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, which included the release of videos.
A well-produced two-minute propaganda video posted on social media by Hamas on September 12 shows fighters using explosives to blow up a replica of a border gate, carrying out an invasion via van and moving building by building, through a great road. Scale reconstruction of an Israeli city.
The Islamist militant group’s live-fire exercise, dubbed Operation “Strong Pillar,” also saw militants in bulletproof vests and combat uniforms carrying out operations that included destroying mock-ups of cement towers and a communications antenna. , just as they would do for Real in the deadly attack last Saturday.
Although Israel’s prestigious security and intelligence services were clearly caught off guard by Hamas’s ability to breach its defenses in Gaza, the group appears to have hidden in plain sight its extensive preparations for the deadly attack.
“There were clearly warnings and indications that should have been taken into account,” 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 think tank. Washington experts. .
The Associated Press (AP) agency analyzed and verified important details of dozens of videos that Hamas spread last year, mainly through the social network Telegram.
Using satellite images, the AP compared the location of the simulated city to an area of desert outside Al-Mawasi, a Palestinian city on the southern coast of the Gaza Strip.
A large sign in Hebrew and Arabic on the door reads “Horesh Yaron,” the name of a controversial Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank.
Bowman emphasized that there is evidence that Hamas intentionally led Israeli authorities to believe that it was preparing to carry out attacks in the West Bank, not Gaza.
Also potentially significant was that the exercise has been held annually since 2020, in December, but has been brought forward almost four months this year, to coincide with the anniversary of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.
In a video posted on Telegram from last year’s “Strong Pillar” exercise on December 28, Hamas fighters are shown attacking what appears to be a model of an Israeli military base, complete with a life-size model of a tank. with an Israeli flag waving. in his tower.
The gunmen break through the concrete buildings and capture other men playing the role of Israeli soldiers as hostages.
Michael Milshtein, a retired Israeli colonel who previously headed the military intelligence department that oversees the Palestinian territories, said he was aware of the Hamas videos but was still caught off guard by the ambition and scale of Saturday’s attack.
“We knew about the drones, we knew about the traps, we knew about the cyber attacks and the maritime forces… The surprise was the coordination between all these systems,” Milshtein said.
The seeds of Israel’s failure to anticipate and prevent Saturday’s attack go back at least a decade.
Faced with recurring attacks by Hamas militants digging tunnels under Israel’s border fence, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proposed a very concrete solution: build a bigger wall.
But shortly after dawn on Saturday, Hamas fighters breached Netanyahu’s wall in a matter of minutes and did so at a relatively low cost, using explosive charges to blow holes in the barrier and then sending bulldozers to widen the holes, while the fighters passed by on motorcycles and in trucks.
Military experts told the AP that the attack showed a level of sophistication that Hamas had not previously shown, likely suggesting it had outside help.
Ali Barakeh, a senior Hamas official based in Beirut, acknowledged that over the years the group has received supplies, financial support, military expertise and training 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 internally, and that the exact date and time of the attack was known only to a handful of Hamas commanders.
Source: TSF
