"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.
Or if they did, they failed to act on it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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.
To prepare for and carry out such a coordinated, complex attack involving the stockpiling and firing of thousands of rockets, right under the noses of the Israelis, must have taken extraordinary levels of operational security by Hamas.
And perhaps the biggest worry for Israel is this: how does it stop others responding to Hamas's call to arms and avoid this conflagration spreading into the West Bank and possibly even draw in the heavily-armed fighters of Hezbollah across its northern border with Lebanon?
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