Israel and the West reckon with a high-tech failure

The Hamas onslaught wasn’t supposed to be possible: A massive, deadly 2G attack on a 5G security state. The consequences are still reverberating.

The deadly weekend attacks by Hamas have cast a nation into mourning, forced a political reckoning — and are prompting a shocked reconsideration of one of Israel’s greatest points of pride, its technical sophistication.

On Saturday, Israel’s vaunted $1 billion security barrier on the Gaza border failed, as Hamas fighters used simple bulldozers to plow through and armed paragliders to soar above it. Barrages of rockets penetrated Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. And Israel’s surveillance system — a dense network of drones, cameras and cyber snooping — was proven fatally insufficient, with Hamas able to both work around and overwhelm it.

“The most common question is, where were the Israeli surveillance drones? The answer is everyone who should have called those drones was already dead,” said Israeli tech journalist Assaf Gilead. The attack also sent shockwaves through the defense establishment in Washington and Europe, not least because Israel has become a key supplier of security and defense technology across the West.

Within Israel, failure of the military’s security technology fed into a broader sense of abandonment among citizens and victims, who called into news programs and texted family for help while gunmen rampaged for hours, unimpeded by Israeli soldiers.