Israel woke up on 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 2000,<> rockets, a number of attackers managed to cross the border from the Gaza Strip by land and air.
As early as 7:30 a.m., Israel's Metula news agency said it had "visual evidence that terrorists are using motorized paragliders" in the south. This information was confirmed by the spokesman of the IDF, the Israeli army, indicating that its troops were engaged in ground fighting in "several places around the Gaza Strip" against fighters infiltrated "with the help of paragliders" by sea and land.
Doubling down on its operation, called the "Al-Aqsa Flood," with strong communication on social media, the Al-Qassam Hamas Brigade itself released a video showing members of the Saqr Squadron arriving into Israeli territory from the sky, using motorized paragliders. The infiltrators later claimed to have taken dozens of Israeli civilians and soldiers hostage, backing up their claims with violent videos showing naked and bloodied bodies, which they said they had brought back to the Gaza Strip.
Novel method
Specialists contacted by Le Figaro confirm that the attack technique is unprecedented on the part of the terrorist movement. Since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2006, the few incursions into Israeli land have always been underground. For example, images of Palestinian bulldozers and assailants shearing through the fences at the border to enter Israeli territory sent shockwaves. "Until now, exchanges of fire and rocket fire have been frequent on both sides of the border. But these ground attacks are a first," says Sarah Daoud, a PhD student at Sciences Po's Centre for International Research.
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 referred in particular to a 15-man unit formed in the early 2010s to use motorized paragliders to pass over the wall. But "this unit was not involved in the 2014 war," the colonel said in an interview with LeFigaro on Saturday, and has apparently never served since.
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In his analysis, Michel Goya also indicated that Hamas was training teams of divers to land on the beaches. At the time, the movement had also built some 40 offensive tunnels, some of them nearly three kilometres long, in preparation for a possible incursion. "Concrete structures, placed between ten and thirty meters below the surface and several kilometers long", some of them "equipped with rail systems and minecarts", the analyst detailed.
Did Israeli intelligence anticipate this mode of attack from the air or not? "Not sure," says researcher Sarah Daoud. I think the Israeli authorities are quite aware of the military arsenal that Hamas' military wing has. Rather, it was the timing of the attack that surprised them," says the researcher. "And the Israeli response is likely to be quite strong. The spiral towards war is quite conceivable at this stage.
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