www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-invasion-delay.html
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www.nytimes.com/2023/10/29/world/middleeast/israel-intelligence-hamas-attack.html
Excerpts
The most powerful military force in the Middle East had not only completely underestimated the magnitude of the attack, it had totally failed in its intelligence-gathering efforts, mostly due to hubris and the mistaken assumption that Hamas was a threat contained.
Despite Israel’s sophisticated technological prowess in espionage, Hamas gunmen had undergone extensive training for the assault, virtually undetected for at least a year. The fighters, who were divided into different units with specific goals, had meticulous information on Israel’s military bases and the layout of kibbutzim.
The country’s once invincible sense of security was shattered.
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Israeli security officials spent months trying to warn Mr. Netanyahu that the political turmoil caused by his domestic policies was weakening the country’s security and emboldening Israel’s enemies. The prime minister continued to push those policies. On one day in July he even refused to meet a senior general who came to deliver a threat warning based on classified intelligence, according to Israeli officials.
Overall, arrogance among Israeli political and security officials convinced them that the country’s military and technological superiority to Hamas would keep the terrorist group in check.
“They were able to trick our collection, our analysis, our conclusions and our strategic understanding,” Eyal Hulata, Israel’s national security adviser from 2021 until early this year, said during a discussion last week in Washington sponsored by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank.
“I don’t think there was anyone who was involved with affairs with Gaza that shouldn’t ask themselves how and where they were also part of this massive failure,” he added.
Many senior officials have accepted responsibility, but Mr. Netanyahu has not. At 1 a.m. Sunday in Israel, after his office was asked for comment on this article, he posted a message on X, formerly Twitter, that repeated remarks he made to The New York Times and blamed the military and intelligence services for failing to provide him with any warning on Hamas.
“Under no circumstances and at no stage was Prime Minister Netanyahu warned of war intentions on the part of Hamas,” the post read in Hebrew. “On the contrary, the assessment of the entire security echelon, including the head of military intelligence and the head of Shin Bet, was that Hamas was deterred and was seeking an arrangement.”
In the resulting furor, Benny Gantz, a member of his war cabinet, publicly rebuked Mr. Netanyahu, saying that “leadership means displaying responsibility,” and urged the prime minister to retract the post. It was later deleted, and Mr. Netanyahu apologized in a new one.
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apple.news/Ao53JMcxnS4up8OTTTZ5JmA
A few hours earlier, facing mounting criticism for the Hamas attacks that killed 1,400 Israelis, he publicly blamed the security failures on Israel’s defense and intelligence services. He hadn’t been warned of Hamas’s intention to start a war, he wrote in a tweet on X, saying that defense and intelligence officials had “assessed that Hamas was deterred.”
Soon after, he deleted the tweet and apologized.
Over 35 years in politics, he has cultivated an image as a security hawk tough on Palestinian violence and ready to face down the threat of a nuclear Iran. That image shattered Oct. 7
Unlike many wartime leaders, Netanyahu is struggling to rally the public to his side. Israelis have blamed him in eulogies for the dead; his ministers have been shouted out of hospitals and pictures have been published of red paint smeared on the headquarters of his Likud party to look like blood.
One senior Likud official said Netanyahu’s fate depends on how the war with Hamas plays out, but he is unlikely to survive as leader of the party, and thus as prime minister.
It is “the end of the game for him,” the official said. “You would find very few people who would say differently.”
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Opinion | President Vladimir Putin last visited Ukraine in 2013. Going into his full-scale war on Russia’s neighbor, Russian propagandists’ understanding of the country appeared stuck in that same year.
— Read on www.themoscowtimes.com/ -
www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/23/ukraine-shoots-down-russian-shahed-drones-odesa-kherson/
Moscow is deploying additional troops to the eastern Avdiivka front after a failed offensive in the region last week that resulted in heavy losses, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
The reinforcements are set to arrive after Russian soldiers have become bogged down there in recent weeks, the ISW reported, citing Russian military bloggers.
Moscow’s troops are facing “ongoing challenges with frontal mechanized assaults”, the think-tank said.
Ukrainian sources also report that Russia is deploying additional units to Avdiivka to bolster its offensive there, according to the ISW.
Senior Ukrainian military officials warned last week that Kyiv was facing a new Russian onslaught in the area, which sits within the partially-occupied Donetsk region.
Avdiivka lies just nine miles from the Moscow-held city of Donetsk, the capital of the region of the same name that Russia said it was annexing last September.
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www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/26/eus-shell-programme-only-producing-30-per-cent/
The European Union has delivered only a third of the one million artillery shells it had promised to Ukraine, as the bloc’s plan to ramp up munition production falls behind schedule.
Brussels has supplied Kyiv with about 300,000 rounds of 155mm ammunition since signing off on the scheme to bolster its dwindling stocks earlier this year, Bloomberg reported.
Under the plan, member states were first encouraged to dip into their existing stocks before increasing industrial capacity and clubbing together to sign joint orders large enough to convince manufacturers to ramp up production.
Shipments were scheduled to be made over a 12-month period, with the final shell set to be handed to the Ukrainians in March next year.
But more than six months on, the initiative has delivered about 30 per cent of its overall target to date.
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www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/opinion/international-world/gaza-idf-israel-veterans.html
I think it could be worth it,” I wrote, “as long as we decisively eliminate the threat.”
That’s the lie they told us, and the lie that’s being repeated today: that we can decisively eliminate the threat of Hamas through a military operation. In the years since, Hamas has only grown stronger, despite our sacrifices and despite the death and destruction we had wrought on Gaza.
Law, Power, and Justice 