naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
Some former members of the IDF who served on the border have in recent days testified on social media that the fence really was a technological marvel. Not so much as a stray cat could get anywhere near the border without setting off alarms, they recall. And the government and military certainly seem to have believed it was indeed impenetrable and really had changed the reality on the ground; hence partly why, by the start of this month, they had redeployed most of their regular military forces to guard the West Bank and northern border instead.
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In any case, Hamas was able to begin their attack with the element of surprise. This was aided by an initial early-morning barrage of rocket fire, which was a relatively routine experience for the Israeli garrison forces, but which survivors recall sent most of their number hurrying as a standard precaution into fortified bunkers where – critically – they could not physically observe the approach to the border. They would normally have instead relied on the surveillance cameras to monitor the situation. Hamas, however, used small, off-the-shelf drones rigged with mortar rounds and other explosives to attack and disable the communications towers powering the network. These drones were too small and low-flying for radar to detect, so would have had to have been spotted by eye and ear. Without the cellular data link provided by the towers, the cameras did not function, and neither did the sensors and alarm systems.
With the surveillance and communications systems down, Hamas commandos then used their now infamous paragliders to simply fly over the fence. There they faced little armed opposition. The remote-controlled machine gun emplacements, if they could even operate without wireless data, had also been destroyed by drones. Now isolated, 23 high-tech observation posts each manned by a single soldier – all of them young women – were ambushed and rapidly overwhelmed by the first attackers. Those who tried to report the attacks would have found they couldn’t easily communicate. Meanwhile Hamas used bulldozers and wire cutters to quickly level around 30 sections of the fence without resistance. All of this took only a matter of minutes.
Operational command and control of the IDF division guarding the border had been concentrated into a single centralized base close to the fence. As some 1,500 Hamas terrorists surged across the now open border, this base was quickly overrun and the senior officers there killed or captured. They likely received little-to-no warning, given pictures circulating of scores of soldiers having been shot while asleep in their barracks, many still in their underwear. The subsequent sudden absence of central leadership and breakdown in the chain of command, along with the communications problems, meant that the scope and gravity of the overall situation could not easily be pieced together or communicated to either local forces or to national-level military command. Thus in the end it took hours for leaders to fully grasp what was happening and for reinforcements from elsewhere in the country to be successfully contacted, mobilized, coordinated, and moved to the south to confront the threat.
In my tech career I've always treated monitors that have lost signal with the same priority as the monitored value exceeding some critical bounds. The idea being that without signal, the monitored value very well could be in a critical state, and loss of signal itself could be caused by some greater issue.
I have no military experience. Does the military not do something similar? For example, a lost camera feed must be treated as an attack until proven otherwise.
I'd be curious to see a timeline of the entire event. Maybe they were able to time it quickly enough that the people monitoring these things didn't have a proper chance to respond before the para-gliders were on top of them.
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Notes -
Pretty interesting analysis of the complex systems fuckup that the Hamas attack was:
...
In my tech career I've always treated monitors that have lost signal with the same priority as the monitored value exceeding some critical bounds. The idea being that without signal, the monitored value very well could be in a critical state, and loss of signal itself could be caused by some greater issue.
I have no military experience. Does the military not do something similar? For example, a lost camera feed must be treated as an attack until proven otherwise.
I'd be curious to see a timeline of the entire event. Maybe they were able to time it quickly enough that the people monitoring these things didn't have a proper chance to respond before the para-gliders were on top of them.
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