October 7 has now become a war on every front
Under attack from all points of the compass, Israel needs the support and practical assistance of the free world, at a time when it is more viciously demonized than ever
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
Why on earth would Yahya Sinwar have sent a message to Israel, a few short weeks before the October 7 invasion and slaughter, warning of an imminent “flare-up” relating to Palestinian security prisoners and the issue of the “captives”? Why would Hamas’s Gaza chief have wanted to draw attention to himself when he was about to send thousands of terrorists to smash through the border fence on a rampage of murder and rape and abduction?
Israel’s Channel 12 news, which on Sunday revealed the fact of the message and broadcast what it said was the approximate text, reported that the very senior Israeli security and political figures who saw it didn’t have an answer then and don’t have an answer now.
They certainly didn’t interpret the message as a warning ahead of the looming bloodbath — a warning that might have prompted an effective defense. But some of them are speculating now — and this sounds “ridiculous,” the TV report said — that, just maybe, Sinwar was attempting to alert Israel ahead of the invasion — not so that it would be prevented altogether, but so that it would need to be delayed. According to this thesis, Sinwar may have been at odds with his military chief, the possibly now-dead Muhammad Deif, who wanted to invade on October 7, whereas Sinwar sought to delay the massacre to enable greater coordination with Hezbollah.
This does indeed sound beyond ridiculous — that two devilishly cunning and malevolent figures, dedicated to the destruction of Israel, would have been so irreconcilably at odds over the timing of a mass murder they had been planning for years that Sinwar would resort to a cryptic attempt to alert Israel to what was coming.
And to have done so, moreover, in the calibrated hope that Israel would wake up to the danger, but not sufficiently as to remain adequately prepared for the same attack a short time later.
What the very curious case of Yahya Sinwar’s message indisputably highlights, however, is how much worse the gravest disaster and carnage in the history of modern Israel could and would have been were the October 7 assault to have been carried out not only on one front, but on two, or more. And the danger has not yet passed — not by a long stretch.
On Tuesday, Education Minister Yoav Kisch told the heads of local authorities at and near Israel’s northern border with Lebanon that, due to “security complexities,” the almost 15,000 school-age children displaced by the fighting that has raged across that border for more than nine months will not, as had been hoped, be able to go back to school in their hometowns at the start of the new school year on September 1.
While the council chiefs, responsible for the 60,000 Israelis displaced from the north and many more still in the line of fire, were disappointed and deeply concerned — including over the inadequate funding and preparations for alternative frameworks — they could not have been remotely surprised: Hezbollah is being confronted daily by the IDF, but it has manifestly neither been dismantled nor deterred.
On the contrary, its leader Hassan Nasrallah is threatening to strike ever deeper into Israel. And a little graphic published on Wednesday morning would appear to indicate that this is precisely what he is doing — extending the daily rocket barrages deeper into Israel.
האם חיזבאללה אכן מגדיל טווחי ירי כמו שנסראללה הבטיח?
בעקבות כתבה של @yair_kraus נעשה לי חשק לבדוק את זה.
נעזרתי בנתונים של @yuvharpaz (הנגישים לכולם) והכנתי מפה דינמית.
אז בבקשה.
מפה שמסכמת אזעקות בישובים בצפון לפי חודשים.
מסקנה:
אנחנו הצפרדע בתוך המים, בסיר על הגז של נסראללה. pic.twitter.com/tLdiQF0ZOw— מואיז הקטן ® (@LittleMoiz) July 24, 2024
Hezbollah is widely assessed to possess well over 100,000 rockets and missiles, including precision-guided missiles that can hit any target in Israel. Its capacity to wreak devastation throughout the country dwarfs any capabilities Hamas could have mustered at its peak. The “assessment” — and that needs to be a dirty word since October 7 — is that Nasrallah is more interested in the well-being of Lebanon and Lebanese than Sinwar is in the well-being of Gaza and Gazans, and that he would be averse to risking an escalation that would lead Israel to turn Beirut into another Gaza City.
But Israel simply cannot count on that. October 7 demonstrated that this tiny country cannot live — literally — with terrorist armies openly dedicated to its destruction encamped at and near its borders. And diplomacy, thus far, has failed to curb Hezbollah.
That Israel is still somewhat imprisoned by assessments, or rather mis-assessments, was tragically highlighted on yet another front in the early hours of last Friday morning, when an explosive drone fired by the Houthis from Yemen penetrated Israel’s rightly vaunted rocket and missile defenses, struck an apartment building in Tel Aviv and killed an Israeli man.
The IDF acknowledged “human error” in the failure to thwart the drone — by which it meant that Israel Air Force radar operators were not sufficiently alert to the possibility of drone attack from the west, and that, in the vital minutes when the drone headed into Israel from that unexpected direction, it was not recognized as a deadly threat. So no intercept was ordered, no sirens were activated, Yevgeny Ferder lost his life, and many Israelis lost a little more confidence in the capacity of the security forces to protect them.
In the wake of Friday’s attack, the fact is that Israel is now threatened from every direction — drones at potentially every compass point now including the west, Gaza in the south, Hezbollah in the north, and Iran pulling the strings in the east.
National resilience and the rebuilding of the broken covenant between the government and the people require the urgent return of the 116 hostages still held by Hamas since October 7. Hamas must not be able to rearm and reassert control in Gaza, but Israel does not have the resources and should not have the desire to become entrenched there. The Gaza war’s untenable burden on the standing army and the reservists is not sustainable, even leaving aside the challenge posed by Hezbollah. And the Islamist regime in Iran, closing in on the bomb, must be faced down.
Whether Hamas tried and failed to coordinate October 7 with Iran and Hezbollah remains one of the many vital questions surrounding the catastrophe that have yet to be definitively answered. The received wisdom has been that Sinwar kept even the exiled leadership of his own Hamas terror group largely in the dark. The “ridiculous” speculation surrounding his inexplicable reported message to Israel would have it that he and Deif were arguing over the timing.
But all of that matters less than the fact that, for one reason or another, Israel was “only” attacked on one front on October 7. That while Hamas has been considerably weakened by the IDF over the almost 300 days since then, we still have been unable to get our hostages back. That the war on Israel has since expanded to multiple fronts, including open warfare against a Hezbollah army many times more potent than Hamas. And that Israel needs the support and practical assistance of the free world to counter the regime at the heart of the existential threat to our nation.
All this at a time when Israel — led by a divisive, dysfunctional government including ministers bent on alienating our remaining friends — is more viciously demonized internationally than ever before, with ever greater pressure on supportive governments to deny it the backing and practical means to defend itself, and with our most important ally preoccupied for the next few months with its own governance.
October 7, in all its horror, could have been much, much worse. We’re not out of the woods yet.
