How did Israel and the U.S. miss what Hamas was planning? | Hacker News Reader

How did Israel and the U.S. miss what Hamas was planning?

nbcnews.com

17 pointsrntn17 comments

Another perspective is this was allowed to happen. It's a bit of wild conspiracy at the moment but if you think about long term strategy, events such as this can shape public opinion. The images going around the world of the terror attack on the "Music Festival For Peace" is going to be quite the PR nightmare for Hamas.

Thought so too. Hard to imagine anyone would not see this attack coming this time of year, but I don't think their gov would sacrifice people to make Hamas reputation slightly worse. Also, warring now undermines negotiations with other Arab/Muslim countries, Israel would be stupid to not foresee it.

The worst possible conspiracy is current gov wants to stay in power and show the pink front "this is what happens if you distract us with your protests". If so I hope they burn in hell for additional eternity. But it's also a naive take. Charitably they literally had hands full I guess.

It would not be unprecedented. Nixon prolonged the Vietnam war to help his election odds [1], and Israel itself perpetrated false flag attacks during the Lavon Affair [2], and, arguably, the attack on USS Liberty [3].

I'm not saying this attack by Hamas was allowed to happen (in fact, unless some evidence comes to light, the default assumption should be there was no conspiracy), but "I don't think the gov would sacrifice people" [4] is not a sure thing. It's probable, but not nearly certain.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nixon-prolonged-vi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair

[3] Citing Ennes's book, Lenczowski notes: Liberty's personnel received firm orders not to say anything to anybody about the attack, and the naval inquiry was conducted in such a way as to earn it the name of "coverup". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

[4] I deliberately cut your sentence short. Their goal could be different from just tarring Hamas. Such as swaying local elections, or increasing US military aid, sorry, cooperation [5], with Israel.

[5] If this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it our aid, our cooperation with Israel. - Nancy Pelosi, Israel-American Council Conference, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1LmnQRnw8I

Perhaps there were indications, it would still be hard to know exactly when and how large an attack would be. I think that music festival was invite only, very exclusive, possibly some of elites children there.

music festival had tickets for sale, not by invite: https://www.eventer.co.il/event/novaparalellotranslate/wCqCL . children of elite are hardly a thing in israel. especially in context of drug infused trance festivals at nature. which are dime a dozen over there.

Not an expert in this area but wasn't the festival about 20km or so from the Gaza border and somewhat secluded from any civilization? If so it seems like this could just be the first stop in the invasion and from the images and videos I saw they did not have any security. I think these people don't want security/law present as some of them are doing drugs as it is a rave. They did appear to be in cell phone range as there are videos of them casually filming the paramotor invaders over head. Not linking to any of that. Ravers would be easy soft targets being unarmed and high. Were there armed security and they just weren't in the images? If there were I would have expected them to call it in.

It was just 5km from the border, relocated from another spot just 3 days prior.

Spot the Russian bot

It is plausible that the hardliners would consider this as a throwing one stone, hitting two birds kind of thing.

Bring the peacnik hippies in line while at the same time letting Hamas show what a sick organization they are.

I do not think for a second Shin Bet didn't know something was going to happen before it happened. The question is to what extent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_Bet

I have been reading for months articles in major newspapers that something horrible will happen. Army was not prepared(and seen as elitist left) and all the concernes were dismissed as leftist propaganda. Most thought it will come from Hizbollah and the North not from the "highly" protected south. All alarm bells were sounding for months, the government chose to deal with other topics.

few things

- humint in gaza is hard (unlike in west bank). there are estimations that they didn't use phones/internet for planning so sigint didn't work

- after "traditional" protests on the fence that went on for a while Israel thought that it bought some quiet with giving more work permits in Israel and allowing money transfers to Gaza (this is how it usually works). The outcome of this was transfer of good chunk of combat forces that is usually stationed around Gaza to west bank to some counter-terror activities in past few weeks

- as opening move hamas bombed from drones observation towers with cameras which are positioned along border essentially blinding IDF.they also bombed and burned down some kind of communication center of IDF in the area what created communication and coordination problems

Considering NSO is known to sell their exploits to Saudis and suspected to sell to Qatar, it's interesting whether Hamas was getting external intelligence help using Israel's own cyber weapons.

I imagine retaliation against Hamas may complicate negotiations with nearby Arab/Muslim countries. No doubt Hamas intent.

Israel's previous assassination of Hamas officials has culled those with crappy op-sec, a kind of perverse survival of the fittest.

Egypt secret services knew about it, warned Israel, but they didn't believe them.

This claim is denied by Israel at this point.

It's now being confirmed by US official and reported in BBC

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67082047

As the US representative says and sources in Israel say, the question was at what level. According to Israel officials, Egypt hasn't revealed to Israel anything they didn't already know. They didn't interpret what they where told/knew to mean, anything in this scale, at this time.

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