October 15, 2023

Sunday, October 15, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Israel and Hamas at War.

Hamas knew about Israel security. How?

First, we are learning what Hamas seems to have known details about Israeli security. The articles below make that clear.

Then the question is how did they come into this knowledge. Trump’s name comes up again and again, but there is no evidence of that at this time.

The Secrets Hamas Knew About Israel’s Military.

The 10 gunmen from Gaza knew exactly how to find the Israeli intelligence hub — and how to get inside.

After crossing into Israel, they headed east on five motorcycles, two gunmen on each vehicle, shooting at passing civilian cars as they pressed forward.

Ten miles later, they veered off the road into a stretch of woodland, dismounting outside an unmanned gate to a military base. They blew open the barrier with a small explosive charge, entered the base and paused to take a group selfie. Then they shot dead an unarmed Israeli soldier dressed in a T-shirt.

For a moment, the attackers appeared uncertain about where to go next. Then one of them pulled something from his pocket: a color-coded map of the complex.

Reoriented, they found an unlocked door to a fortified building. Once inside, they entered a room filled with computers — the military intelligence hub. Under a bed in the room, they found two soldiers taking shelter.

The gunmen shot both dead.

This sequence was captured on a camera mounted on the head of a gunman who was later killed. The New York Times reviewed the footage, then verified the events by interviewing Israeli officials and checking Israeli military video of the attack as well.

An image taken from a video filmed by a Hamas commander who was killed on Saturday. The gunmen are seen inside an Israeli intelligence hub.

The Hamas commander reviewing a map of the base that includes the intelligence hub.

They provide chilling details of how Hamas, the militia that controls the Gaza Strip, managed to surprise and outmaneuver the most powerful military in the Middle East last Saturday — storming across the border, overrunning more than 30 square miles, taking more than 150 hostages and killing more than 1,300 people in the deadliest day for Israel in its 75-year history.

With meticulous planning and extraordinary awareness of Israel’s secrets and weaknesses, Hamas and its allies overwhelmed the length of Israel’s front with Gaza shortly after dawn, shocking a nation that has long taken the superiority of its military as an article of faith.

Using drones, Hamas destroyed key surveillance and communications towers along the border with Gaza, imposing vast blind spots on the Israeli military. With explosives and tractors, Hamas blew open gaps in the border barricades, allowing 200 attackers to pour through in the first wave and another 1,800 later that day, officials say. On motorcycles and in pickup trucks, the assailants surged into Israel, overwhelming at least eight military bases and waging terrorist attacks against civilians in more than 15 villages and cities.

Hamas planning documents, videos of the assault and interviews with security officials show that the group had a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of how the Israeli military operated, where it stationed specific units, and even the time it would take for reinforcements to arrive.

The Israeli military says that, once the war is over, it will investigate how Hamas managed to breach its defenses so easily.

But whether the armed forces were careless with their secrets or infiltrated by spies, the revelations have already unnerved officials and analysts who have questioned how the Israeli military — renowned for its intelligence gathering — could have inadvertently revealed so much information about its own operations.

The outcome was a staggering series of atrocities and massacres, in what the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, has described as the worst mass killing of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust.

It shattered Israel’s aura of invincibility and provoked an Israeli counterattack on Gaza that has killed more than 1,900 Palestinians in a week, the ferocity of which has never been seen in Gaza.

It also upended assumptions that Hamas, long designated a terrorist group by Israel and many Western nations, had gradually become more interested in running Gaza than in using it to launch major assaults on Israel.

Hamas made Israelis think it was “busy with governing Gaza,” said Ali Barakeh, a Hamas leader, in a television interview on Monday. “All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack,” he added.

‘Hamas In the Kibbutz!’

The terrorists were inside Addi Cherry’s home, on the other side of an unlocked door.

Ms. Cherry, her husband and their three children were hiding inside their eldest son’s bedroom, listening to the gunmen wander around their living room.

“Please help us,” Ms. Cherry texted a friend, as one of the assailants walked closer and closer to the bedroom door.

Then he gripped the door handle.

The Cherry family’s day had begun with a burst of rockets from Gaza, not long after 6 a.m.

Ms. Cherry, an economist, and her husband, Oren, an engineer, rushed with their children into their eldest son’s bedroom, which doubled as a bomb shelter.

Initially, the events of the morning felt distressingly familiar. The Cherry family lives in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, a rural village of some 500 residents, a few hundred yards east of the border with Gaza. Early morning rocket fire — and the ensuing rush to the safe room — is a frequent feature of life in the region.

“Like always,” Ms. Cherry remembered thinking.

But this morning soon felt different. The rockets kept coming, many of them headed deep into Israeli territory.

Then, from the fields around the village, came the sound of gunshots.

Mr. Cherry left the bedroom, and peeked through the shutters on their living room windows.

“Oh God,” Ms. Cherry remembered her husband shouting. “Hamas in the kibbutz! Hamas in the kibbutz!”

It was 7:20 a.m.

Hundreds of Hamas invaders, carrying guns, shoulder-borne rocket launchers and wearing the group’s green headband, were streaming through the village fields.

It was part of a coordinated assault that, documents and video show, assigned squads of assailants to precise targets. As some swept through military bases, others charged into residential areas, ruthlessly kidnapping and killing civilians.

They would reach the Cherrys’ street within minutes.

The family had to act quickly. Their bomb shelter — a teenager’s bedroom — had no lock.

The parents grabbed a chair, and wedged it under the door handle — making it harder to open.

They dragged a small cabinet, and pressed it against the chair.

Then they waited. There was an army base next to the village. Its troops would be here within minutes, Ms. Cherry remembered thinking.

What she didn’t know was that many of them were already dead.

‘Take soldiers and civilians’

All along the border, the Hamas gunmen had already overrun most, if not all, of the Israeli border bases.

Footage from the attackers’ head-mounted cameras, including the video of the raid on the intelligence hub, showed Hamas gunmen — from its highly trained Nukhba brigade — smashing through the barricades of several bases in the first light of the morning.

After breaching, they were merciless, gunning down some soldiers in their beds and underwear. In several bases, they knew exactly where the communications servers were and destroyed them, according to a senior Israeli army officer.

With much of their communications and surveillance systems down, the Israelis often couldn’t see the commandos coming. They found it harder to call for help and mount a response. In many cases, they were unable to protect themselves, let alone the surrounding civilian villages.

A Hamas planning document — found by Israeli emergency responders in one village — showed that the attackers were organized into well-defined units with clear goals and battle plans.

One platoon had designated navigators, saboteurs and drivers — as well as mortar units in the rear to provide cover for the attackers, the document shows.

The group had a specific target — a kibbutz — and the attackers were tasked with storming the village from specific angles. They had estimates for how many Israeli troops were stationed in nearby posts, how many vehicles they had at their disposal, and how long it would take those Israeli relief forces to reach them.

The document is dated October 2022, suggesting that the attack had been planned for at least a year.

Elsewhere, other assailants were posted to key road junctions to ambush Israeli reinforcements, according to four senior officers and officials.

Some units had specific instructions to capture Israelis for use as bargaining chips in future prisoner exchanges with Israel.

“Take soldiers and civilians as prisoners and hostages to negotiate with,” the document said.

‘We Are Going to Die’

The terrorists smashed their way into the Cherrys’ house shortly before 10 a.m., according to texts that Ms. Cherry sent friends at the time.

They had already killed the kibbutz guards, as well as a civilian security volunteer who had rushed to confront them in the opening moments of the assault, according to the village leadership.

Now, the terrorists were going house by house, trying to find people to kill and kidnap.

“Please send help,” Ms. Cherry typed into her phone.

At the Cherrys’ house, they forced in the door. Then they charged in, shouting and ransacking the house, Ms. Cherry said.

The ransacked interior of the Cherry family home.Credit...via Cherry Family.

The ransacked interior.Credit...via Cherry Family

“We are going to die,” Ms. Cherry remembered thinking.

The family waited in terrified silence, hoping the intruders would ignore the door to the bedroom and assume everyone was away.

Mr. and Mrs. Cherry put all their weight against the cabinet, to brace the chair underneath the door handle.

Guy, 15, their eldest son, stood next to the door, holding an 18-pound dumbbell. If someone did break in, the plan was to drop it on the assailant’s head.

Then the handle twitched.

The parents began to push the cabinet.

The handle continued to rattle.

Then it stopped. The assailant walked away.

A few streets away, the family of Miki Levi, who oversees the kibbutz gardens, had an even closer call.

After a terrorist squad chased Mr. Levi, 47, inside his safe room, the attackers sprayed bullets at the reinforced door, Mr. Levi said in an interview.

Some of the bullets pierced the door, creating large openings, and Mr. Levi said he also fired back with his pistol, shredding it further. His wife and two young daughters sheltered to the side.

Changing tactics, the terrorists later brought two of his neighbors — a mother and her 12-year-old daughter, Mr. Levi said.

At gunpoint, the mother and child were told to persuade him to open up, Mr. Levi said.

“‘Come out and stop shooting,’” Mr. Levi recounted one of them saying. “‘The terrorists won’t do anything to you.’”

Eventually, the terrorists gave up that approach and returned with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, Mr. Levi said.

It was only when Mr. Levi shot one attacker in the thigh that they finally left, he added.

The mother and child, Mr. Levi suspects, are now captives in Gaza.

‘Bodies Were Burning’

Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus said he drove south without knowing where exactly he should go.

General Goldfus, 46, a paratrooper commander, had been on leave at home, jogging in his neighborhood north of Tel Aviv. Then he saw a video from the south, showing terrorists cruising through a city, entirely unimpeded.

Without waiting for orders, the general said he ran home, changed into his uniform and headed south.

He picked up guns and two soldiers from his base in central Israel, and called friends and colleagues to find out what was happening.

Only a few picked up. Of the rest, “There was nobody really understanding the full picture,” General Goldfus said in an interview.

The speed, precision and scale of Hamas’s attack had thrown the Israeli military into disarray, and for many hours afterward civilians were left to fend for themselves.

Using the few scraps of information he could glean, General Goldfus said he and the soldiers headed to a village north of Nahal Oz, and then gradually worked their way south.

It was around 10 a.m. All around him was carnage and atrocity.

Dead Israelis lined the roads, alongside the husks of burned-out, overturned cars.

At the site of an all-night outdoor rave, gunmen had killed an estimated 260 partygoers.

The bodies of Israelis killed by Hamas militants are gathered for identification at an IDF base in Ramla, Israel.

“Bodies were burning,” General Goldfus remembered seeing at the site.

The attack by Hamas had unleashed a violent free-for-all. Some residents of Gaza had poured over the undefended border after it was breached, at times streaming what they were doing on their phones. Gazans were looting and ransacking homes, taking computers, clothes, crockery, televisions and phones, survivors said.

In some Israeli villages, residents had been burned alive in their homes, while terrorists stalked civilians at every turn, looking for people to capture and kill. Grandparents, toddlers and a nine-month-old baby were seized and taken back to Gaza, some of them squeezed between their kidnappers on motorcycles.

And during much of the mayhem, the Israeli army was almost nowhere to be seen.

Near Kibbutz Reim, General Goldfus said he ran into another senior commander by chance. Like him, the officer had rushed to the scene on instinct, without any instructions, and had assembled a small group of soldiers.

There and then, the two men came up with their own ad hoc strategy.

“There’s no orders here,” General Goldfus said. “I said: ‘You take from this place and further south — and I’ll take from this place and further north.’”

That was how some of the Israeli counterattack took place: soldiers or civilian volunteers — including retired generals in their 60s — rushing to the region and doing what they could.

Israel Ziv, a former general, reached a nearby battle in his Audi.

Yair Golan, a retired deputy chief of staff and former leftist lawmaker, said he took a gun and began rescuing survivors of a massacre at a rave, who were hiding in nearby bushes.

“We are brought up to run as fast as possible toward the fire,” said General Goldfus. “So that we can be the first one there.”

‘It’s O.K. We’re Jewish.’

The intelligence hub near Gaza was one of the first places to be recaptured by Israel.

In the late morning, soldiers and reservists from different units reached the base from separate directions, overpowering the 10 Gazan gunmen who had filmed their deadly assault on video.

The camera mounted on the Hamas commander’s head captured the moment he was shot and killed. The camera falls off, bouncing along the ground. By the time the video stops, the commander can be seen slumped on the ground, revealing his long beard and thinning hairline.

In other parts of southern Israel, the first formal reinforcements came from an Israeli commando unit that arrived in helicopters, according to the senior Israeli officer.

They were followed by other special operations units, including Israeli navy seals and a reconnaissance unit trained to operate deep inside enemy lines, rather than on Israeli soil.

Sometimes, the commandos joined forces with volunteers without body armor who had rushed into the fray to rescue family members.

Noam Tibon, a former general, drove south with his pistol to try to retake Kibbutz Nahal Oz, where his son, Amir, a journalist, was trapped.

In the early afternoon, the elder Mr. Tibon joined a squad that was making its way through the kibbutz, house by house.

By Sunday afternoon, several villages and bases still had some kind of Hamas presence. The whole area would not be fully secured for days.

Ms. Cherry emerged around 5 p.m. on Saturday in Kibbutz Nahal Oz to find her home turned upside down, the microwave torn from the wall, drawers ripped from their cabinets and a pool of drying blood on the floor.

She had heard a gun battle in and around her home earlier in the day. She believed a terrorist had died in the house — and that his bloodied corpse had been carried off by fellow fighters.

Some survivors refused to open up, even after the army arrived.

When soldiers reached the home of Oshrit Sabag, another resident of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, she feared they were terrorists in disguise.

Even after the soldiers began chatting to one another in Hebrew, to prove who they were, Ms. Sabag, 48, was unconvinced.

It was only their Jewish prayers that made her relax.

“‘It’s O.K., it’s O.K.,’” Ms. Sabag remembered them saying. “‘We’re Jewish.’”

The funeral of Shani Kupervaser, who was killed at the music festival, in Haifa on Friday.

(New York Times).

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C.I.A. Reports Contained General Warnings of Potential Gaza Flare-up

“Reports issued days before the Hamas attack did not foresee such a deadly strike, but did say rocket attacks were possible” President Biden did NOT see these reports.

A pair of classified C.I.A. intelligence reports issued in the days ahead of a major Hamas attack on Israel warned about a potential escalation in violence but did not predict the complex, multipronged attack that Hamas gunmen launched against Israel, according to U.S. officials.

The first of the intelligence reports, dated Sept. 28, described the possibility that Hamas would launch rockets into Israel over a period of several days.

The second report, dated Oct. 5, built on the first but was more analytical.

The Oct. 5 report appeared in a daily C.I.A. summary of intelligence that is distributed widely to policymakers and lawmakers, the officials said. But intelligence officials did not brief either of the reports to President Biden or senior White House officials. Nor did the C.I.A. highlight the reports to White House policymakers as being of particular significance, officials said.

Several U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, described the reports as routine, and similar to other intelligence reports about the possibility of Palestinian violence that were written throughout the year.

While the reports warned of potential rocket fire, they did not say that Hamas intended to employ new tactics against Israel, such as a ground incursion. (New York Times).

Hamas practiced in plain sight, posting video of mock attack weeks before border breach.

Less than a month before Hamas fighters blew through Israel’s high-tech “Iron Wall” and launched an attack that would leave more than 1,200 Israelis dead, they practiced in a very public dress rehearsal.

A slickly produced two-minute propaganda video posted to social media by Hamas on Sept. 12 shows fighters using explosives to blast through a replica of the border gate, sweep in on pickup trucks and then move building by building through a full-scale reconstruction of an Israeli town, firing automatic weapons at human-silhouetted paper targets.

Watch the video.👇

The Islamic militant group’s live-fire exercise dubbed operation “Strong Pillar” also had militants in body armor and combat fatigues carrying out operations that included the destruction of mock-ups of the wall’s concrete towers and a communications antenna, just as they would do for real in the deadly attack last Saturday.

While Israel’s highly regarded security and intelligence services were clearly caught flatfooted by Hamas’ ability to breach its Gaza defenses, the group appears to have hidden its extensive preparations for the assault in plain sight. One of the compounds Hamas used to prepare was so close to an Israeli border checkpoint that soldiers could have been able to observe the site with binoculars.

“There clearly were warnings and indications that should have been picked up,” said Bradley Bowman, a former U.S. Army officer who is now senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington research institute. “Or maybe they were picked up, but they didn’t spark necessary preparations to prevent these horrific terrorist acts from happening.”

The Associated Press reviewed more than 100 videos Hamas released over the last year, primarily through the social media app Telegram. Using satellite imagery, the AP was able to verify key details, as well as identify five sites Hamas used to practice shooting and blowing holes in Israel’s border defenses.

The AP matched the location of the mocked-up settlement from the Sept 12 video to a patch of desert outside Al-Mawasi, a Palestinian town on the southern coast of the Gaza Strip. A large sign in Hebrew and Arabic at the gate says “Horesh Yaron,” the name of a controversial Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

Bowman said there are indications that Hamas intentionally led Israeli officials to believe it was preparing to carry out raids in the West Bank, rather than Gaza. It was also potentially significant that the exercise has been held annually since 2020 in December, but was moved up by nearly four months this year to coincide with the anniversary of Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.

This image from video posted to social media by Hamas on Sept. 12, 2023 shows a live-fire exercise dubbed operation “Strong Pillar” outside Al-Mawasi, a Palestinian town on the southern coast of the Gaza Strip.

In a separate video posted to Telegram from last year’s Strong Pillar exercise on Dec. 28 [https://youtu.be/AZzHxgGhsBg?si=lFe-UwqVYvf_YvOs] Hamas fighters are shown storming what appears to be a mockup Israeli military base, complete with a full-size model of a tank flying an Israeli flag. The gunmen move through the cinderblock buildings, seizing and cuffing other men playing the roles of Israeli soldier hostages.

The AP matched the location where the video was taken to a site near the town of Beit Hanoun, less than half a mile (800 meters) from the Israeli border wall. Satellite images show increased activity at the compound over the last year, with the addition of concrete structures and what appear to be large tents.

Michael Milshtein, a retired Israeli colonel who previously led the military intelligence department overseeing the Palestinian territories, said he was aware of the Hamas videos, but was still caught off guard by the ambition and scale of Saturday’s attack.

“We knew about the drones, we knew about booby traps, we knew about cyberattacks and the marine forces. The surprise was the coordination between all those systems,” Milshtein said.

This image from video posted to social media by Hamas on Sept. 12, 2023 shows a live-fire exercise dubbed operation “Strong Pillar” outside Al-Mawasi, a Palestinian town on the southern coast of the Gaza Strip.

The seeds of Israel’s failure to anticipate and stop Saturday’s attack go back at least a decade. Faced with recurring attacks from Hamas militants tunneling under Israel’s border fence, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a concrete solution — build a bigger wall.

With financial help from U.S. taxpayers, Israel completed construction of a $1.1 billion project to fortify its existing defenses along its 40-mile land border with Gaza in 2021. The new, upgraded barrier includes a “smart fence” up to 6-meters (19.7 feet) high, festooned with cameras that can see in the dark, razor wire and seismic sensors capable of detecting the digging of tunnels more than 200 feet below. Manned guard posts were replaced with concrete towers topped with remote-controlled machine guns.

“In our neighborhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts,” Netanyahu said in 2016, referring to Palestinians and neighboring Arab states. “At the end of the day as I see it, there will be a fence like this one surrounding Israel in its entirety.”

Shortly after dawn on Saturday, Hamas fighters pushed through Netanyahu’s wall in a matter of minutes. And they did it on the relative cheap, using explosive charges to blow holes in the barrier and then sending in bulldozers to widen the breaches as fighters streamed through on motorcycles and in pick-up trucks. Cameras and communications gear were bombarded by grenades and mortar shells dropped from off-the-shelf, commercial drones — a tactic borrowed directly from the battlefields of Ukraine.

Snipers took out Israel’s sophisticated roboguns by targeting their exposed ammunition boxes, causing them to explode. Militants armed with assault rifles used paragliders to sail over the Israeli defenses, providing Hamas airborne troops despite lacking airplanes. Increasingly sophisticated homemade rockets capable of striking Tel Aviv substituted for a lack of heavy artillery.

Satellite images analyzed by the AP show the massive extent of the damage done at the heavily fortified Erez border crossing between Gaza and Israel. The images taken Sunday showed gaping holes in three sections of the border wall, the largest more than 70 meters (230 feet) wide.

This satellite photo provided by Planet Labs PBC shows the damage to the Erez border crossing separating the Gaza Strip from southern Israel after a Hamas attack Sunday, Oct. 8, 2023. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)

Once the wall was breached, Hamas fighters streamed through by the hundreds. A video showed a lone Israeli battle tank rushing to the sight of the attack, only to be attacked and destroyed in a ball of flame. Hamas then disabled radio towers and radar sites, likely impeding the ability of Israeli commanders to see and understand the extent of the attack.

Hamas forces also struck a nearby army base near Zikim, engaging in an intense firefight with Israeli troops before overrunning the post. Videos posted by Hamas show graphic scenes with dozens of dead Israeli soldiers.

They then fanned out across the countryside of Southern Israel, attacking kibbutzim and a music festival. On the bodies of some of the Hamas militants killed during the invasion were detailed maps showing planned zones and routes of attack, according to images posted by Israeli first responders who recovered some of the the corpses. Israeli authorities announced Wednesday they had recovered the bodies of about 1,500 Islamic fighters, though no details were provided about where they were found or how they died.

Military experts told the AP the attack showed a level of sophistication not previously exhibited by Hamas, likely suggesting they had external help.

“I just was impressed with Hamas’s ability to use basics and fundamentals to be able to penetrate the wall,” said retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Stephen Danner, a combat engineer trained to build and breach defenses. “They seemed to be able to find those weak spots and penetrate quickly and then exploit that breach.”

Ali Barakeh, a Beirut-based senior Hamas official, acknowledged that over the years the group had received supplies, financial support, military expertise and training from its allies abroad, including Iran and Hezbollah. But he insisted the recent operation to breach Israel’s border defenses was homegrown, with the exact date and time for the attack known only to a handful of commanders within Hamas.

Details of the operation were kept so tight, Barakeh said, that some Hamas fighters who took part in the assault Saturday believed they were heading to just another drill, showing up in street clothes rather than their uniforms.

Last weekend’s devastating surprise attack has shaken political support for Netanyahu within Israel, who pushed ahead with spending to build walls despite some within his own cabinet and military warning that it probably wouldn’t work.

In the days since Hamas struck, senior Israeli officials have largely deflected questions about the wall and the apparent intelligence failure. Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, acknowledged the military owes the public an explanation, but said now is not the time.

“First, we fight, then we investigate,” he said.

In Netanyahu’s push to build border walls, he found an enthusiastic partner in then-President Donald Trump, who praised the Iron Wall as a potential model for the expanded barrier he planned for the U.S. Southern border with Mexico.

Under Trump, the U.S. expanded a joint initiative with Israel started under the Obama Administration to develop technologies for detecting underground tunnels along the Gaza border defenses. Since 2016, Congress has appropriated $320 million toward the project.

But even with all its high-tech gadgets, the Iron Wall was still largely just a physical barrier that could be breached, said Victor Tricaud, a senior analyst with the London-based consulting firm Control Risks.

“The fence, no matter how many sensors ... no matter how deep the underground obstacles go, at the end of the day, it’s effectively a metal fence,” he said. “Explosives, bulldozers can eventually get through it. What was remarkable was Hamas’s capability to keep all the preparations under wraps.” (Associated Press).

From the 1988 charter, founding Hamas.

“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him." (Article 7)

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Domestic.

The President and First Lady at the Human Rights Campaign Gala.

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A Few Domestic Responses to the Hamas attack.

Touch to watch the Vice President. 👇

He wrote:

“In Judaism there is an obligation of “Hakarat Hatov” — saying thank you to those who perform good deeds. While I have been, and remain, deeply critical of the Biden Administration, the moral, tactical, diplomatic and military support that it has provided Israel over the past few days has been exceptional. As one living in Jerusalem with children who are Israeli citizens, I am deeply grateful. I pray that American support continues in the difficult days ahead.”

New York Times Editorial.

Israel Can Defend Itself and Uphold Its Values.

Israel stands on the verge of invading Gaza in response to the terrorist attacks by Hamas that many, including Israel’s leaders, have compared to Sept. 11 not just because of the scale and savagery but also because the terrorists sought to destroy the tranquillity of daily life. They killed the very young and the very old, the strong and the weak, civilians and soldiers; they took some 150 hostages, including children, and survivors said the attackers raped women — all to send a message that no Israeli was safe.

Israel has a responsibility to its citizens to hold accountable the perpetrators of this violence, but as Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this week, “How Israel does this matters.”

Israel cannot win this war just by killing all the terrorists. It is determined to break the power of Hamas, and in that effort it deserves the support of the United States and the rest of the world. But it can succeed only by upholding the rules and norms of behavior that Hamas so wantonly ignores. What Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law. To do that, the means and the ends of its military response must be consistent.

Israel’s goal is to destroy Hamas; in doing that, it should not lose sight of its commitment to safeguard those who have not taken up arms.

The Israeli Army acknowledges and espouses an obligation not to target civilians for military purposes, and to avoid actions that inflict disproportionate harm on civilians, such as destroying an entire city block to kill fighters in a specific building that could be targeted more precisely. But this war is unfolding in an atmosphere of intense emotion, notably in the recent remarks by Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who said that Israel was fighting “human animals.”

Israel is preparing to send its young men and women into battle, where they will face an enemy that does not respect the same rules of warfare that they have committed to.

Hamas is known to hide its fighters among civilians, and an indifference to their suffering is central to its brand of terrorism. Hamas is using the people of Gaza as human shields against Israel’s bombing campaign, and as Gazans try to escape, Hamas still holds the hostages who were kidnapped last Saturday. The group has threatened to kill them one by one with every airstrike that hits Gazans in their homes.

Israeli soldiers will look to their leaders to guide their actions and decisions on the battlefield to make sure that they, unlike Hamas, make distinctions between civilians and combatants.

Protecting civilians is also the most sensible way forward. Ending Hamas’s control over Gaza is an essential step, but a military victory will not mean much if young Gazans regroup under another extremist banner. Israel and its allies — and the Palestinians and their allies — have a shared interest in setting Gaza on a path to a different future. To do that, Palestinians first need to see that their lives and their safety are taken into account by Israel in its conduct of this war.

On Thursday, Israel announced that more than one million Palestinians had 24 hours to exit northern Gaza, prompting panic, confusion and immediate objections from the United Nations, which pleaded with Israeli officials to rescind the order. As Secretary General António Guterres noted, the order “applies to a territory that is already besieged, under aerial bombardment and without fuel, electricity, water and food.”

Directing civilians to move out of targeted areas is a valuable way to minimize casualties, but it works only if those who are ordered to evacuate have somewhere to go, a safe route and means to get there and sufficient time to make the journey. The Israeli military widened that 24-hour window and clarified that Gazans would have time on Saturday to move south “without any harm.” Mr. Blinken said Friday that the United States is working with the International Committee of the Red Cross to create safe zones, which could help to limit civilian casualties.

Hamas has a long history of exploiting the rules of war for its own purposes, and it is likely to take advantage of any arrangements such as these intended to protect civilians. But that does not absolve Israel of the responsibility to try.

Israel should also take steps to ensure the safety of journalists and humanitarian workers in the conflict zone. They perform a critical role in wartime by documenting what is happening. That documentation makes it possible for all participants in a conflict to be held accountable for their conduct, by the citizens of their own nations and by the rest of the world, as in Ukraine, where journalists have documented evidence of war crimes in Bucha. At least 11 United Nations workers and 11 journalists have already been killed in this war. Where journalists and aid organizations are not able to bear witness, there is no accountability.

The United States has offered firm support for Israel in its hour of agony. But friendship also requires speaking hard truths. Mr. Blinken and President Biden have spoken in general terms about the importance of minimizing civilian casualties; they should make clear to Israel that the relationship between the two nations is rooted in a commitment to democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

In counseling restraint, the United States can point to the lessons of its own recent history. For two decades, America waged a global campaign against terrorism, all too often ignoring international law when those rules seemed inconvenient. In doing so, America weakened the world’s commitment to those rules and helped embolden a new generation of extremists.

Israel finds itself at war because of the depravity of Hamas. Further bloodshed now appears unavoidable, but the way Israel fights will begin to determine what happens next: Defeating Hamas will make Israel safer; showing disregard for the killing of civilians will not.

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