had been under massive siege.

Gaza Arabs take over an Israeli tank and its crew, October 7, 2023. / Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90

According to security sources, the terrorists reached IDF posts, engaged in point-blank range battles with IDF soldiers, and killed them. Hordes of Gaza Arabs followed and looted weapons and valuable military equipment, and burned down buildings, armored troops carriers, and tanks. Arab social networks featured crazed terrorists riding stolen military vehicles on the streets of Gaza.

The newspapers are full of the tearful stories of civilians from the Gaza envelope communities whose homes were invaded by armed terrorists. They called for help repeatedly, the media outlets played their desperate calls for the whole nation to hear, and everyone was asking, many angrily, where is the IDF? Why did it take the first responding military unit four hours to get to those settlements, often after their residents had been slaughtered or kidnapped to Gaza? The answer may be that the IDF units near those settlements were dead or scurried away, fleeing from the Hamas invasion.

When IDF Spokesman Daniel Hagari was asked by an angry group of military reporters on TV Saturday evening why it took the army more than four hours to respond, he dodged the question and skipped to the fact that at the moment, albeit 10 hours later, there was IDF presence in each of the 22 invaded settlements.

My hunch is that the latest outrageous number of dead Israelis on Shabbat, 350, is a very low ballpark figure.

Gaza Arabs drive through the Erez Crossing on a jeep they took from an IDF base, October 7, 2023. / Atia Mohammed/Flash90

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE IDF?

An Arab Twitter user named Hadad Yosef asked on Sunday morning: “Who is the Chief of Staff at the top of the IDF? Who are the people at the top of military intelligence? The IDF never had such a failed leadership. The best military intelligence in the world has become extinct. The story of the best army in the world has vanished.” He then urged a rehabilitation of the IDF to restore people’s trust in it, as well as its ability to deter the enemy.

In early June, one female and two male IDF soldiers were killed by gunshots fired by an Egyptian policeman. The two were found lifeless by a force that jumped to their observation post at the Egyptian border after they had not responded to attempts to contact them. Hours later, another soldier was killed during an exchange of fire with the gunman. The operational failures that were exposed by a later IDF inquiry were staggering, but the mainstream media buried alive a Channel 14 analyst who dared to suggest that the reason for the carnage had to do with the decision to post a man and a woman together for 12 hours.

Turns out the border with Egypt is guarded by the Caracal and Cheetah Battalions, both of which have men and women living and fighting together, and tank units operated by women. Both groups are the result of years of efforts to feminize the IDF, heralded by Supreme Court justices and many feminist groups. Even now, the IDF has been forced to let women into its special forces, and its leadership was recently chastised by the court for letting them only into two units, and not the whole shebang.

Over the past decade, the IDF has been turned into an instrument for empowering women, transgenders, and mentally challenged individuals. Even worse, because of the Israeli government’s fear of annexing Judea and Samaria, the IDF is relegated to manning checkpoints and carrying out police operations, where issues such as civil rights dominate its ability to carry out missions.

The bulk of the standard army was posted in Judea and Samaria on Shabbat, to rebuff terrorist attempts, including a riot in Huawara. Israeli media blamed the settlers for the Shabbat failure: because of the settlers, they argued, the army was away from the Gaza front. But, as I said, the entire terrorist threat in Samaria as well as Judea has to do with the country’s reluctance to declare those areas part of Israel. Police units were able to quell signs of violence in Acco, a mixed city of Arabs and Jews. Police units should be controlling Huwara.

Those are the reasons the IDF that eventually rescued the State of Israel from two invading armies on October 7, 1973, has been put to shame by 1,000 Hamas irregulars on October 7, 2023.

Armed Hamas terrorists returning to Gaza after inflicting high casualties on the IDF, October 7, 2023. / Atia Mohammed/Flash90

THE CONCEPT

“The Conceptzia” was the name given by the Agrant Committee of Inquiry after the Yom Kippur War to the concept that was formulated by the Research Division of the IDF Intelligence Division during the year 1971, regarding Egyptian and Syrian threshold conditions for going to war. At the center of the concept were two fundamental assumptions: 1. Egypt will not go to war against Israel unless it first guarantees itself an air capability to attack deep inside Israel, to paralyze the Israeli Air Force; and, 2. Syria will not launch a major attack on Israel except at the same time as Egypt.

The second part came true, the first didn’t. The Egyptians attacked without air superiority, and stunned the defending Israeli units along the Suez Canal.

The committee of inquiry which will no doubt be appointed to look into the failures of October 2023, will likely discover that, 1. The “Palestinian” problem cannot be ignored, no matter how many Arab countries sign peace agreements with Israel on the White House lawn; 2. Gone is the notion that Hamas is now more interested in jobs for Gazans in Israel and economic recovery than it is in annihilating the Jewish State.

The IDF General Staff and Military Intelligence claimed that Hamas is reluctant to engage with Israel, having been burned in the previous clashes, and is not looking for war. In practice, thousands of Hamas terrorists had been preparing for a surprise attack for months, and the military intelligence that prided itself on knowing exactly where every Islamic Jihad leader resided so that the IAF could surgically remove them from this world, knew nothing about the Hamas war preparations. And all the time Israel continued to debate whether to increase the number of work permits to Gazan workers from 17 to 20 thousand.

3. Gone is the idea that Israel can maintain equilibrium by supporting Hamas and the PLO against each other; 4. Gone is the notion that a Maginot Line can be a substitute for a dynamic Israeli army presence along all the country’s borders – it failed when the Germans bypassed the fortified Maginot Line by invading Belgium, and it failed when Hamas terrorists found four different ways of bypassing the impenetrable Gaza fence – and rest assured, when the time comes, Hezbollah will also find ways to bypass Israeli defenses along the Lebanese border.

It was armed civilian residents, response teams, and police officers who fought the invading Hamas terrorists house to house and were overwhelmed in many places. The strongest army in the Middle East was a no-show. The entire IDF system collapsed before Hamas, which hadn’t been the case in 1973 against Egypt and Syria, nor in 2006 against Hezbollah.

Netanyahu in the 2009 campaign: We will topple the Hamas regime:

In 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu ran for the post of Prime Minister with the promise of destroying Hamas. But over the years he not only ignored that promise, he developed the idea that he could use Hamas to avoid dealing with the PA’s demand for statehood. Netanyahu rode this tiger for more than a decade, believing he could always manage it. On Shabbat Simchat Torah he was forced to declare that the only solution must be to destroy Hamas.

It would have been much easier in 2009.