Operation Iron Swords - Day 1 - 07 October 2023

Mohammad Deif, Commander-in-Chief of al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, announced the launching of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood following a barrage of rockets fired and an infiltration operation into Gaza Envelope settlements. The leader said the operation comes in response to the Israeli occupation's desecration of al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as multiple assaults against women in its yards.

The early-morning attacks occurred on Simchat Torah, a holiday which falls towards the conclusion of the weeklong Jewish festival known as Sukkot, or the Feast of Tabernacles. Half a century earlier, to the day, on October 6, 1973, Egypt launched the operation with a massive artillery barrage against Israeli positions, starting the war known in Israel as the Yom Kippur War and in the Arab world as the Ramadan War).

Israeli media questioned how such a situation could unfold on the 50th anniversary of the October 1973 War, which itself was remembered as a significant intelligence failure when "Israel" faced an attack from an Arab coalition. "All of Israel is asking itself: Where is the [IOF], where is the police, where is the security?" asked Eli Maron, the former head of the Israeli navy, on live television. "It’s a colossal failure; the hierarchies have simply failed, with vast consequences."

Political analyst Nour Odeh told Al Jazeera there had been no warnings about what was about to unfold. “Those who used to talk about such raids in the past were accused of being fans of science fiction. We have to remember that Israel is a military power and the difference between Israel and Palestine’s military is huge. So what we saw today is certainly unexpected,” she said. “But analysts have been warning for months about what has been happening to the Palestinians in the occupied territories and in Gaza. So everybody with a sense of what was going on knew the calm so far was deceiving, and knew something big was going to happen,” she added.

It was evident that there were missed signs of preparation at various stages, including planning and stockpiling. The most critical oversight occurred in the immediate lead-up to the Hamas retaliation when resistance fighters gathered near the border, despite the presence of regular patrols, cameras, ground motion sensors, and remote-controlled weaponry that had been effective in thwarting past border incursions. This implied the operation required extensive and well-concealed preparations, similar to previous surprise infiltration attacks by Hamas, including tunnel-based incursions.

Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, Marwan Bishara, said the attacks by Hamas – and their surprise effectiveness – will have a transformative effect on the Middle East and stakeholders across the world. “You could say that we’ve just lived through 10 hours that shocked Israel and the Middle East. These are a dramatic 10 hours that are a game changer in this region,” he said. “They will transform and reverse much of the strategic military and political calculus of both Palestinians and Israelis, as well as most of the countries involved in this whether through partnership or normalisation or as enemies of Israel,” added Bishara.

Hamas fighters had taken control of multiple Israeli civilian population centers, where residents were begging for help from their government. Gun battles are taking place in and around the towns of Kfar Aza, Sderot, Sufa, Nahal Oz, Magen, Be’eri, and the Re’im military base, the Times of Israel reported. Medical sources in Gaza said at least 200 Palestinians were killed and more than 1,600 wounded.

Hamas spokesperson Khaled Qadomi told Al Jazeera that the group’s military operation is in response to all the atrocities the Palestinians have faced over the decades. “We want the international community to stop atrocities in Gaza, against Palestinian people, our holy sites like Al-Aqsa. All these things are the reason behind starting this battle,” he said. “This is the day of the greatest battle to end the last occupation on Earth,” Mohammed Deif, the Hamas military commander said, adding that 5,000 rockets were launched. Other estimates of the number of rockets fired on the first day ranged from 2,000 to 7,000.

“Everyone who has a gun should take it out. The time has come,” Deif said, according to reports. Hamas called on “the resistance fighters in the West Bank” as well as “our Arab and Islamic nations” to join the battle, in a statement posted on Telegram.

An adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei says that Iran supported the Palestinians’ attack. Lebanese group Hezbollah issued a statement saying it was closely following the situation in Gaza and was in “direct contact with the leadership of the Palestinian resistance”.

Arab countries called for an end to the escalation between the Israeli and Palestinian sides and for restraint, sending calls to the international community to take action, amid Egyptian-Jordanian contacts to push for calm. This came in statements issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Emirates, Qatar, the Sultanate of Oman, Egypt and Jordan.

The Givati Brigade had been operating with strength and determination, in order to regain control of the surrounding settlements and ensure the safety of the citizens. In the morning, the Givat patrol sent a large force to the city of Sderot for searches. After further assessing the situation, the entire unit was sent to Nahal Oz settlement to rescue the residents and eliminate the terrorist squads. In the evening, about 400 residents that the brigade rescued from Nahal Oz joined the Mishmar HaNegev base. The brigade also operated in the settlements of Kfar Gaza and Kisufim and neutralized the terrorists who threatened the residents of the Otaf.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says his country is in a war it “will win”. Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel “will win this war.” Hamas, he said, had made a “grave mistake this morning and launched a war against the State of Israel”. Israeli health officials said at least 100 Israelis had been killed and 750 wounded in Hamas attacks.

Netanyahu says the army’s first goal is “to cleanse the area of the enemy forces that have infiltrated and restore security and peace to the settlements that were attacked”. “The second goal, at the same time, is to exact a huge price from the enemy, also in the Gaza Strip,” the Israeli prime minister said. Israel will also reinforce frontiers to deter any others from “making the mistake of joining this war”, Netanyahu added, calling on all citizens of Israel to unite.

Israel has said an unknown number of Israeli soldiers and civilians were taken into Gaza. Israeli military spokesman Hagari said Hamas fighters were also holding hostages in the towns of Beeri and Ofakim, located about 24 kilometers from Gaza. Hamas spokesman Abu Obeida, meanwhile, said fighters had taken “dozens” of Israeli soldiers, including officers, captive. He said the captives were being held in “safe places” and militant tunnels.

Biden told Netanyahu that Washington was ready to provide “all appropriate means of support” amid the attacks on Israel and the continuing Israeli bombardment of Gaza. “Israel has a right to defend itself and its people. The United States warns against any other party hostile to Israel seeking advantage in this situation,” Biden said. The Israeli prime minister’s office had previously said Biden had called Netanyahu, saying that a “forceful, prolonged campaign” was necessary. “Over the coming days the Department of Defense will work to ensure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself and protect civilians from indiscriminate violence and terrorism,” Austin said in a statement.

"The Kremlin is already and will likely continue to exploit the Hamas attacks in Israel to advance several information operations intended to reduce US and Western support and attention to Ukraine," the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) think tank said. The Kremlin spread information that blamed Western countries for "neglecting conflicts in the Middle East in favor of supporting Ukraine," the ISW argued.

US foreign policy is partly to blame for the latest violent flare-up between Israel and the Palestinians, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has suggested. The official, who is currently Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said Washington should have channeled its energy into ensuring a lasting peace in the Middle East but chose to focus on Ukraine instead. Commenting on the escalation between Israel and the Hamas militant group from Gaza, Medvedev wrote on his Telegram channel that these events were predictable. “This is what Washington and its allies should have dealt with,” he explained, adding that the Israel-Palestine conflict has lasted for decades, with the US being a “key player there.” According to Medvedev, instead of this, “these morons got involved in our region and are actively helping neo-Nazis, pitting two close peoples against one another.”

Russia’s president, indeed, was celebrating his 71st birthday on this day, yet it is not clear how exactly this fact was relevant to the ongoing escalation in the Middle East.

In the sudden attack by the Palestinian resistance, Israel lost four things at once:

1 - Intelligence failure: As Israeli agents in Gaza did not receive news of what the resistance was preparing, for a whole year, and perhaps more, as suggested from some of the statements of its leaders during the course of the war. This is a devastating exposure of the Mossad, which promotes itself with a superior ability to collect and analyze information, and to enable the Israeli army to be proactive.

2 - Permissible borders: The separation wall - which was built around the Gaza Strip, and its cost amounted to a billion dollars - did not prevent the resistance fighters from breaching it, after striking it at specific points, which enabled the resistance fighters to easily cross to the settlements surrounding Gaza, and control them in limited hours. Although these walls surrounding Gaza are equipped with the latest types of surveillance - including high-powered cameras - they did not save Israel anything, after the resistance fighters were able to disable them electronically, before the attack began.

3 - Loss of control: After the resistance fighters crossed the border, they were able to expand west and north, to the point of seizing a double area of the Strip, without finding anything to repel them or repel them at first. This was surprising even to the resistance itself, to the point that Musa Abu Marzouk, one of the leaders of the political bureau of the Islamic Resistance Movement “Hamas,” said in a statement: “If we had known that the Israeli army was this weak, we would have forced thousands of resistance fighters to seize the land, until they reached Tel Aviv itself.”

4 - The slow reaction and its failure: After news of the attack reached the Israeli political leadership, it immediately gave orders to the army to advance to compensate for the collapse of the Gaza Division, but the movement was slow, and it also did not escape the confusion and panic that struck the Israeli soldiers, after they were certain of the sudden defeat. Which befell their forces in a few hours.

After Israel gathered its scattered forces and began brutally bombing Gaza, and preparing for a ground battle, the effects of the sudden defeat continued to spread throughout it, whether at the level of rhetoric or measures. This effect began with hesitation or delay in the sweeping ground attack, then it was replaced by what Israel called a “qualitative ground operation.” As soon as it began, losses on the ground began to follow without interruption.

Now it can be said that if the war ends without uprooting the resistance and forcing the people of the Gaza Strip to flee, Israel will have lost three things that will be difficult to compensate for later:

1 - The “protecting army” equation is shaken: Israel is an army with a community around it, and the latter is completely dependent on the former for its survival. For 75 years, the Israelis treated their army as invincible, and thus their state was safe and stable. This idea, which was widely marketed, has long contributed to many Jews coming to Israel. This equation is no longer the same, regardless of the results of the war. Israel is accustomed to war outside its land, and has kept its borders safe, so that battles do not have a severe impact on the people, but the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation took place in Israel’s cities and settlements, not through missiles this time, but through intrusion and deep strikes, or war on enemy territory.

2 - Injury to the bright image: Israel created an image for itself that it marketed globally as a gentle lamb among packs of wolves, and that it is a democratic state in the midst of authoritarian states, to hide its ugly face in its treatment of the Palestinians, which ranges from apartheid to ongoing genocide, whether through soft means in Most of the time, or rough during confrontation and wars. Western traditional media supported this fabricated image, and even contributed to its dissemination, but social media sites provided a different narrative for the minds of people in the east and west of the earth. This awakening of awareness was reflected in the demonstrations and protests that supported Palestinian rights in various parts of the world.

3 - The possibility of ruling Arab regimes retreating from using Israel as a refuge or military partner, after it was proven to them that the Israeli army is not as strong as they had imagined, and therefore, after the war, they must search for other means to achieve a degree of strategic balance or understanding and protect interests.