The “vaunted” Israeli Defense Forces have an entirely undeserved reputation subject to gushing hagiographic treatment in the corporate/access media and even their intelligence services have reputations untethered to reality.
The historians will have a cottage industry in the future examining the intelligence failures of Israel in 2023 but this is simply a part of the ongoing chaos avalanche of military disasters that has haunted and dogged the Israeli armed forces since 1982 in Lebanon and continued to get worse over time. One day far in the future when we are all dust, some minor historian will make the stuttering conclusion that the very notion of a state doing something effectively and in a timely fashion in warfare is categorically impossible.
“One of the reasons the tatzpitaniyot were dismissed was that they “did not fit into the narrative that Hamas had evolved from being a revolutionary movement and had moderated and become more institutionalized and pragmatic,” said Michael Milshtein, head of the Department for Palestinians Affairs in Israel’s Defense Intelligence agency.
Milshtein faulted Netanyahu not only for misjudging Hamas, but also for allowing Qatar to channel hundreds of millions of dollars over the years to Gaza, much of it likely spent on the faction’s military wing. (Netanyahu himself told a Likud party conference in 2019 that “anyone who wants to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas.”)”
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“In the last 15 years, Israel did everything to downgrade the Palestinian Authority and to boost Hamas,” he told POLITICO. “Gaza was on the brink of collapse because they had no resources, they had no money, and the PA refused to give Hamas any money. Bibi saved them. Bibi made a deal with Qatar and they started to move millions and millions of dollars to Gaza.”
“But we all thought we could flirt with Hamas, [that] they would behave according to our expectations of them. And it all blew up in our faces.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-border-troops-women-hamas-warnings-war-october-7-benjamin-netanyahu/
H/T to AM
