In a video essay published on Nov. 17, the Washington Post examines the failure of Israel’s defenses that allowed the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas to proceed, giving multiple examples of Hamas preparation that Israel should have known about, and the vulnerabilities of heavily tech-dependent defenses.
How could a newspaper learn about Hamas’s secret preparation? One example: “Videos of militants training to attack mockups of Israeli compounds had been posted to social media months earlier, and were visible to all,” says the report.
At dawn on Oct. 7, Hamas fighters launched attacks on the border fence at numerous locations. A barrage of rockets—more than 3,000, according to Israel—was launched to distract Israeli forces and deplete its supply of missile defense rockets.
Hamas later posted videos to social media showing that militants had been training to use gliders to scale the barrier and to breach mockups of the border wall. Could this not have been seen? “They had also been expanding their training camps, activity that was visible in widely available online maps,” the report indicates.
To blind Israeli defenses, militants cut free one surveillance balloon and struck surveillance and remote-controlled weapons towers along the border, by using drones to drop explosives from above, and by RPGs and sniper fire.
Recovered Hamas documents showed extensive knowledge of weak points of Israeli tanks.
According to video reviewed by the Washington Post, fighters streaming through the more than one dozen breaches in the border wall encounter little initial resistance.
The report closes with a statement from the IDF, that they would not respond to questions from the Post until “after the war.”
