U.S. sends carrier group to eastern Mediterranean
Israel formally declared war on Hamas on Sunday after a surprise attack that killed over 700. The Israelis are massing troops for a ground invasion.
The U.S. State Department said in a statement this morning that at least nine Americans died in the Hamas attack.
“This is Israel’s 9/11. Not since 1973 has there been such a catastrophic intelligence failure in Israel,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, who worked for 26 years for the CIA, where he specialized in counterterrorism, the Middle East and South Asia.
Israel’s intelligence services have long been seen as some of the most capable in the world, with an array of human intelligence, eavesdropping and other technical means blanketing the West Bank and Gaza.
“It is almost inconceivable how they missed this,” said Polymeropoulos.
As with early reporting from any war zone, statistics and accounts will be revised. Be careful where you get your news and note reporters’ sources.
Patrick Kingsley, the New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief, and two others report (relying in part on “two senior Israeli officials”) that a large portion of those 700 reported casualties in Israel came in attack by Hamas militants on an outdoor music festival. They bulldozed their way through border barricades and sped toward the festival still underway at dawn. It’s a chlling account:
The militants gunned down more than 100 ravers and abducted others, according to two senior Israeli officials, as they sprinted through the open fields. Video verified by The New York Times showed militants driving off on a motorcycle with an Israeli woman squeezed between them, screaming as her boyfriend was marched off on foot, his arm wrenched behind his back.
Those who survived often did so by hiding in nearby bushes, some of them for hours.
Bullets whistled overhead and shots resounded all around, said Andrey Peairie, 35, one of the survivors. He described crawling up to the top of a nearby hill to get a better sense of what was happening.
“Smoke and flames and gunfire,” said Mr. Peairie, a tech worker. “I have a military background, but I never was in a situation like this.”
Based in Tel Aviv, Ruth Margalit is a former member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff. Her account of the music festival attack is similar:
As partygoers scrambled toward their cars or lay on the ground waiting for the barrage to pass, another kind of fire began. [Hanoch Hai] Cohen watched as four pickup trucks filled with armed militants and gunmen on motorcycles encircled the road leading out of the event venue, which was bottlenecked with cars attempting to flee the area. “They were shooting at people just a metre away,” Cohen told me over the phone on Sunday. “These were executions. We were like ducks in a firing range.”
The music festival was one of the first sites targeted by the unprecedented Hamas ground incursion into Israel. It is also perhaps the deadliest. At least two hundred and sixty had been killed there, according to Israel’s search-and-rescue organization.
Militants also raided nearby communities, going from home to home, killing and taking residents—in some instances, entire families—hostage. On Sunday evening, the Israeli military was still engaged in battle with Gaza militants in several locations, more than a full day after the invasion began. The death toll in Israel climbed to seven hundred, and more than three hundred were seriously or critically wounded. Around four hundred Palestinians had been killed in Israeli air strikes on Gaza.
The attack at the festival appeared to be not only premeditated but also highly coördinated. Videos uploaded by attendees showed the sky above them suddenly dotted with militants on hang gliders. “Nothing there was arbitrary,” Cohen said, adding that the road to the event was ringed. “They showed up in an organized formation.” As the gunmen emptied rounds of live ammunition on the attendees, including hand grenades and mortar fire, Cohen and a friend broke off from the main road into a nearby field; from there, they navigated their jeep through dirt roads until they reached the main highway, which, Cohen said, was itself charred, with an eight-foot rocket strewn on the bank.
Kibbutz Nahal Oz lies adjacent to Gaza. People hid in their family bomb shelters only to realize there was more happening above than rocket fire. This time Amir Tibon also heard gunfire (New York Times again):
“There were terrorists inside the kibbutz, inside our neighborhood and — at some point — outside our window,” Mr. Tibon recalled. “We could hear them talk. We could hear them run. We could hear them shooting their guns at our house, at our windows.”
On the village WhatsApp group, neighbors were posting frantic messages. “People were saying, ‘They are in my house, they are trying to break into the safe room!’” recalled Mr. Tibon, a journalist for Haaretz, one of the country’s most prominent news outlets.
Messages from fellow reporters revealed even more terrifying news. They said that Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, had infiltrated scores of Israeli border towns, and that it would take time for the Israeli Army to reach the village.
The U.S. is scrambling to prevent (if it can) the fighting from spreading (Washington Post):
The Biden administration on Sunday scrambled to prevent Hamas’s assault on Israel from escalating into a multi-front, regional conflict, deploying a U.S. aircraft carrier group to the eastern Mediterranean and rushing arms to the Israeli military in a bid to deter the Lebanon-based Hezbollah and other actors from attacking.
The effort came amid close consultations between President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government formally declared war on Hamas on Sunday. U.S. officials expect Israel to unleash a broad-based ground assault against the militant group within the next 24 to 48 hours, following the sophisticated Hamas attack on Saturday that killed more than 700 Israelis. Israeli reprisals have killed more than 400 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
American citizens are probably among the hostages that Hamas is holding inside Gaza, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday. At least several Americans were killed in the attack, a senior administration official confirmed.
Politico Magazine sought out Matt Duss, a former foreign policy aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), for comment on how this assault will affect the left’s view of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Duss is now executive vice president of the Center for International Policy.
“This is something on the scale of the Yom Kippur war in terms of people’s perceptions,” Duss said. Yet the Palestinian issue will not go away. The attack “has destroyed this whole premise that we can just bottle up the Palestinians and it won’t matter.”
Duss tells Politico:
On the progressive left, you have a recognition and a respect for the rights of all people to live in security and dignity. That includes Israelis and Palestinians. I think the statements you see from most U.S. officials, including from the White House, are overwhelmingly focused on one side. It is of course quite true that Israel has the right to defend itself. Its people have a right to live in peace and security. The Palestinians have that right as well. The Center for International Policy put out a statement responding to the events of the last few days, making this point — that what Hamas has done is awful. We condemn it unequivocally. We also note that Palestinians have continued to suffer under an occupation and blockade that is decades old. That is absolutely necessary context. That does not excuse what Hamas has done. There is no excuse for that. But there is an important context of understanding where this violence grows from.
Mr. “I can fix this very quickly and very easily” will kindly STFU and tend to his multiple criminal indictments.