.IN THE EARLY hrs of October 7th Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist organisation that runs Gaza, introduced much more than 2,000 spacecrafts towards Israel. Over a many thousand Hamas fighters, some in motorised gliders, crossed the perimeter in between Israel and Gaza. They struck civilians on the roads of small Israeli cities and in their homes.
In the following 48 hours they got rid of more than 900 Israelis, an amount far going beyond the fatalities in the previous 19 years of conflict, and took about 150 captives. Israel was actually captured off guard partly since Hamas had never ever carried out such a sizable strike. The country’s defence establishment had assumed that in recent years Hamas had determined to refrain from wide-scale fight– which its own capacity to accomplish thus was actually limited.
They were wrong. Only how strong is Hamas?