If Iran is involved in the attack, experts worry that it might spark a ‘regional conflagration’ of unprecedented proportions.
WASHINGTON—Israel has been through many wars before, but the recent Hamas assault, which displayed an unexpected level of sophistication and coordination, shocked Israelis and the rest of the world.
Using motorcycles, pickup vehicles, and even paragliders and speed boats, Hamas terrorists penetrated Israeli towns near the Gaza Strip and began killing and kidnapping civilians. They also launched thousands of rockets into Israeli cities starting at 6:30 a.m. on the morning of Oct. 7.
Some compared these recent assaults to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States and even to the Holocaust.
“It’s a historical disaster, a national trauma that won’t be erased for decades,” said Yigal Carmon, president and founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute.
“Yesterday, I spoke with my daughters. I told them, ‘Imagine that you are in the middle of the Holocaust, and the Nazis are shooting.’ These are Nazi scenes. It’s terrible,” he told The Epoch Times.
Israeli and U.S. intelligence officials were caught off guard, leading many pundits to question why the Intelligence Community failed to anticipate the attack and avert it, considering that it may have been meticulously planned for months.
“This is an attack that I don’t think anyone saw coming,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Kristen Welker of NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
However, he dodged questions about whether there was an intelligence failure.
“The Israelis will have plenty of time to look into that. All of us will have time to look into that. The focus now has to be on making sure that Israel has what it needs to deal with this attack,” Mr. Blinken said.
However, the information regarding this type of attack was available in advance, according to Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
“And the question was not so much the lack of information being available regarding Hamas mobilization; it’s how that information was interpreted, and why do senior political officials ignore it?” he said during a press briefing by the CFR on Oct. 7.
By Emel Akan
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