Seth Frantzman, adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), senior correspondent at the Jerusalem Post, and author of The October 7 War: Israel’s Battle for Security in Gaza, spoke to a March 3 Middle East Forum Podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
Israel’s overreliance on technology proved fatal after Hamas’s “willingness to throw thousands of men at a fence line” with an “ISIS-like focus.”
The current ceasefire in the October 7 war has reached the end of its first phase, and as such, is at a “crux moment.” Will it reach phase two, or will Israel resume fighting? Although degraded, Hamas still remains in control, and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), albeit still in control of Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor, has withdrawn from much of Gaza. The ceasefire brokered under the Trump administration has freed Israel’s hand from the former Biden administration’s policy restraining it, but how will this end? “It’s not that this is reset back to October 6, 2023, but it is a big question mark as to where this trajectory goes.”
During the 1990s, “the Middle East was a series of powerful states,” but in the past two decades, many declined, and became “chaotic and ungoverned spaces.” For example, part of Yemen is now run by the Iranian-backed Houthis, Libya “has fallen apart” since the collapse of Gaddafi’s regime, and there was a ten-year civil war in Syria under the Assad regime. In the vacuum, extremist groups such as ISIS in Iraq arose, but in 2018, the state system began to reemerge.
Modes of warfare also shifted from a period of battling terrorist groups like ISIS and al Qaeda “to a period of conventional militaries” increasingly reshaped by technology. Thus, innovations in drone technology resulted in a greater reliance on drone warfare. Israel invested “more than a billion dollars” in a smart fence that was “supposed to be some sort of a brilliant high-tech Maginot line.” That overreliance on technology proved fatal after Hamas’s “willingness to throw thousands of men at a fence line” with an “ISIS-like focus.” The poorly defended and undermanned southern border of Israel with Gaza was overrun. Despite the thousands of rockets fired at Israel in the lead-up and the failure of the “general staff and officers” of the IDF, “the entire health system” dealing with the bloody aftermath “didn’t collapse; it actually performed very well.” Hamas’s “al-Aqsa Flood” surprise onslaught on Israel’s October 7 Jewish holiday was not the first time in history that a military was “taken by surprise, whether it’s Pearl Harbor, or the Tet Offensive in ’68, or Custer’s last stand.”
The current challenge Israel faces is fighting an insurgent terror group that illegally took over Gaza to govern it “in collaboration with NGOs and other groups.”
“Commanders were extremely arrogant,” underestimating Hamas and neglecting to quickly mobilize reaction forces nearby. “They never imagined a human wave attack could happen.” Hamas attackers were dressed in uniforms and pretended to be a “legitimate terrorist military organization” in a war. However, when targeted, they discarded their uniforms in an attempt to appear as random civilians. “They don’t actually want to have a stand-up fight when it comes down to it because they’re a murderous genocidal terrorist group” that shouldn’t have military capabilities. The current challenge Israel faces is fighting an insurgent terror group that illegally took over Gaza to govern it “in collaboration with NGOs and other groups.” Israel added goals to its originally stated mission of getting all of its hostages released and defeating Hamas’s governance and military capabilities. “There’s mission creep in the war” in that Israel added the goals of securing the West Bank against the terrorists there, securing the northern border against Hezbollah, and supporting the Trump plan to resettle Gazans. As it stands, how all these goals can be accomplished has yet to be clarified.
Among the key lessons learned from the IDF’s collapse on October 7 is the shortsightedness of any Western military which invests heavily in technology at the expense of conventional armed forces (i.e., tanks and artillery). “You should invest in drones and things, but not at the expense of investing in everyday infantry and all the things that any Western military will need if it has to confront not only ISIS or Hamas, but whether it has to confront China or Iran, or whoever you want to put out there. That’s the nature of the game. You can’t just sit back and have a few little units and hope that will get you through things.
