Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwboatyface | Hacker News Reader

All reports are that Netanyahu and the Israeli intelligence services knew this attack was coming. They've been promoting Hamas over more moderate elements in Gaza. The goal was to provoke an attack which would "justify" a counter-attack to completely level Gaza and kill or force out all the remaining civilians.

View on HN

While there are elements of truth to this, the reality is more nuanced. They have been promoting Hamas over moderate elements, and have looked the other way as Qatar has provided money in briefcases to Hamas. Israel ignored warnings from their own intel as well as civilians who noticed that Hamas were increasing training exercises on the border from listening to radio communications. The explicit goal of promoting Hamas was not to promote an attack, but to divide and rule the Palestinians: by showing Hamas as an example of "this is what would happen if we left the West Bank" and by exacerbating the rivalry, they used this to exert control over the Palestinian Authority.

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-netanyahu-bolste...

That article you cite, uses this haaretz opinion article (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-20/ty-article-op...) as evidence for Netanyahu bolstering Hamas. The main point presented is here:

"Releasing Palestinian prisoners, allowing cash transfers, as the Qatari envoy comes and goes to Gaza as he pleases, agreeing to the import of a broad array of goods, construction materials in particular, with the knowledge that much of the material will be designated for terrorism and not for building civilian infrastructure, increasing the number of work permits in Israel for Palestinian workers from Gaza, and more. All these developments created symbiosis between the flowering of fundamentalist terrorism and preservation of Netanyahu’s rule."

The idea that these points prove that Netanyahu purposefully bolstered Hamas is tenuous at best.

That is not what the reports say. They certainly indicate some intelligence failures, unclear whether in the intelligence services themselves or in the way the reports were handled. But there's a huge difference between "we knew this attack was going to happen and let it happen" vs. "we made a mistake here".

And also worth noting, there's internal Israeli politics involved in all these reports - Netanyahu wants to show that the failure was on the military/intelligence side and not on his side.

It is completely baseless to claim that Israel knew about the attack and let it happen - no serious person is suggesting that.

Claiming that "All reports" are saying this does not make it less of a conspiracy theory.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com