Israel-Palestine Update

Some updates; the death toll has exceeded five hundred (nine hundred by some sources), and open fighting continues in communities along the Gaza border:

As of Sunday afternoon, officials said that at least 250 Israelis had been reported killed and more than 1,400 wounded. At least 370 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

The land, sea and air assault on Israel launched by Palestinian militants on Saturday prompted Israel to respond with heavy strikes on Gazan cities, which continued into Sunday morning. Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, also continued to fire rockets into Israel, hitting the city of Sderot and injuring at least one person.

As Israel’s military said fighting was underway in seven border communities and an army base, tanks were seen crossing farmland in parts of southern Israel, heading south toward Gaza. Scores of reservists waited at rural bus stops, trying to get to their bases after Mr. Netanyahu issued a call-up.

There appear to be a great many hostages.

Israeli and Hamas officials both confirmed that Israeli military personnel and civilians were taken captive, though the total number and their condition is unknown. A spokesperson for Hamas’s armed wing said there were “tens” of soldiers and officers in the group’s custody, a Reuters journalist in Gaza reported. The Israeli Embassy in the United States posted on X that there were 100 “kidnapped civilians and soldiers.”

The story of Israel’s military and intelligence failures will take a while to write, but it seems obvious that there was a political focus on the West Bank to the detriment of monitoring Gaza:

Israeli security leaders had played down the threat from Hamas in recent months, as the group abstained from conflicts started by its smaller ally in Gaza, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. There was a sense that Israel, with its Iron Dome air defense systems, had rendered ineffective Gaza’s main threat of short-range rockets. 

Last month, the Israeli military confidently characterized Gaza as being in a state of “stable instability,” suggesting that the dangers posed by Hamas militants were largely contained. 

Recent Israeli intelligence assessments of Hamas were that the militant group had shifted its focus to trying to stoke violence in the West Bank and that it was looking to avoid launching major attacks from Gaza in an effort to avoid the kinds of punishing Israeli military responses that have devastated the isolated area in the past.

There has been a tendency in the comment threads to concentrate responsibility for these failures on Bibi. That’s not wrong, exactly; as the head of government he’s clearly responsible for pointing the security services in particular directions and for ensuring that they carry out their appointed tasks. At the same time, we should expect that any fuck-ups in Israel’s vast, sophisticated, and extremely professional intelligence services will be blamed on the political leadership as part of Operation Cover Our Ass.

Finally… Lawyers, Guns and Money is a politics and culture blog that offers a forum for discussion of a great many topics of interest to a varied but nevertheless somewhat narrow audience. LGM is *not* a breaking news service, and you absolutely should not expect that this blog will have regular updates about this iteration of the Israel-Palestine conflict, about Ukraine, or about anything else that you happen to think is really super important at the moment. If this is a problem for you then you are welcome to fuck right off.