Less than a month before Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel, which resulted in more than 1,200 deaths on the Israeli side, the Islamist movement held a public dress rehearsal, including the release of videos.
A well-produced two-minute propaganda video posted by Hamas on social media on September 12 shows fighters using explosives to blow up a replica of a border gate, carrying out an invasion via a pickup truck and moving building by building, through a large-scale reconstruction of an Israeli city.
The Islamic militant group’s live-fire exercise, dubbed Operation ‘Strong Pillar’, also saw militants in body armor and combat gear carrying out operations including destroying models of the cement towers and a communications antenna. Real in last Saturday’s deadly attack.
Although Israel’s highly regarded security and intelligence services were clearly blindsided by Hamas’s ability to breach Gaza’s defenses, the group appears to have clearly concealed its extensive preparations for the deadly attack.
“There were clearly warnings and clues that should have been picked up.”said Bradley Bowman, a former U.S. Army officer who is now senior director of the Center for Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research institute in Washington.
The Associated Press (AP) agency has analyzed and verified key details of dozens of videos released by Hamas last year, mainly through the social network Telegram.
Using satellite images, the AP linked the location of the simulated city to a stretch of desert on the outskirts of Al-Mawasi, a Palestinian town on the southern coast of the Gaza Strip.
A large sign in Hebrew and Arabic at the gate reads “Horesh Yaron,” the name of a controversial Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank.
Bowman emphasized that there is evidence that Hamas deliberately led Israeli authorities to believe that it was preparing to carry out attacks on the West Bank, and not Gaza.
It was also potentially significant that the exercise has been held annually in December since 2020, but was brought forward almost four months this year to coincide with the anniversary of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.
In a video on Telegram from last year’s “Strong Pillar” exercise on December 28, Hamas fighters are shown attacking a model of an Israeli military base, complete with a life-size model of a tank with an Israeli flag on it. on his tower.
The armed men break through the concrete buildings and take hostage other men playing the role of Israeli soldiers.
Michael Milshtein, a retired Israeli colonel who previously headed the military intelligence agency that oversees the Palestinian territories, said he was aware of the Hamas videos but was still blindsided by the ambition and scale of the attack from Saturday.
“We knew about the drones, we knew about the traps, we knew about the cyber attacks and the naval forces… The surprise was the coordination between all these systems”Milstein noted.
The seeds of Israel’s failure to anticipate and prevent Saturday’s attack go back at least a decade.
Faced with recurring attacks from Hamas militants digging tunnels under Israel’s border fence, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proposed a very concrete solution: building a bigger wall.
But shortly after dawn on Saturday, Hamas fighters broke through Netanyahu’s wall in minutes and did so relatively cheaply, using explosives to blow holes in the barrier and then sending bulldozers to widen the holes, while the fighters who they passed on motorcycles and in trucks on Saturday.
Military experts told the AP that the attack showed a level of sophistication not previously displayed by Hamas, likely indicating there was outside help.
Ali Barakeh, a senior Hamas official based in Beirut, acknowledged that the group has received supplies, financial support, military expertise and training over the years from its allies abroad, including Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But this source insisted that the recent operation to breach Israel’s border defenses was developed domestically, with the exact date and time of the attack known only to a handful of Hamas commanders.
Source: DN
