In 2014, the aim of the Israeli army in Operation Protective Edge – the bloodiest confrontation to date, with around 2,200 Palestinians and 71 Israelis dead – was to put an end to the Hamas military tunnels, which were causing terror among the inhabitants, near of 20,000, from the Gaza environment. A year later, an officer at the Kerem Shalom crossing, through which goods and humanitarian aid entered the strip with droppers, said that the objective was being achieved, blinding tunnels, installing sensors, creating underground barriers…
The Negev desert stretches in front of this pass at the confluence of Israel, Egypt and Gaza itself, and towards the north. Along most of the 60 kilometer perimeter of the Israeli fence, the Sufa, Karni and Nahal Oz crossings have been closed since Hamas gained control of the strip in 2007. Kisufim, east of the urban agglomeration of Khan Iunis, remained for the exclusive use of the Israeli army in its raids. In the south, two passes at Rafah communicate with Egypt, and in the north, a single one, the one at Erez, with Israel. Gaza, with 365 square kilometers (more than half of the metropolitan area of ??Barcelona), looks a bit like a rectangle about 43 kilometers from north to south, about 14 at the widest part and 5 at the widest narrow (relative data, taking into account the Israeli margin of safety).
Hamas, lacking tunnels, has done the unimaginable this time: attack on the surface. There are those who believe that the protests of 2018, the “marches of return”, celebrated on “Fridays of anger” in which around 20,000 young people participated (resulting in around 200 deaths and 29,000 injuries in one year) in front of the border barrier, they served Hamas to take action on Israeli military bases in the Negev. But you may not need them.
Few details are known about what happened on October 7. At 5.50 local time, Hamas showed Telegram images of five motorcycles (two men on each) crossing the fence in Kerem Shalom; an excavator immediately widened the embankment. The image was far from evoking the 2008 blasting of the Rafah metal fence to allow Gazans to escape to Egypt in the face of Israel’s suffocating trade and energy blockade. Nor was it similar to what would happen immediately in Erez.
The Erez crossing – intended for the transit of people, such as workers passing through Israel, aid workers and foreign journalists on occasion, and some vehicles – is a small Israeli fortress since Hamas rules Gaza. A painful labyrinth of long tunnels, doors with turns that made it very difficult for luggage to pass through and other narrow doors with intercoms and cameras, all of this monitored by soldiers from a kind of control tower.
The elite forces ( nukhba ) of Hamas attacked it, but from the outside, once the fence was breached further south, right where Israeli troops usually break into the first town in Gaza, Beit Hanun. An anti-tank rocket apparently breached the cement wall and the militiamen penetrated and shot the soldiers.
At the time, all attention was on the rain of missiles falling on Israel.
It is not clear whether the Izzidin al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, entered through 15 sites or fewer, but they reached as many as 27 Israeli enclaves within a maximum distance of 22.5 kilometers.
Only six kilometers from the strip, more or less at the height of the Kisufim pass, the worst slaughter took place. About 260 young people attending a music festival were shot dead, and an undetermined number of survivors, kidnapped.
Media outlets such as the BBC have been able to determine from videos on social media that just before 6:30 a.m., when the missile launch began, attendees of the Supernova festival were able to see perhaps as many as seven flying artifacts. These were paramotors (paragliders, some single-seater, others two-seater, equipped with an engine) of the Falcon squadron of the Al-Qassam Brigades. When everyone could then see the traces of the missiles in the sky, many started running towards the cars. But it was late. The militiamen had also arrived in vans and motorbikes and started shooting indiscriminately.
Did Hamas know that more than 3,000 people had gathered near Kibbutz Re’im? Some witnesses believe so, because the location of the festival was secret when the tickets went on sale and was only announced a few hours before. Others believe that the music was heard from the strip on the night of the 6th. From the paragliders they could clearly see the concentration, and perhaps guide the rest of the militiamen.
The trap in the desert was finally closed when, according to the Yediotnews portal, Hamas vehicles camouflaged by the Israeli police blocked roads in the Negev communities, and even seized real police cars and drove them away. take to Gaza.
