JEFF CHILDERS

A day after its horrific southern border collapse, as Israel’s army finishes recapturing 22 townships from armed Hamas migrants and re-sealing 29 different broken border barriers, the latest casualty figures reported by The Jerusalem Post this morning have soared to nearly 2,000 injured, almost 400 dead, and over 100 captured as hostages, including soldiers, women, and small children, easily making yesterday’s surprise raid the single deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s modern history.

Those are just the casualty figures for Israel. And there are hundreds more reports of people who remain missing, so those figures will almost certainly increase. As of this morning’s report, small-arms fighting continues in several places inside Israel.

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After officially declaring war, and warning civilians to clear out of Gaza for most of the day yesterday, the Israeli Defense Forces have begun targeted strikes, but have not commenced what is being called the Gaza counteroffensive yet. They are still calling up reserves and organizing their equipment for an eventual ground invasion.

My morning report yesterday suffered in a couple minor particulars — for example, the IDF commander’s capture turned out to be a hoax — but most of the post held up well through the long news day, and the questions I posed remain open, such as whether any other major players like Hezbollah or Iran will try to take advantage of the chaos or may ultimately be linked to the attack.

So far, no. Aljazeera reported that while Lebanon-based Hezbollah has been lobbing some mortars into the north of Israel, and even though Iran issued several provocative social media statements yesterday, otherwise nobody blinked.

Meanwhile, ordinary Israelis were starting to ask some pretty hard questions. Like, how could this have possibly happened? In one article, the Wall Street Journal posed the question everyone is asking:

Unofficial statements suggest that, for some unstated security reason, 70% to 80% of IDF soldiers may have been temporarily relocated from their normal Gaza duty stations to the West Bank, leaving terrified citizens in the Gaza area mostly undefended. The WSJ reported that even military experts are baffled:

Last month, the Israeli military confidently characterized Gaza as being in a state of “stable instability,” suggesting that the dangers posed by Hamas militants were largely contained…
(But) Palestinian militants armed with machine guns, rocket propelled grenades and pistols were able to stream into Israeli towns and military bases with surprising ease…
“Clearly this was a well-planned operation that didn’t just emerge overnight and it’s surprising it was not detected by Israel or any of its security partners,” said Brian Katulis, vice president of policy at the Middle East Institute think tank in Washington. “It’s hard to think of a security failure of this magnitude in Israel’s recent history.”
Even official mouthpieces like The Jerusalem Post were starting to wonder how the country can possibly live up to its promise to “utterly destroy Hamas” and “extract vengeance.” A cell-based terrorist network like Hamas is hard to attack straight on. The unstated strategy seems to be to trap Hamas’ militants in Gaza, while letting the civilians out, then fighting door-to-door until the job is finished.

From a political perspective, it appears that Israel’s political battle with its left wing is over for the time being. Regardless of the unanswered — unanswerable — questions, the situation will almost certainly rally Israelis around the conservative government. Things will be possible now for Israel that were politically impossible before.

The story continues developing. I’ll keep you posted.