2023-10-07 20:39:37
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The Islamist movement published a video showing its fighters landing in the Hebrew state from the sky, a first.
Israel woke up this Saturday October 7 in a state of shock. The armed wing of Hamas, a Palestinian Islamist group, has launched a massive attack on the territory of the Jewish state. Simultaneously with a rain of more than 2,000 rockets, a number of attackers managed, by land and air, to cross the border from the Gaza Strip.
As of 7:30 a.m., the Israeli Metula news agency claimed to have “visual evidence that terrorists are using powered paragliders” in the south. Information confirmed by the spokesperson for the IDF, the Israeli army, indicating that its troops were engaged in ground combat in “several locations around the Gaza Strip» against fighters infiltrated in «help from paragliders» by sea and by land.
Doubling his operation, called “Al-Aqsa flood», strong communication on social networks, the Al-Qassam Hamas Brigade itself broadcast a video showing members of the Saqr Squadron arriving from the sky on Israeli territory, using motorized paragliders. The infiltrators later claimed to have taken dozens of Israeli civilians and soldiers hostage, supporting their statements with violent videos showing naked and bloodied bodies, which they said they had brought back to the Gaza Strip.
New method
The specialists contacted by Le Figaro confirm that the attack technique is unprecedented on the part of the terrorist movement. Since Hamas controlled the Gaza Strip in 2006, the rare incursions into Israeli land have always been made underground. Thus, the images of bulldozers and Palestinian attackers shearing through the wire fences at the border to enter Israeli territory created a shock wave. “Until now, exchanges of fire and rocket launches were frequent on both sides of the border. But these ground attacks are a first», Says Sarah Daoud, doctoral student at the Sciences Po International Research Center.
In Sisyphus in Gaza, a military analysis published on his blog, Colonel Michel Goya already explained in 2015 that Hamas was developing raiding capabilities inside Israeli territory to circumvent the defensive barrier. The analyst mentioned in particular a unit of 15 men trained, in the early 2010s, to use motorized paragliders to pass over the wall. But “this unit was not engaged in the 2014 war», specifies this Saturday the colonel questioned by The Figaroand would not have first never used since.
Also read: 50 years of the Yom Kippur War: “Israel’s enemies could take advantage of its vulnerability”
In his analysis, Michel Goya also indicated that Hamas was training teams of divers intended to land on the beaches. The movement had also built, at the time, around forty offensive tunnels, some nearly three kilometers long, in order to prepare for a possible incursion. Of the “concrete structures, placed between ten and thirty meters below the surface and several kilometers long“, for some people “equipped with rail and cart systems», detailed the analyst.
Did Israeli intelligence poorly or not anticipate this mode of attack from the air? “Not sure, comments researcher Sarah Daoud. I think that the Israeli authorities are quite well aware of the military arsenal available to the armed wing of Hamas. VS“It was rather the moment chosen for the attack that surprised them,” believes the researcher. “And the Israeli response is likely to be quite strong. The spiral towards war is entirely possible at this stage.»
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