These astonishing images made the rounds on social networks throughout the weekend. At dawn, Saturday October 7, Hamas terrorists attack the Erez border post. Rockets are fired at the concrete wall, opening a passage, then at the iron fence, several meters high.
Elsewhere, a bulldozer opens a passage, simply destroying the immense fortified fence that separates the Gaza Strip from Israel. Fighters from the Ezzeddine al-Qassam brigades equipped with assault weapons cross the barrier by the dozens. At the same time, Hamas fired more than 5,000 rockets into Israeli territory, and other terrorist commandos took off in hang gliders to cross the border by sky.
The “iron wall” should have been impassable. Inaugurated in 2021 after three years of costly construction, the fortification was presented by the authorities as “unique in the world”, with solid arguments. 65 kilometers long, the fortification is made up of a wall and a fence which required 140,000 tonnes of iron and steel. Financed at more than a billion dollars, the “iron wall” is also a compendium of technological innovation, full of multiple radars and other sensors, particularly deep in the ground.
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The rampart is in fact equipped with an underground concrete part, one meter thick, and probably several tens of meters deep, as Le Figaro noted during a report during its construction. The stated objective was to prevent any attempt at intrusion by digging tunnels from the Gaza Strip. Since 2007, the Jewish state has imposed a blockade on this Palestinian territory, controlled since that date by Hamas. The wall is also equipped with remotely controlled weapon systems as well as radar systems. “This barrier is part of the ‘iron wall’ of our defense policy, on the ground, in the air, at sea and in general,” declared General Aviv Kokhavi, Israeli Chief of Staff at his inauguration .
And the construction of the wall was decided after the war in the summer of 2014, with an almost unanimous consensus unlike the wall in the West Bank. During this 52-day conflict, during which more than 2,100 Palestinians and 73 Israelis were killed, residents of the border kibbutz lived in fear of seeing tunnels drilled under the border by enemy fighters. On several occasions, Hamas commandos had carried out deadly raids, convincing the Jewish state to launch Operation “Protective Edge” to destroy, according to official announcements, more than 32 tunnels.
“The Israelis chose to build a classic security barrier initially monitored by autonomous patrols of robots and drones, but ultimately, the IDF deemed it more effective to rely on reaction forces ready to intervene quickly,” explains historian Pierre Razoux, academic director of the Mediterranean Foundation for Strategic Studies*.
This barrier, a “technologically advanced and innovative project”, “will give Israeli citizens a feeling of security”, assured former Defense Minister Benny Gantz in 2021 in a press release. According to the same press release, the barrier also has a portion at sea “connected to a remotely controlled weapons system”.
The Jewish state has also built a barrier made up in places of large concrete sections to separate its soil from the West Bank, another Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 by the Israeli army. Another wall, this time made of steel, was built by Israel on its border with Egypt. This led General Eran Ofir, who led the construction, to say that the wall around Gaza was “one of the most complex projects ever carried out” for the defense of the country.
But obviously, all this defensive equipment was not enough to prevent a crossing of the border. “The country’s leaders believed they had found the solution by creating an airtight border with a wall and barbed wire fences. But they discovered that it was in reality a Maginot line…” explained the director of the geopolitical journal The National Interest Jacob Heilbrunn in L’Express.
With unsophisticated weapons, Hamas fighters managed to cross the wall. “They first neutralized the cameras and surveillance devices to make the Israeli General Staff blind and deaf, then they seized the checkpoints and passed through side crossing points created by the IDF to allow them to to carry out incursions into Gaza,” also explains Pierre Razoux. “Hamas also dug new tunnels, in the form of small tubes of several hundred meters or even kilometers, sufficient to allow a combat group to cross the border.”
At the same time, Israeli defense was undermined by the number of rockets fired by Hamas, saturating the “Iron Dome”, a system developed in 2006 to protect the sky from fire from Gaza. This makes it possible to shoot down machines in flight with a range of up to 70 km, day or night, whatever the weather conditions, in rain, low clouds or fog. And if it obtains a success rate of 90%, according to its manufacturer, it was therefore unable to stop the thousands of rockets sent this weekend against Israel.
Despite the iron defense of the Jewish state, Israel was surprised, giving Hamas terrorists time to take away around a hundred Israeli hostages. “We have become too dependent on the very sophisticated underground barrier, too dependent on technology. We convinced ourselves that this deterred and frightened Hamas,” a reserve officer also reported in the columns of the Israeli daily Haaretz.
*Pierre Razoux is the author of Tsahal: New History of the Israeli Army, published by Perrin.
