I have reached the sad conclusion that this failure to defend was done on purpose.

Israel intelligence is historically famous for its ability to infiltrate Arab government…. Right now, they have eyes and ears all over the Gaza strip, sufficient to know where Hamas leaders meet and spend their nights.

The high tech fence surrounding the entire Gaza Strip is bristling with cameras and sensors, including sensitive seismic detectors that will trigger an alarm even if a dog approaches the fence. …

Egypt intelligence officials even told the media that Israel ignored repeated warnings from them that ‘something big’ was coming. …

The IDF had no rapid reaction forces at all in the area, giving Hamas a full 6 hours … plenty of time to take over entire villages… and capture over a hundred hostages and haul them back into Gaza.

Israel allowed this attack to happen by purposefully removing troops and leaving the Southern sector of Israel devoid of strong military units to justify a stronger war footing. …

Terror is also a convenient excuse to justify keeping PM Netanyahu in power. He’s been beset by a decade of investigations for corruption, taking huge sums of campaign money from various entities illegally, and evaded all attempts to impeach him. He even pushed through a recent limitation on the Supreme Court that eliminated the court’s ability to overturn bad law, which was very unpopular in Israel.

Israel is a deeply divided society, like the US. Israel’s own Deep State government pushed mandatory vaccination for Covid on nearly everyone, propagandizes about climate change, digital currency and has heavy handed regulation in an inflationary economy.

Of course, Netanyahu is now safe from prosecution because he’s leading the charge in an “all-out war” against Hamas.

• • •

World Affairs Brief, October 13, 2023 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World. Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).

WAR IN ISRAEL: WHY THE ATTACK BY HAMAS WAS UNOPPOSED

In a coordinated attack by land, sea and air, Hamas terrorists (who govern the entire Gaza enclave in Southern Israel) broke through the high fence surrounding them and burst into southern Israel, overrunning army outposts, capturing settlements and murdering men, women and children during a Jewish holiday. The assault was preceded by firing off thousands of unguided rockets at Israeli cities on the first day, killing more than 500 and injuring over a 1000, and overwhelming Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome ABM system. Armed groups breached the border in several areas and attacked several kibbutzim and settlements killing, pillaging and kidnapping men, women and children and torching their houses. The story about babies being beheaded is in dispute. Many secular youth chose to celebrate the religious holiday at a dance/rave music festival that was attacked and over 280 people killed and many others hauled off captive. Many captured women were assaulted, raped and killed. The invaders took a lot of video footage of their crimes with footage showing soldiers and civilians – some dead – being paraded through Gaza’s streets. Some hostages were hauled off in motorcycles, pickups, and captured golf carts. Attackers came in a convoy of trucks, cars and motorcycles, while others attacked by boat. A few used motorized parachutes to attack military outposts with automatic handheld weapons. Rocket fire has now resumed from Gaza and the Israeli death toll now exceeds 1300 people. This horrific attack, came without any resistance from the Israeli military, and globalist PM Benjamin Netanyahu as justification for his vow to completely destroy Hamas, which is nearly impossible with all their secret hiding places and tunnels in a concrete jungle of 2.3 million people. This week I’ll discuss the reasons why Israel allowed this attack to happen and where I expect it will all lead.

The big question on everyone’s mind (except within the mainstream media) is “How did Israel get caught so unprepared for this attack by Hamas?” This huge attack was at least a year in the planning, and occurred 50 years and a day since the 1973 Yom Kippur war in which Israel was also caught napping, but for real. I have reached the sad conclusion that this failure to defend was done on purpose.

Israel intelligence is historically famous for its ability to infiltrate Arab governments, including in Gaza, Egypt, and elsewhere with their spies and informants. They even managed to place spies within the top leadership of Iran, Syria and Jordan to alert them to any move against Israel. Right now, they have eyes and ears all over the Gaza strip, sufficient to know where Hamas leaders meet and spend their nights.

The high tech fence surrounding the entire Gaza Strip is bristling with cameras and sensors, including sensitive seismic detectors that will trigger an alarm even if a dog approaches the fence. So how could Israel possibly be caught napping and not know the convoys of attackers were coming?

The mainstream media claims Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were lulled into complacency by multiple simulated attacks near the fence by Hamas—but this is an excuse. Egypt intelligence officials even told the media that Israel ignored repeated warnings from them that ‘something big’ was coming:

Cairo official says Israel focused on West Bank [where they sent the Gaza Brigade] instead of Gaza; Egypt’s spy chief said to warn PM of ‘terrible operation,’

Then the IDF came out and claimed they were blinded by a cyber attack on their defense system so they couldn’t detect any intrusion on the fence. This too is bogus as the alerts are decentralized and don’t go only to a central command computer. Even if it were true, if all cameras and alert feeds had gone down it would have immediately triggered a response from a rapid reaction force to quickly set up defensive positions around the fence—but there were no such forces anywhere near Gaza to respond.

I have watched countless mainstream media shows bring up the question of why Israel was caught unprepared, and why there were intelligence failures only to simply leave them as unanswered questions. No network even discussed the lame excuses Israel has given, nor covered the real reason that one Israeli source, Efrat Fenigson in her series of daily updates from outraged Israelis who were left unprotected.

She reported that Israel failed to react because it had already removed 60-80% of the Gaza battalion that defended Southern Israel well beforehand and moved them to the West Bank, which doesn’t have a big terrorist threat since it is occupied territory. Israel had half a dozen small local military and police installations in the communities around Gaza but they only had limited manpower and were immediately put on the defensive and were overrun by the assault.

The IDF was so embarrassed by their lack of response to the Saturday morning raid they didn’t even make a public statement on mass media until six hours after it started, and the media didn’t start broadcasting images of the disaster until later on Saturday evening. Of course, the public was experiencing the rocket attacks firsthand, but the government was derelict in its duty to inform the public of what was going on.

The IDF had no rapid reaction forces at all in the area, giving Hamas a full 6 hours to commit their murders and kidnapping before troops arrived, and then they had to battle it out with terrorists already occupying the settlements and military outposts. Hamas had plenty of time to take over entire villages, massacre women and children and capture over a hundred hostages and haul them back into Gaza.

Even though the small military outposts still had a few tanks in the area, they were not manned and sat silent as Hamas bulldozers broke down the fence in 15 locations allowing Hamas’ 1500 man invasion force to enter Israel without resistance. The tanks were captured or burned.

The excuse for pulling out the Gaza Battalion from Southern Israel to the West Bank was ostensibly to save money, leaving instead what the government said would be increased training for the local civilian defense forces which were minimal.

But in recent years, Israel had begun to disarm their populace as well, by making it difficult to get a gun permit and by taking away the automatic weapons and ammunition that used to be stockpiled in every Kibbutz. As Leo Hohmann wrote,

According to my sources, the Israeli government makes its citizens jump through so many hoops that less than 2 percent of Israeli citizens are licensed to own a pistol. And it’s virtually impossible to own a rifle. If you are among the ranks of retired military, you are allowed to own a rifle but you cannot store it in your house unless you are among the top elite commandos.

In short, the entire area was left almost defenseless without a rapid reaction force to counter this invasion and massacre and without private arms in the hands of citizens. Now, but only “as a war measure” exception, the government is loosening up the gun permits to allow any normal citizen to arm themselves—a bit too late, and the change won’t be permanent.

Also too late is the new policy to evacuate all the small settlements near Gaza and force residents to relocate elsewhere. This forced relocation happened years ago when the Israeli government decided to hand all of Gaza over to the Palestinians and forced all Israelis to leave their homes in Gaza, as well as businesses and farms, “for their own safety.” How safe did that turn out to be?

All the media is repeating the false propaganda about this being Israel’s Pearl Harbor or 9/11 attack—said to help Israel justify any form of retaliation as the US did in its phony “War on Terror” excuse to attack Iraq and Afghanistan, which we now know were not the real perpetrators of the terrible events on 9/11. The pre-planned PATRIOT ACT also ended up taking away many civil rights as an anti-terrorism measure.

In some ways this comparison to 9/11 is accurate, in that Israel allowed this attack to happen by purposefully removing troops and leaving the Southern sector of Israel devoid of strong military units to justify a stronger war footing.

9/11 was a worse conspiracy in the US because the Deep State actually engineered the entire attack, with the secret assistance of Saudi Arabia, including hiring the terrorists and loading the buildings with explosives so they could falsely blame the collapse and death of around 3,000 Americans on terrorists who couldn’t fly the planes that crashed into the towers. As I’ve explained in prior briefs, the planes were equipped with “uninterruptable autopilot” equipment allowing the planes to be taken over remotely.

In Israel, however, the attackers were not hired by Israel, but simply allowed to breach the fences and carry out their attacks without opposition. Many are claiming that Israel created Hamas, but this is only partly true. They did facilitate and fund bringing the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt into Gaza to act as a counter-balance to the secular Fatah faction or Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) under Yasser Arafat. Under the guidance of Muslim cleric Yassim, Hamas built a university, hospitals and welfare systems to gain support and finally won a majority victory in the elections of 2007 and have controlled Gaza ever since.

But 20 years ago, Hamas became radicalized like all Islamic military-style groups and Israel stopped funding them. Remember too that Israel funded the PLO at the same time, and set up a secret Swiss bank account for Yassar Arafat. By the time of his death he was worth over a billion dollars, having skimmed off much of US and International aid money. So, like the US Deep State, Israel plays both sides by building and fighting their enemies.

Terror is also a convenient excuse to justify keeping PM Netanyahu in power. He’s been beset by a decade of investigations for corruption, taking huge sums of campaign money from various entities illegally, and evaded all attempts to impeach him. He even pushed through a recent limitation on the Supreme Court that eliminated the court’s ability to overturn bad law, which was very unpopular in Israel.

Israel is a deeply divided society, like the US. Israel’s own Deep State government pushed mandatory vaccination for Covid on nearly everyone, propagandizes about climate change, digital currency and has heavy handed regulation in an inflationary economy.

Of course, Netanyahu is now safe from prosecution because he’s leading the charge in an “all-out war” against Hamas. It was perfectly timed to compromise his opposition by inviting them into a new “unity” government, so no one will attack his policies. Since Benny Ganz will now be part of the government, he will be tainted with the backlash of events just like Netanyahu, unless he gets fed up and resigns. Unity governments never last long during or after conflict.

US and International funding and “humanitarian aid” to Gaza is huge and much of that money gets into the hands of Hamas, making there leaders very wealthy. Here’s an extensive article on how Hamas leaders siphoned off millions from aid to become wealthy billionaires. Corruption abounds in all totalitarian governments, even those pretending to be democracies like the US and Israel.

Hamas, which means “Islamic Resistance Movement,” has several distinct branches in Gaza including the social service wing, Dawah, and larger military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades (IQB). So Israel will have to be careful to distinguish the members of the military wing from the humanitarian wing of the party, which won’t be easy in combat. They can’t just target everyone who supports or is a member of Hamas.

Even though there has been some US arms in the Middle East that has gotten into the hands of Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran remains the largest source of arms and explosives which are smuggled in through underground tunnels from the Egyptian side of the Gaza border. Qatar now supplies most of the money for arms in Gaza.

The Military Response

Slow as it was to come, Israel now has only two choices in dealing with Hamas: to bomb Gaza, claiming to target only places where Hamas exists, or go in with ground troops fighting house to house to root out all of Hamas (if they don’t escape out their tunnels into Egypt). The Daily Mails has pictures and descriptions of this tunnel network. Right now they are bombing constantly while amassing over a hundred thousand troops for an invasion of the city. It looks like they are going with both options.

With a population of 2.3 million people in Gaza, finding even 5-10,000 Hamas militants is like searching for a needle in a haystack, especially given the extensive underground network of tunnels and secret hiding places they have taken years to construct. If the Israeli Air Force continues the current policy of bombing the city every day, eventually the casualty count of Palestinian civilians will create a wave of international backlash that demands a ceasefire—the same thing that has happened in the past which intervened to save Hamas so that the threat is never fully eradicated.

Invading with ground troops has a better chance of actually getting rid of Hamas but at the price of hundreds of military casualties, which Israel has very little tolerance for. A long war is extremely costly for Israel because more than 300,000 reservists have been activated and that guarantees all kinds of economic hardship when they are pulled out of jobs. And, when the high casualty rates roll in, you will see Israeli public resolve start to melt away fast.

And then there’s the hostage issue. Israel has long created a dangerous precedent of exchanging hundreds of dangerous Islamic terrorists they have captured for even one or two hostage soldiers. Hamas knows that they now have a real trump card with the hundreds of hostages they have recently taken, not only of women and children but soldiers as well, including a Major General.

The presence of hostages spread out over the city will act as an additional deterrent for continued Israeli bombing of buildings—as any deaths of hostages by bombs can then be blamed on Israel. Hamas has already threatened to start killing hostages if Israel invades.

Israelis, for the most part are secular and many don’t believe in resurrection or an afterlife. Most religious or reformed Jews do believe in an afterlife in a generalized way, but the idea of a physical resurrection is even more disputed. For these and other reasons, Jews discourage cremation and go to great lengths to honor and preserve the body. As a result, they have a very low tolerance for standing up to hostage demands. Death is a big deal in Israel, with much weeping and wailing.

In this all-out war against Hamas, the residents of Gaza are going to pay a horrendous price. Israel has essentially put it under siege, cutting off all supplies of food, water, electricity, gas and fuel. The sole independent electric plant in Gaza has now run out of fuel. Gaza will not fare well in this siege without supplies and water but if anyone thinks this will induce the people to rise up against Hamas, that’s not going to happen.

All Palestinian children are taught a steady diet of hatred toward Jews in every level of education. And even if they should decide to rebel, they don’t have private arms to use against Hamas. Only the military wing of Hamas and Fatah are armed. People who want to leave Gaza can only do so by sea, and few nations will accept any more Palestinian refugees.

Hamas claims that the reason for their attacks on Israel is because of Israel’s “unjust 56 year occupation of Gaza” with all its restrictions on domestic life. But, in fact, that excuse doesn’t hold water. Gaza used to be occupied by Israeli soldiers and governed by Israel but was given semi-autonomous status as a walled-off enclave. But that status without armed occupation has only been used to build up an armed city of terrorists.

Would they stop attacking Israel if given full independence? Not at all. Look at Hezbollah, which has full independence inside Lebanon. Have they stopped attacking Israel? Arabs in Palestine will always have their grievances going back to the original 1947 partition of Palestine creating a Jewish state which dispossessed many Arabs of their land, after they abandoned cities during the war when the Jews were attacked by surrounding Arab nations. The Arabs lost that war but keep demanding the “right of return” to lands that have long been turned into cities and productive farms in Israel. There’s no equitable solution to that problem after 60 plus years.

If Gaza or even the West Bank Arabs were integrated into the nation of Israel, the Jews would once again become a political minority as before the partition, and the Arabs would vote away all their rights to the Arab majority. There are Arabs living inside Israel who have political rights equal to Israelis as citizens of Israel and that are generally better off and more economically productive than their Arab neighbors outside Israel. That isn’t to say that Israel is a paragon of liberty. It isn’t but neither are any of the Arab socialist nations.

As I have long said in the WAB, there will never be peace between the Jews and the Palestinians, even if Saudi Arabia makes “peace” with Israel—and that will only be a temporary measure to appease the Western Powers and get more arms and aid into Arabia. The Saudis would ultimately love to have nuclear weapons.

Alex Jones rattled off a long list of countries with nuclear weapons beside the known nuclear powers that included South Africa and Saudi Arabia, but he’s wrong about the latter two. Nuclear weapons require a considerable nuclear industrial base to refresh nuclear triggering devices, so even if a nation obtained nuclear weapons from a known nuclear power, those weapons wouldn’t remain viable indefinitely. The same thing goes for the claims of stolen “nuclear suitcase bombs.” They get out of date as well and need refurbishment.

Speaking of nuclear weapons, a subscriber who lives near the entrance highway to Los Alamos nuclear reservation in New Mexico told me that in recent months traffic going into the base has increased significantly, indicating that the US may be gearing up for a large nuclear war in the future.

Future Escalation

Israel has been trying to provoke a war with Iran for years, by goading them into attacking or retaliating too strongly for several years now—including the bombing of Iranian bases in Syria. Israel knows that if they can provoke a fight with Iran, Iran will also hit US forces who are still illegally occupying Iraq and Syria, and induce the US to help them defeat Iran.

So, far Iran has not taken the bait while it continues to build up its powerful military arsenal of every conceivable class of weapon, except nuclear (so far). It has a thriving drone industry which has become a major player with the Russian side of the war with Ukraine. Iran not only supports Hamas with ammunition but rocket parts and explosives.

Israel has been constantly complaining about Iran backing Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah to the north in Lebanon (who is even more powerful than Hamas). As the UK Independent wrote,

“Israel says the Hamas attack involved about 1,500 commandos entering Israel: Israel has assessed that Hezbollah has a 45,000-strong regular army,” he told The Independent. “Hamas fired about 3,300 missiles and drones so far: Hezbollah has around 150,000 munitions ready to fire.”

So far, there has only been minor cross-border skirmishes to the north on the border with Lebanon and Israel has responded by sending a tank battalion north to guard the border. Both the US and Israel have sent ultimatums to Hezbollah to stay out of the war, and the USS Gerald R. Ford and its carrier task force are now stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean to back up that threat.

The US Air Force has also sent in squadrons of A-10 ground attack aircraft and F-15 and F-16 fighters to nearby bases in Iraq and Jordan. One site (WarNews) claims the 101 Airborne division is coming into Jordan as well. Another US aircraft carrier task force (The Eisenhower) is on the way from Norfolk, Va, which indicates the US seriously expects Iran to enter the war at some point, or is trying hard to deter it.

I do not think that Iran will attack unless Israel attacks it first. Israeli rhetoric against Iran looks like it is trying to build public opinion to justify a strike on Iran’s nuclear industry, which would provoke a wider war. Israel has been practicing for this attack all last year. I think it’s inevitable that there will be a war between Iran and Israel in the not-too-distant future, and with this current war, it could happen any day. On Sunday morning one group of Hezbollah fighters did launch missiles at disputed territory on the border with Israel as the Daily Beast reported,

Guided missiles and artillery shells from Lebanon pounded targets in Israel Sunday morning as war in the Middle East threatened to spin out of control. The militant group Hezbollah—which is also a powerful political party in Lebanon—claimed responsibility for the attacks on a disputed territory in the north of Israel hours after President Biden had warned them not to get involved.

Hezbollah has backed off for the moment. But if escalation begins anew, and Iran is attacked by Israel, the Persians could retaliate with tens of heavy intermediate range missiles at Israel—but only after Hezbollah shoots off multiple volleys of hundreds of missiles to overwhelm and use up the supply of Iron Dome interceptors. That would pave the way for the higher precision Iranian missiles to strike unobstructed. But we must also factor in the large supply of Aegis Anti-ballistic missile interceptors that are on board US destroyers that form part of any carrier task force that can help shoot down missiles raining down on Israel. They can help but will only stop a few.

So, if this does escalate into a war with Iran, one major thing will happen: The US has already delivered its first shipment of ammunition and other weapons to Israel in anticipation of a prolonged war with Hamas. The US also keeps large stockpiles of munitions in Israeli warehouses, which it simply transfers to Israel when needed.

But in a war with Iran the US would probably not have enough weapons to keep supplying both Ukraine and its own forces fighting Iran. It could get even worse if China took advantage of the situation and decided to attack Taiwan. The US would then be involved in supporting a conflict on three fronts.

This scenario would play well into the hands of V. Putin who has long waged a propaganda war aimed at Republicans and conservatives in the West to induce them to shut down the weapons pipeline to Ukraine. Iran, as a puppet of Russia, could well cause this to happen by entering the Israeli conflict. Business Insider had an article explaining why Putin wants US aid to Ukraine cut off.

Vladimir Putin has long bet that Western support for Ukraine will begin to weaken. The US Congress is in turmoil over Republican Party opposition to Ukraine aid. But public support in the West continues to be strong. As the right wing of the Republican Party tipped Congress into chaos over its opposition to committing more money to Ukraine, the Kremlin took a victory lap.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said the turmoil was a sign of things to come — that Western support for Ukraine would begin to collapse.

Analysts have long deduced that this is a crucial part of President Vladimir Putin’s plan: to stay in the fight so long that the West gets tired of helping Ukraine.

The US congressional dispute centers on a new multibillion-dollar aid package to Ukraine, the latest in a series of massive cash and weapons packages that have proven vital to Ukraine in its battle against Russia’s invasion. The isolationist far-right faction of the House GOP has opposed the package, even forcing out former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy over the issue.

It’s not really an isolationist faction as much as an anti-neocon and anti-globalist faction of conservatives that got fed up with neocons using the phony war on terror to justify all the blood and money squandered in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, to little or no effect. Terror is still with us because the US Deep State created al Qaeda and ISIS and funded them secretly off budget.

But Ron Paul conservatives mistakenly tend to view anyone the globalists are attacking as innocent. Naively, the elder Paul doesn’t seem to think either China and Russia are real enemies. They are.

Putin has aimed a specific set of propaganda lies toward US conservatives, pretending to be a supporter of Christianity, and against censorship, the Western woke agenda promoting homosexuality and transgenderism. That really gets conservatives excited as they fail to detect the deception. Conservatives have been fooled into thinking Russia is the good guy, trying to help us dismantle the globalist NWO.

V. Putin’s Russia is an aggressive censor of dissident thought and writing, just as it was during Soviet days. A Russian journalist Marina Ovsiannikova who protested Ukraine war on Russian TV had to flee to France, after she was sentenced to prison for her views. Putin has ordered many other dissidents poisoned as well while in foreign countries. Now, that’s deadly censorship. In 2022, Russia passed a law under which anyone who spreads “false” information on the war in Ukraine can face up to 15 years in prison.

Putin even made a recent statement condemning WEF leader Klaus Schwab, saying “His days are numbered.” But conservative supporters of Putin fail to understand this is part of the grand deception following the phony fall of the Soviet Union. Putin is doing this only to pave the way for their attempt to create a Russia/China version of a global government which will be far more tyrannical.

In conclusion, even if this turns into a wider war with Iran, I don’t believe it will turn into a larger nuclear World War III. China’s entrance is a key to the next World War, and she is not ready yet to take on the West.