Nothing serious was supposed to happen. Dawn was beginning to break in Israel. It was the last day of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. The whole country was slowing down. Israelis were preparing to celebrate with their families. Gathered in a rave in the open air, hundreds of young people had promised to dance until the end of the night.
They were almost there. And suddenly, the shock. Absolute horror.
Motorcyclists appeared out of nowhere, armed to the teeth1. They fired and fired and fired again. Panicked, the young people tried to flee, but the terrorists were arriving from all sides, some perched on motorcycles, others crowded into jeeps. A massacre. One among others.
At the same time, a barrage of rockets fell on Israel. The sirens sounded, but for hundreds of Israelis, it was already too late. Terrorists had infiltrated their villages, their kibbutz. They shot dead passers-by and kidnapped others. Locked in shelters, anguished families hoped for hours for reinforcements which did not arrive.
Nothing serious was supposed to happen. In Israel, these horror stories happen, however. Since this has been going on for decades, we should expect it, be prepared, at all times. So, in the aftermath of the Hamas offensive, the world in general, and Israelis in particular, are asking themselves: how is it possible that no one saw it coming?
For Israelis, the psychological shock caused by this all-out attack is immense. Observers are already comparing it to that suffered by the Americans on September 11, 2001.
Except that the Americans could never have imagined that terrorists would transform civilian planes into weapons of mass destruction. For them, the surprise effect was total.
Israelis, on the contrary, are unfortunately used to attacks. For this nation, the existential threat is permanent. Hence the legendary efficiency of the Mossad and the Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence services, which pride themselves on having informants everywhere.
But now we learn that thousands of rockets have passed under the noses of these formidable secret agents to be stored in the Gaza Strip, an ultra-monitored Palestinian enclave, without anyone noticing anything. Saturday morning, they fell on Israeli targets. And the legendary efficiency of the Mossad took its toll.
With the means at hand – bulldozers, boats, motorized paragliders – Hamas fighters pierced the imposing fortified barrier which has isolated the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip for years. This is how they infiltrated Israel. They thwarted the cameras, the ground movement sensors, the patrols, in short, an entire surveillance system that was said to be very elaborate.
“The whole system has failed,” former Israeli Defense Forces international spokesman Jonathan Conricus admitted to CNN. It’s not just one component. The entire defense architecture has clearly failed to provide the necessary defense for Israeli civilians. »
He compared the Hamas offensive not to the 9/11 attacks, but to another American carnage: “It’s a Pearl Harbor-type moment for Israel, where there was a reality until today, and there will be another reality after today. »
If we have to compare this shock offensive to a historical event, the Yom Kippur War is almost natural. The parallels are striking…and distressing. Fifty years later, nothing has changed. The stability of the Middle East is still only a fantasy.
PHOTO JALAA MAREY, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
Mortar shells are piled up in the remains of a military truck from the 1973 Yom Kippur War in the Golan Heights near the Syrian border last September.
Let us judge: on October 6, 1973, as they were preparing to celebrate Yom Kippur, the Israelis woke up in a state of war. Like today, the country was surprised after letting down its guard. Like today, the failure of its intelligence services had been monumental.
At the time, the Israeli response was devastating. The one we must now expect will be just as much.
“We are at war,” declared Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. General Rassen Alian said Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, had “opened the gates of hell” and would “suffer the consequences”.
The response has already begun. In Gaza, multi-storey buildings collapsed under Israeli missile fire. At least 200 Palestinians died. And that’s just the beginning. Benjamin Netanyahu will find it difficult to resist pressure from those calling for a military invasion of the Gaza Strip.
But what will happen then?
How will the reoccupation of this Palestinian enclave advance peace negotiations in the Middle East? Doesn’t an escalation of violence risk setting the entire region ablaze? How many more deaths to come? How many other disaster assessments to draw up?
We don’t know, but unfortunately we can be sure of one thing: this will all end badly, once again.