[IMPORTANT] Hamas launches foot assault against settlements.

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Israel is a European nation located in the Middle East. Its not culturally part of the Middle East. It is not part of the Arab world. Israel was founded by European Jews who brought the European ideas of the Enlightenment and democracy with them. Israel was the only functioning democracy south of Turkey...and hopefully will continue to be a democracy after Netanyahu. The European Jews still dominate the country.

He is also Jewish so has more right to talk about Jews than either you or me.

If it was a conspiracy I think it was about deflecting the Israeli public from the judicial reform controversies not ethnic cleansing.

This is disturbing.
Soldiers warned about an attack but were not listened to.
Maybe because they were female?
https://www.politico.eu/article/israel- ... netanyahu/

Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.

The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.

The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.

Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot — all of which happened on Oct. 7.
The plan also included details about the location and size of Israeli military forces, communication hubs and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks inside the Israeli security establishment.

The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities, according to documents and officials. It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document, as well.

Last year, shortly after the document was obtained, officials in the Israeli military’s military’s Gaza division, which is responsible for defending the border with Gaza, said that Hamas’s intentions were unclear.

“It is not yet possible to determine whether the plan has been fully accepted and how it will be manifested,” read a military assessment reviewed by The Times.

Then, in July, just three months before the attacks, a veteran analyst with Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, warned that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint.

But a colonel in the Gaza division brushed off her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by The Times.

“I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, fully matched “the content of Jericho Wall.”

“It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”

Officials privately concede that, had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them.

The Jericho Wall document lays bare a yearslong cascade of missteps that culminated in what officials now regard as the worst Israeli intelligence failure since the surprise attack that led to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.

Underpinning all these failures was a single, fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so ingrained in the Israeli government, officials said, that they disregarded growing evidence to the contrary

The Israeli military and the Israeli Security Agency, which is in charge of counterterrorism in Gaza, declined to comment.

Officials would not say how they obtained the Jericho Wall document, but it was among several versions of attack plans collected over the years. A 2016 Defense Ministry memorandum viewed by The Times, for example, says, “Hamas intends to move the next confrontation into Israeli territory.”

Such an attack would most likely involve hostage-taking and “occupying an Israeli community (and perhaps even a number of communities),” the memo reads.

The Jericho Wall document, named for the ancient fortifications in the modern-day West Bank, was even more explicit. It detailed rocket attacks to distract Israeli soldiers and send them hurrying into bunkers, and drones to disable the elaborate security measures along the border fence separating Israel and Gaza.

Hamas fighters would then break through 60 points in the wall, storming across the border into Israel. The document begins with a quote from the Quran: “Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will certainly prevail.”

The same phrase has been widely used by Hamas in its videos and statements since Oct. 7.

One of the most important objectives outlined in the document was to overrun the Israeli military base in Re’im, which is home to the Gaza division responsible for protecting the region. Other bases that fell under the division’s command were also listed.

Hamas carried out that objective on Oct. 7, rampaging through Re’im and overrunning parts of the base.

The audacity of the blueprint, officials said, made it easy to underestimate. All militaries write plans that they never use, and Israeli officials assessed that, even if Hamas invaded, it might muster a force of a few dozen, not the hundreds who ultimately attacked.

Israel had also misread Hamas’s actions. The group had negotiated for permits to allow Palestinians to work in Israel, which Israeli officials took as a sign that Hamas was not looking for a war.

But Hamas had been drafting attack plans for many years, and Israeli officials had gotten hold of previous iterations of them. What could have been an intelligence coup turned into one of the worst miscalculations in Israel’s 75-year history.

In September 2016, the defense minister’s office compiled a top-secret memorandum based on a much earlier iteration of a Hamas attack plan. The memorandum, which was signed by the defense minister at the time, Avigdor Lieberman, said that an invasion and hostage-taking would “lead to severe damage to the consciousness and morale of the citizens of Israel.”

The memo, which was viewed by The Times, said that Hamas had purchased sophisticated weapons, GPS jammers and drones. It also said that Hamas had increased its fighting force to 27,000 people — having added 6,000 to its ranks in a two-year period. Hamas had hoped to reach 40,000 by 2020, the memo determined.

Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan.

Hamas had “decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope,” analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division.

But the Gaza division referred to the plan as a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go but had not arrived there yet.

On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing.

The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times.

The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out.

The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off.

“In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.

The back-and-forth continued, with some colleagues supporting the analyst’s original conclusion. Soon, she invoked the lessons of the 1973 war, in which Syrian and Egyptian armies overran Israeli defenses . Israeli forces regrouped and repelled the invasion, but the intelligence failure has long served as a lesson for Israeli security officials.

While ominous, none of the emails predicted that war was imminent. Nor did the analyst challenge the conventional wisdom among Israeli intelligence officials that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was not interested in war with Israel. But she correctly assessed that Hamas’s capabilities had drastically improved. The gap between the possible and the aspirational had narrowed significantly.

This is disturbing.
Soldiers warned about an attack but were not listened to.
Maybe because they were female?
https://www.politico.eu/article/israel- ... netanyahu/

While it might be a factor gaining insight it can also be a factor in missing insight due to emotion caused bias. .

This important story was buried due to the resumption of the war so thanks for posting it.

The youtubers got into a discussion of was it a deliberate “let it happen” conspiracy or pure incompetence. It could be both. It is possible that Bibi “let it happen” but because of incompetence and arrogance never anticipated “those people”
would be so effective. If it was a conspiracy I think it was about deflecting the Israeli public from the judicial reform controversies not ethnic cleansing.

I've had an argument with people who seem to think the Netanyahu let it happen deliberately as a pretext to allow them to go and flatten Gaza and ethnically cleanse Palestinians with plausible deniability. As though that makes any sense. It seems much more plausible to me that they just underestimated them. They saw the plan but it did not think that Hamas had the capability of carrying it out.

another front in this long-running conflict is the West Bank, a kidney-bean shaped piece of land on the west bank of the Jordan River and to the east of Israel that is home to nearly 3 million Palestinians and would make up the heart of any future Palestinian state. Alongside those Palestinian cities and villages, however, are Jewish settlements.

Since the Six-Day War of June 1967, the state of Israel has planned and funded Jewish outposts throughout the West Bank; other settlers have moved in without the state’s explicit backing. The settlers believe they have a right to be there, even though most of the international community views the settlements as illegal.

These populations are largely separated by Israel’s complex security infrastructure, including military checkpoints, armed patrols, a separation barrier, and color-coded identification cards and license plates. This system dictates all aspects of daily life for West Bank residents.

Some settlers have for years harassed and attacked the Palestinians living there, often with impunity and occasionally with the support of Israeli soldiers. In the weeks since October 7, however, the rate of violence has significantly increased. It is already the deadliest year since the Second Intifada, and is getting bad enough for the eyes of the world to occasionally leave Gaza and look to the West Bank.

“I continue to be alarmed about extremist settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank,” President Joe Biden said in late October, comparing the attacks to “pouring gasoline on fire.”

Meanwhile, popular support for Hamas has surged among Palestinians in the West Bank as faith in the Palestinian Authority plummets.

This escalation of settler violence could, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explains, “lead to a deeper entrenchment of Israel’s occupation and, quite possibly, a violent Palestinian response that brings outright war to the West Bank.” That would in turn “weaken the already-slim prospects of a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the foreseeable future,” he writes.

The writer Nathan Thrall is well acquainted with the dual lives of Palestinian and Israeli residents of the West Bank. Thrall spent a decade at the International Crisis Group covering Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. In his new book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, he tells the story of a Palestinian father from the West Bank searching for his son who’s gone missing after a school bus accident.

Thrall spoke with Today, Explained host Noel King about the history of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and why Israel faces strong criticism for its support of settlers, not just from Palestinians but also from some Israelis and the international community.

Help situate us: What does the West Bank look like? And who lives there?
The West Bank is quite hilly. It has a mountain ridge running through the middle of it, north to south. And it is covered with Israeli settlements. These settlements in the popular imagination are a set of caravans haphazardly erected on a hilltop. [Some newer outposts, particularly illegal ones, do consist largely of portable buildings.] But in fact, [many] are towns and cities that look identical to the communities of similar size within Israel proper. And they are connected seamlessly to Israel proper. The residents of these communities include Israel’s elite. They include Supreme Court justices. They include ministers in the Israeli government and many, many other government employees and leaders in industry.

These people are able to live in these communities precisely because they have been segregated from the Palestinian population that surrounds them. They have been given roads that cut through these Palestinian communities without having exits or entrances for the Palestinian communities that these highways pass through. This whole architecture, this infrastructure, gives the Jewish residents of these settlements the illusion that they are living in a Jewish-only zone where they don’t really have to confront or think about the Palestinians who are just beside them, and they can go very easily to their workplaces in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem and believe that they are living in a suburb just like any other.

How long have the Israeli settlements been in the West Bank?
The settlement project began, really, as soon as Israel conquered the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Those settlements were created by the Israeli center left that had been in power since the establishment of the state in 1948 and remained in power until 1977. So for the first decade of the settlement project, it was driven by center-left governments. And it’s important to stress it was driven by the government. This is not a story of a bunch of radicals twisting the arm of the state against its will, which is how it’s often depicted. This is a state-driven project and it is in fact the greatest project, the largest and most expensive project, that the state of Israel has undertaken.

As the settlers have moved in, how have they justified this?
There are a number of different motivations for moving to the settlements. Broadly speaking, there are three groups of settlers.

There are ideologically driven settlers who believe that the West Bank is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and that they have every right to build homes and establish Israeli sovereignty in these areas, no less so than Israel had a right to establish settlements in 78 percent of historic Palestine, the borders of Israel prior to 1967. And this is an argument that they make to their detractors in Israeli politics.

The second type of settler is just an ordinary middle-class or upper middle-class person who is moving there because there are financial incentives to do so.

What happens over time is they often start to shift ideologically after moving there because every human being naturally wants to feel justified in what they’re doing.

The third type are ultra-Orthodox Jews, and they historically had avoided living in settlements. But that changed. And they live in a few settlements, but they’re very large and dense. And those settlements are, for the most part, closer to the edge of the West Bank, closer to the boundary with pre-1967 Israel.

How do Palestinian and Jewish residents of the West Bank interact with each other? Do they interact with each other, typically?
The Palestinian and Jewish communities in the West Bank are entirely segregated and the settlements have gates at their entrances and security guards at those gates. Palestinians are not allowed to enter them unless they are coming as pre-approved workers, as cleaners or gardeners or construction workers.

So this is a highly unequal situation. If you are Palestinian in the West Bank, you are subject to restrictions. You are subject to inequities. But then on top of that, Nathan, we hear about settler violence. What does this refer to? What does that mean?
So settler violence is a broad term that includes everything from settlers going and burning down olive trees of Palestinians who live nearby. It includes raids on Palestinian communities in the middle of the night. It includes activities that Israeli officials even have referred to as pogroms, such as the burning of all kinds of property in the town of Huwara earlier this year or in the town of Turmus Ayya last June.

The Palestinians who are attacked are entirely defenseless in this situation. [Israel points to terror attacks by Hamas, including a November 30 shooting at a bus stop in west Jerusalem, as a reason to maintain security measures.] They know that if they lay a single finger on an armed settler who enters their home, they can be arrested and put in jail and locked up in what is known as administrative detention, which is detention without trial or charge. Israel can do that for six months to somebody, and then extend it indefinitely.

And so when a Palestinian encounters a settler militia, they know that putting their finger on that settler is not putting their hand on an individual. It’s putting their hand on the entire state of Israel, this enormous machine that controls their every movement and that can arrest them and their family members at any moment.

How is it that the settlers can commit such violence without legal repercussions? Where does the law fit in here?
The law doesn’t fit in here because there is total impunity for the settlers When there are cases filed against settlers for attacks on Palestinians, fewer than 10 percent result in an indictment and only 3 percent result in a conviction. That’s data from the last 18 years. And now after October 7, when most of the regular army is off in Gaza or on the border with Lebanon, you have those same settlers who were attacking the Palestinian communities several months ago, now in uniform [called up from the reserves], with full authority to do those same attacks as the army.

While everybody is arguing if the massive civilian casualties is Israeli ethnic cleansing, Israel not giving a s**t about collateral damage, or Israel making the correct lesser of evils choice it is in the West Bank that there is no doubt that state sponsored terrorism for the purpose of ethnic cleansing is occurring.

With the world focused on Gaza, Israeli settlers and soldiers are increasing attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.

So, how is getting the ICC going to help beyond prosecuting the current criminals? When being arrested for the 'cause' may elevate them to a political prisoner status. And the free ones will fall in line to fill their shoes again and again, on both sides.

I read the article, it fits all the criteria for ethnic cleansing. Where I have difficulty getting on board with any sort of 'getting back to life' prior to this or any other conflict between to two peoples/countries/partition agreements, etc... is that it's not going to last. It would just be show for the watching world. As soon as there is something else to divert our focus, both parties are going to be right back at it.

When is there ever going to be an intervention that completely separates the two so that it's impossible for either side to go about the business of daily terrorism? Or ethnic cleansing? I looked up the term before I commented, to make sure I had a better understanding of all it entailed. I get really angry, so my default is set to, "why is it necessarily 'ethnic cleansing,' whom else are they supposed to kill?" And, if they encourage them to evacuate, so as not to kill them, how have they been cleansed? They're still alive, just alive somewhere else. But, I read where to drive them out is part of 'ethnic cleansing' so I understand that better. But, from a humanitarian stand point, isn't it better the be alive? This intervention will not guarantee life or lasting peace for either side. It's just replacing the pieces on the existing chess board. More, from both sides, are going to die all over again.

So, how is getting the ICC going to help beyond prosecuting the current criminals? When being arrested for the 'cause' may elevate them to a political prisoner status. And the free ones will fall in line to fill their shoes again and again, on both sides.

I say grade school tactics still have a place in the world. Separate them like two incorrigible kids... Probably naive, certainly unpopular and considered low brow, backward thinking. But, wth, I thought being alive was the ultimate goal of humanitarian efforts, not land rights.

Because, it's not being held accountable that has allowed this thing to continue in the first place. Plus, the UN needs to get more actively involved. We need a UN peacekeeping force there in order to replace the Israeli forces in the interim. First in order to stop terrorism and secondly to stop the settler violence, which the Israeli forces are actually currently supporting.