Elliot Kaufman
WSJ, Oct. 13, 2023
“They fire 2,000 rockets in one day. They’d never fired that many rockets at once,” Mr. Bob says. But it was all a diversion.”
“I’m driving south to the Gaza corridor, the place Hamas invaded on Saturday,” Yonah Jeremy Bob says in our first phone conversation. “But it’s a straight drive, so let’s talk.” Mr. Bob is an expert on the Israeli shadow war with Iran, the subject of his new book, “Target Tehran,” and he covers the Israeli intelligence agencies and military for the Jerusalem Post. He’s busy tracking down answers to the questions every Israeli wants answered: How could this have happened? What’s the plan? Who will pay?
Even after the corpses of Israeli civilians had been cleared, “it’s some sort of nightmare,” Mr. Bob says when we catch up later on Wednesday. “What I saw was once a living, happy place, and it has been utterly destroyed.”
Israeli intelligence misjudged Hamas. “In the worst case,” Mr. Bob says, the expectation was that “Hamas might be able to take over one village that’s really small for three hours” and kill 20 people. “There was no scenario where anybody talked about 22 villages, a whole area of the country, 1,200 Israelis killed, including 800 to 900 civilians. That wasn’t conceivable.”
Saturday’s shock gave way to rage, “and then rage crystallized into a very steely determination,” Mr. Bob says. “It’s the thing Israel’s enemies never fully understand. They think of Israel as a weak Western state, where people care about their looks and money and all the things that will make them flee rather than fight.” Hamas often scoffs that “the Jews love life.” But that’s why they fight for it.
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