It is not blaming the victim to ask this question.
"We have no idea how this could have happened."
That is the reaction Israeli officials have been giving today when I ask them how, with all its vast resources, Israeli intelligence did not see this attack coming.
Dozens of armed Palestinian gunmen were able to cross the heavily fortified border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, while thousands of rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel.
With the combined efforts of Shin Bet, Israeli domestic intelligence, Mossad, its external spy agency and all the assets of the Israel Defense Forces, it is frankly astounding that nobody saw this coming.
...
Israel has arguably the most extensive and well-funded intelligence services in the Middle East.
It has informants and agents inside Palestinian militant groups, as well as in Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere.
It has, in the past, carried out precisely timed assassinations of militant leaders, knowing all their movements intimately.
Sometimes these have been done with drone strikes, after agents have placed a GPS tracker on an individual's car; sometimes in the past it has even used exploding mobile phones.
On the ground, along the tense border fence between Gaza and Israel there are cameras, ground-motion sensors and regular army patrols.
The barbed-wire topped fence is supposed to have been a "smart barrier" to prevent exactly the sort of infiltration that has taken place in this attack.
Yet the militants of Hamas simply bulldozed their way through it, cut holes in the wire or entered Israel from the sea and by paraglider.
...how all this could have occurred, on the 50th anniversary of another surprise attack by Israel's enemies at the time: the Yom Kippur war of October 1973.
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No, it is right that this question be asked. The Israeli opposition leader has said that Prime Minister Netanyahu knows "he cannot manage this war" with the right-wing kooks and nuts he has in his cabinet. I don't know, but I wonder if that does have something to do with it. As this BBC reporter amply documents, this has never happened before and it is "frankly astounding" that it happened in this day.
