10 Stops in 5 Days, Plus an Air Raid Shelter, for Blinken

Edward Wong, Michael Crowley

2023 Oct 16 New York Times LINK

The secretary of state’s chaotic trip in the Middle East has underscored the scale and complexity of the diplomatic crisis he faces.

Image Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in Tel Aviv on Monday. His trip was originally scheduled for two days.Credit...Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press

By Edward Wongand Michael Crowley

Edward Wong reported from Israel, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt while traveling with the U.S. secretary of state, and Michael Crowley reported from Washington.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken hurried into a bunker as air raid sirens wailed in Tel Aviv on Monday, in the most dramatic moment of a whirlwind — and unusually chaotic — Middle East tour for America’s top diplomat.

After his second visit to Israel in five days, Mr. Blinken was scheduled to land in Amman, Jordan, on Monday night, but he ended up stuck in a marathon overnight negotiation session in Tel Aviv, and his next destination was uncertain. A trip originally scheduled for two days has now extended into its sixth, with 10 stops and counting.

For an official whose travel schedule is meticulously planned and rarely revised, Mr. Blinken’s frenetic journey has underscored the scale and complexity of the diplomatic crisis he faces.

Mr. Blinken is at once trying to show U.S. support for Israel after it was attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7; limit Arab criticism of Israel’s military response; win the freedom of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza; and prevent an escalation of the conflict, perhaps to include Hezbollah and Iran, that might draw in the United States.

It has been a grim voyage for Mr. Blinken, who at times appeared haunted as he described the slaughter of Israeli citizens and a growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Speaking to reporters in Cairo on Sunday, two days after his first stop in Israel, Mr. Blinken conceded that things had become a blur even for him. “I think I’ve lost track” of how many countries he had visited, Mr. Blinken said, before correctly putting the count at seven since his departure from Washington on Wednesday afternoon: Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, plus two stops each in Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

For State Department veterans, Mr. Blinken’s travel was reminiscent of a recent predecessor. John Kerry, who was secretary of state during the Obama administration, frequently extended and improvised his trips — even changing destinations midflight, in what was branded “seat-of-the-pants diplomacy.” Not so Mr. Blinken, who typically travels from Monday to Friday, returning in time to spend the weekend at home with his two young children.

The ad hoc nature of the trip began just days after the massacres by Hamas. Mr. Blinken immediately moved up a visit to the region that he had planned for the following week. The State Department announced that he would depart on Oct. 11 for Israel and Jordan, and return on Friday, Oct. 13.

That plan was soon torn up as State Department officials, in consultation with the White House, expanded Mr. Blinken’s itinerary to include several other major capitals.

“Henry Kissinger’s 33-day trip to reach an Israeli-Syrian disengagement accord following the 1973 October War holds the Middle East shuttle record,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former longtime State Department Middle East negotiator. “Blinken’s recent wild ride through the region doesn’t quite compare. But it does reflect the uncertainty and chaos of a crisis the administration didn’t see coming and the complexity of the challenges it faces going forward.”

“From here on in,” he added, “the secretary might want to pack a few extra shirts. If the administration wants to make a difference in this region, there are likely going to be more than few wild rides in his future.”

Making a difference will not be easy. Mr. Blinken has not yet succeeded in one of his goals: securing the free passage of American citizens in Gaza through a border crossing into Egypt. Hundreds remained stuck at the sealed border on Monday.

It is not for want of trying. After their arrival in the region, on Thursday, Mr. Blinken and his aides nailed down their schedule for the next day: four countries in one day, from Jordan to Qatar to Bahrain to Saudi Arabia.

They sometimes improvised on the transportation: To get from Tel Aviv, their first stop, to Amman, they took a C-17 U.S. military plane that looped over Cyprus after having sent the usual Boeing 757 Air Force plane ahead so the crew could rest while the American diplomats met with Israeli officials.

In Jordan, Mr. Blinken met with King Abdullah II in his palace and then with Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, in a villa. In Qatar, Mr. Blinken held a joint news conference in a lavish government building with the prime minister. In Bahrain, he spoke to the prime minister, Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, in a V.I.P. airport lounge as royal guards in dress uniforms flanked a red carpet on the tarmac outdoors.

To squeeze in meetings, Mr. Blinken took a quick day trip from Riyadh to the United Arab Emirates on Saturday and then back to the Saudi capital again. On Saturday night, he prepared to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto leader who has regained a measure of diplomatic legitimacy less than three years after the Biden administration released intelligence finding him responsible for the 2018 killing and dismemberment of the Saudi Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

That meeting introduced a new element of uncertainty. Reporters traveling with Mr. Blinken were told to be ready at any minute to leave their hotel in the secretary’s motorcade for an audience with the crown prince, the region’s most powerful Sunni Muslim ruler.

The hours dragged on, from midnight to 2 a.m. and then 4 a.m. Finally, the prince agreed to meet Mr. Blinken after 7:30 a.m. on Sunday at his private farm residence. (The journalists, who had stayed up almost all night, were ultimately denied access.)

Officials said it was typical for the prince to keep even important visitors waiting. Still, it was a rare and most likely frustrating experience for a sleep-deprived Mr. Blinken, who is used to foreign officials accommodating his schedule.

At noon on Sunday, it was off to Egypt — supposedly Mr. Blinken’s last stop before returning home. “I know that this is the last of your big tour in the region,” Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, told Mr. Blinken at the start of their meeting in Cairo.

Not so fast. After speaking to President Biden, Mr. Blinken added a return trip to Israel to his schedule. He spent the night in Jordan before flying back to Tel Aviv on Monday morning and driving on to Jerusalem to see Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again.

By this time, State Department officials had begun whispering about Mr. Biden possibly visiting Israel this week. Plans for a Monday return to Washington were scratched. The new plan was to fly back to Jordan after negotiations with Israeli leaders over humanitarian aid to Palestinians, and everyone would wait there for further instructions.

In Jerusalem on Monday, between meetings with Israeli leaders, Mr. Blinken made an unscheduled stop at the residence of the American ambassador, popping in to borrow a secure line for a call to Washington. He had to brief officials there throughout his trip — and even spoke daily with Mr. Biden.

Mr. Blinken’s trip has also been charged with an unusual current of danger. Security officers who normally wear suits sported body armor and helmets while guarding his plane during his stops in Israel.

On Monday, right after Mr. Blinken’s convoy left Jerusalem, air sirens sounded there, indicating incoming rockets or missiles. Everyone in the city ran for shelter. Sirens sounded too in Tel Aviv. Officials and journalists in the convoy between the two cities were told to race from the cars if sirens sounded and lie down on the ground at roadside.

After Mr. Blinken met with Mr. Netanyahu and his war cabinet around 7 p.m. at the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, sirens sounded again. The traveling journalists and Israeli soldiers standing outside dashed into a stairwell indoors.

Mr. Blinken and Mr. Netanyahu were meeting in the prime minister’s office in the Shimon Peres House on the base when the sirens sounded. Mr. Blinken and the Israeli officials ducked into a bunker for five minutes. There was a boom in the distance — an interceptor missile from the Iron Dome defense system hitting the incoming rocket.

They then walked to a command center to continue their meeting about humanitarian aid. The center was six floors underground. Some Israeli officers have been working and living there — the place has showers — since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7.

Another siren sounded outside, but the officials did not hear it. The negotiations went into early Tuesday with no end in sight — far longer than originally planned.

Edward Wongis a diplomatic correspondent who has reported for The Times for more than 24 years from New York, Baghdad, Beijing and Washington. He was on a team of Pulitzer Prize finalists for Iraq War coverage. More about Edward Wong

Michael Crowleycovers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state. More about Michael Crowley

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/us/politics/blinken-us-israel-gaza.html

Home / News / News analyzes

Qatar and Egypt, discreet but essential mediators of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis

By Emile Bouvier

Published on 11/24/2023 • modified on 11/24/2023 • Reading time: 9 minutes

From the first days of the conflict between Hamas and Israel and the first Israeli retaliatory strikes on the Gaza Strip, eyes very quickly turned towards Qatar: if some of this attention carried a large part of disapproval from the welcome given on its soil by this petromonarchy to Hamas, another party saw in Doha the natural mediator of this new episode of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Indeed, if Qatar has never hidden its intention not to recognize the State of Israel for a long time  [ 1 ], it has also suggested that informal “working relations” (sic) would continue to exist between the two country, particularly on the Palestinian question  [ 2 ]. He also strongly condemned the Israeli military response to the Hamas attacks, saying that Israel was responsible for the security escalation .  [ 3 ] Qatar is, in fact, able to dialogue with the two protagonists: not only does Doha admit to naturally having unofficial channels of communication with the Jewish state, but it has the confidence of Hamas.

This role of mediator, traditionally discreet, has found itself in the spotlight in recent days due to the growing success of the discussions carried out under the aegis of Doha between negotiators from Tel Aviv and representatives of Hamas; these, in fact, ended with a compromise on November 22 providing, among other things, the release of 50 of the 240 hostages  [ 4 ]held by Hamas and 150 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, accompanied by a cease-fire. four-day fire. The two parties agreed on the extensibility of this agreement, providing for an extension of the ceasefire if more hostages were released  [ 5 ]. If the Israeli Prime Minister indicated that Israel was “at war, and will continue the war”  [ 6 ]at the end of the truce, Western chancelleries welcomed the conclusion of this agreement concluded in coordination with the United States and, in a much less publicized way, with Egypt.

This article thus intends to explore behind the scenes of the conclusion of this agreement (I) and to focus in particular on what the latter demonstrates of the singular, discreet and yet essential role of mediators played by Qatar (II) and Egypt (III). in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

I. A highly sensitive agreement

Negotiations centered around the release of hostages held by Hamas began in the first days of the conflict: on October 9, two days after the attack by Palestinian militants against the Israeli kibbutzim, Doha and Cairo proved to be already engaged in talks with Hamas  [ 7 ]. The United States, particularly invested in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis  [ 8 ], will try to support and coordinate these negotiations as much as possible and will set up a “secret cell” (sic)  [ 9 ]of advisors to the American president with the Qatari in this sense. This work will culminate, on October 20, in the first release of two American hostages. An American official told Agence France Presse (AFP) that this first success was to serve as a pilot “process” in order to judge Qatar's real capacity to carry out such sensitive negotiations  [ 10 ].

This first success will encourage the parties involved in these negotiations - Israel, the United States, Egypt, Qatar, Hamas - to become more involved in the discussions. William Burns, head of the CIA and David Barnea, director of the Mossad, will thus be personally involved in the negotiations  [ 11 ], as will American President Joe Biden who will speak on the telephone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 20, 22, October 23 and 25 to discuss the talks  [ 12 ]. The latter, particularly tense, will be made even more complex to carry out by the poor quality of communications within the Gaza Strip, where the hostages are still being held.

Faced with the risk of discussions getting bogged down, Williams Burns and David Barnea will travel to Doha on November 9 to speak face to face with Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed ben Abderrahmane Al-Thani  [ 13 ]. Three days later, the American President followed up with a call to the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, during which he “clearly indicated to him that the current situation [of the negotiations] was not sufficient”  [ 14 ].

What followed will be a succession of disappointed and renewed hopes: while Hamas will end up producing on November 13 a list of criteria for the release of the fifty Israeli hostages, Joe Biden will call Benjamin Netanyahu again the next day to urge him to accept this agreement, which the Israeli Prime Minister will finally agree to do. However, on November 15, Hamas abruptly ceased discussions, raising fears of a collapse of the negotiation process. The American President will then call the Emir of Qatar two days later to reiterate that this agreement must be achieved at all costs. The Egyptians, represented by their head of intelligence services Abbas Kamel, managed to relaunch discussions and ultimately bring all the parties to an agreement  [ 15 ].

II. Qatar, an essential mediator

The Qatari authorities proved indispensable in the conclusion of this agreement - and will probably also be essential in the continuation of the upcoming negotiations, with Hamas still holding the vast majority of hostages - for several reasons. First, they have maintained pragmatic relations with Israel for around thirty years, guided by the mutual interests of these two nations; secondly, Qatar hosts most of the Hamas staff on its soil. Qatar also has the confidence of the United States, which has its largest military influence on Qatari soil in the Middle East - the Al-Udeid air base, with nearly 10,000 soldiers [  16 ] -without thereby attracting the wrath of Iran with which Doha maintains close relations, particularly in energy matters since the two Gulf neighbors share the largest gas field in the world  [ 17 ]. This ability to dialogue with everyone, including with rival actors or with others with whom Western chancelleries refuse to officially deal - like political movements like the Afghan Taliban - has become, for several years, a specialty of Doha.

Indeed, Qatar has several very notable diplomatic feats to its credit, even if they have not always been crowned with success. One of the first in which Doha was able to distinguish itself was its attempt to resolve the political crisis in Lebanon in 2008, by organizing talks between rival political factions in order to end the clashes and find ground agreement  [ 18 ]. Meeting in the Qatari capital, the actors in the Lebanese crisis reached several compromises  [ 19 ] ; this mediation will prove to be a significant enough success for Qatar to become a regular - but always discreet - supporter of Lebanon and for it to be part, today, of the "group of Five" [20] in  charge of findinga solution to the presidential vacuum in the country  [ 21 ]. Qatar's mediation capacity was demonstrated again the following year, when Doha hosted peace talks between the Sudanese government and certain Darfur rebel groups in order to find a peaceful solution to the conflict  [ 22 ]. More recently, Qatar has hosted negotiations between the United States and the Afghan Taliban  [ 23 ]and numerous others between Washington and Tehran on subjects ranging from Iranian nuclear power  [ 24 ]to that of an exchange of prisoners  [ 25 ]..

Due to its privileged relations with both Israel and Hamas and its history of successful mediations in the region, Qatar immediately established itself as the natural mediator of the crisis. However, the scale of the role played by Doha in the conclusion of the agreement between Israel and Hamas should not eclipse that played by Egypt.

III. Egypt, a more occasional but equally decisive mediator

A geopolitical as well as a demographic heavyweight  [ 26 ]in the Middle East, Egypt has also had several successful mediation exercises in recent years. The latest one, still in progress, is part of the civil war in Sudan: in fact, since the start of hostilities between the president of the Sudanese Sovereignty Council Abdel Fattah al-Burhane and his former number two the General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo (known as “Hemetti”), several actors tried to impose themselves as mediators. Among them, Egypt managed to win this role  [ 27 ], bringing the belligerents together on several occasions around the negotiating table  [ 28 ]. Egyptian mediation also stood out in Libya, with Cairo having demonstrated its ability to dialogue with each party  [ 29 ], despite its notorious goodwill for Marshal Haftar.

Egypt also maintains special relations with Israel and the Palestinian movements. Before the Abraham Accords (2020), Cairo was one of the only countries, with Jordan, to maintain official relations with Israel. Their relationships, often complex, remained guided by pragmatism and their common interests, particularly in energy matters, as Keys to the Middle East recently detailed , or even military matters  [ 30 ]. Egypt's desire to maintain correct relations with Israel is such that, beyond the declarations of the Egyptian president affirming his attachment to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty [31], the Egyptian authorities  have only reactedvery weighted to the injuries of several of their border guards following an accidental shot from an Israeli tank on October 22, 2023  [ 32 ].

On the Palestinian side, Egypt is also very present here due to its geographical proximity to the Gaza Strip, to which it adjoins; Cairo thus played the role of mediator in October 2017 between Fatah and Hamas in order to promote the return of the Palestinian Government to Gaza  [ 33 ]and, a few weeks before the start of hostilities on October 7, in July 2023, it still received in Cairo in an attempt to reconcile them  [ 34 ]. Egypt, in fact, has long played this role between Israel and the various Palestinian movements; such mediation took place, for example, in August 2022 when Israeli forces and Islamic Jihad militants exchanged deadly fire on both sides of the Gaza Strip  [ 35 ].

Egypt's role in the current Israeli-Palestinian crisis, however, seems more minor than that of Qatar despite its full mobilization from the start of hostilities  [ 36 ]and appears, in many respects, complementary to Doha. Indeed, while Qatar leads the negotiations, Egypt participates and helps implement the agreement on the ground. This was for example the case during the release of Israeli hostages Yocheved Lifshitz and Nurit Cooper on October 23, which was possible thanks to their being taken by ambulance to Egypt, where they were examined by doctors. on site before being transferred to Israel  [ 37 ]. The same goes for the current agreement, which should jointly mobilize the International Red Cross and Egypt in its practical implementation  [ 38 ], although no further details have emerged at this time. . The Egyptian authorities thus appear essential in the mediation process, as was shown by the visit on November 16 to Cairo by Ronen Bar, director of the Shin Bet (the Israeli domestic intelligence service), as well as the reception in the Egyptian capital by the head of the Egyptian intelligence services Abbas Kamel, on November 11, of a Hamas delegation led by its political leader Ismail Haniyeh  [ 39 ].

Conclusion

Egypt and Qatar have thus proven to be valuable mediators in the Middle East for many years; very often discreet, their mediation is all the more effective and, above all, accepted by the various protagonists, who are often reluctant to see the content of their negotiations made public. This new episode of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a new opportunity to prove it and provide a demonstration of the complementarity of the two countries on this issue. Qatar, however, remains the main conductor of this mediation and intends to gain a substantial diplomatic aura from it; the Qatari prime minister has already announced that he hopes that the ceasefire concluded between Israel and Hamas will lead to new negotiations towards a real peace agreement, and that he is ready to once again be the architect of a such a compromise  [ 40 ]. However, Hamas still holds more than 180 Israeli hostages and the Israeli Prime Minister has reiterated his desire to “destroy” the Palestinian movement; while each belligerent still seems determined to prolong the armed clashes, the negotiations carried out under the mediation of Qatar and Egypt promise, in the

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Sitography:

– Qatar says won't normalize ties with Israel soon, Anadolu Ajansi, 09/15/2020

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/qatar-says-won-t-normalize- ties-with-israel-soon/1974315

– Qatar: “No normalization with Israel”, The Times of Israel, 02/03/2022

https://fr.timesofisrael.com/qatar-pas-de-normalisation-avec- israel/

– Qatar Says Israel Is Responsible for Escalation, Oman, Bahrain Call for Restraint, Asharq Al-Awsat, 07/10/2023

https://english.aawsat.com/gulf/4590556-qatar-says-israel-responsible- escalation-oman-bahrain-call-restraint

– Gaza hostage release will not start before Friday, Israel says, Reuters, 22/11/2023

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-government-debates -deal-release-gaza-hostages-truce-2023-11-21/

– Netanyahu says Israel will continue war against Hamas after cease-fire, PBS News, 11/21/2023

https://www.pbs.org/newshour /world/netanyahu-says-israel-will-continue-war-against-hamas-after-cease-fire

– Qatar holds discussions with Hamas on Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip, La Tribune, 09/10 /2023

https://www.latribune.fr/economie/international/le-qatar-mene-des-discussions-avec-le-hamas-sur-les-otages-israeliens-detenus-dans-la-bande-de- gaza-979346.html

– Political pressures on Biden helped drive 'secret cell' of aides in hostage talks, Deccan Herald, 11/22/2023

https://www.deccanherald.com/world/political-pressures-on-biden- helped-drive-secret-cell-of-aides-in-hostage-talks-2780615

– Political Pressures on Biden Helped Drive 'Secret Cell' of Aides in Hostage Talks, The New York Times, 11/21/2023

https:// www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/us/politics/biden-hostage-talks-israel-hamas.html

– US reveals 'excruciating' five-week negotiations behind Israel-Hamas deal, France24, 11/22/2023

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231122-the-frantic-effort-behind-the-hamas-israel-truce-deal

– The frantic effort behind the Hamas-Israel truce deal, Daily Sun, 22/11/2023

https://www.daily-sun.com/post/722617

– Mossad, CIA chiefs meet Qatar PM in Doha on Gaza hostage deal -source, Reuters, 09/11/2023

https://www. reuters.com/world/middle-east/mossad-cia-chiefs-meet-with-qatar-pm-doha-over-hostage-deal-source-2023-11-09/

– US reveals 'excruciating' five-week negotiations behind Israel-Hamas deal, France24, 11/22/2023

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231122-the-frantic-effort-behind-the-hamas-israel-truce-deal

– Israel -Hamas hostage deal delayed until Friday, Israeli official says, CBS News, 11/22/2023

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-hostage-deal-delayed-friday/

– Iran and Qatar: the economy for sharing only, Les Echos, 08/21/2018

https://www. lesechos.fr/idees-debats/cercle/iran-et-qatar-leconomie-pour-seul-partage-137024

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https ://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1350705/mediations-et-donations- quatre-decennies-de-soutien-qatari- au-liban.html

– Darfur: Peace talks in Doha between government and JEM rebels, Nations United, 02/10/2009

https://news.un.org/fr/story/2009/02/150212

– Afghanistan: discussions in Doha between Taliban and government despite the fighting, France24, 07/17/2021

https: //www.france24.com/fr/asie-pacifique/20210717-afghanistan-des-discussions-%C3%A0-doha-between-taliban-et-government-malgr%C3%A9-les-combats

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https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/qatar-held-separate-talks-with-us-iran- touching-nuclear-drones-2023-09-20/

– US prisoners freed from Iran make emotional return home after swap deal, Reuters, 09/19/2023

https://www.reuters.com/world/american-prisoners-freed -by-iran-head-us-after-choreographed-swap-2023-09-19/

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https ://www.la-croix.com/Monde/Afrique/100-millions-dhabitants-légal-vit-contre-transition-demgraphique-2020-02-13-1201078114

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https://www.jeuneafrique.com/1443289/politique/conflit-au-soudan-comment-legypte-veut-simposition-dans-la-mediation/

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https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/egypt-launch-fresh-sudan-mediation-attempt-during-summit-2023-07- 13/

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https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2020/09/turkey-libya-sarraj-resignation-ankara- accepts-egypt-role.html

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/world/ middleeast/israel-airstrikes-sinai-egypt.html

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https://www.timesofisrael.com/egyptian-leader-says -peace-treaty-with-israel-stable-and-permanent/

– Egyptian army says border guards hurt in accidental hit by Israeli tank, Reuters, 22/10/2023

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-military-says-mistakenly-hit-egyptian-position- near-gaza-border-2023-10-22/

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https:/ /press.un.org/fr/2017/cs13035.doc.htm

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https://www. timesofisrael.com/hamas-fatah-meet-in-egypt-in-attempt-to-broker-reconciliation/

– Israeli-Palestinian conflict: mediation by Egypt to try to ease tensions between Gaza and Israel, RTBF, 06 /08/2022

https://www.rtbf.be/article/conflit-israelo-palestinian-mediation-de-legypte-pour-tenter-dapaiser-les-tensions-entre-gaza-et-israel-11043611

– Germany voices support for Egypt's mediation efforts between Israel and Palestine, Anadolu Ajansi, 08/10/2023

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/germany-voices-support-for-egypt-s-mediation-efforts- between-israel-and-palestine/3011787

– Egypt plays second fiddle to Qatar on Hamas mediation, Globes, 11/23/2023

https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-egypt-plays-second-fiddle -to-qatar-on-hamas-mediation-1001463254

– Red Cross 'cannot force its way in' to see hostages, but critics say it could do more, The Times of Israel, 11/20/2023

https://www. timesofisrael.com/red-cross-cannot-force-its-way-in-to-see-hostages-but-critics-say-it-could-do-more/

– Is Egypt Nearing a Breakthrough in Israel-Hamas Deal? , Asharq al-Awsat, 16/1/2023

https://english.aawsat.com/arab-world/4671886-egypt-nearing-breakthrough-israel-hamas-deal

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Notes

[1] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/qatar-says-won-t-normalize-ties-with-israel-soon/1974315

[2] https://fr.timesofisrael.com/qatar-pas-de-normalisation-avec-israel/

[3] https://english.aawsat.com/gulf/4590556-qatar-says-israel-responsible-escalation-oman-bahrain-call-restraint

[4] https://www.leparisien.fr/international/israel/guerre-a-gaza-la-croix-rouge-annonce-que-sa-presidente-a-rencontre-le-chef-du-hamas-au-qatar-20-11-2023-PREJUBWWMVDFFMYHJRHZXG3GG4.php

[5] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-government-debates-deal-release-gaza-hostages-truce-2023-11-21/

[6] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/netanyahu-says-israel-will-continue-war-against-hamas-after-cease-fire

[7] https://www.latribune.fr/economie/international/le-qatar-mene-des-discussions-avec-le-hamas-sur-les-otages-israeliens-detenus-dans-la-bande-de-gaza-979346.html

[8] Citons les nombreux déplacements effectués par des hauts responsables américains dans la région dès le début de la crise, notamment celles du Président Joe Biden ou encore du Secrétaire d’Etat Antony Blinken ; la présidence américaine aurait passé, au 23 novembre, un total de 13 appels téléphoniques à la primature israélienne depuis le 7 octobre (voir https://www.deccanherald.com/world/political-pressures-on-biden-helped-drive-secret-cell-of-aides-in-hostage-talks-2780615)

[9] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/us/politics/biden-hostage-talks-israel-hamas.html

[10] The release of two American citizens on October 20 was seen as "a pilot process".

[11] https://www.daily-sun.com/post/722617

[12] https://www.dawn.com/news/1791700/frantic-efforts-behind-closed-doors-led-to-truce-deal

[13] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/mossad-cia-chiefs-meet-with-qatar-pm-doha-over-hostage-deal-source-2023-11-09/

[14] https://www.timesofisrael.com/behind-the-scenes-of-the-intense-talks-that-led-to-the-israel-hamas-hostage-deal/

[15] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231122-the-frantic-effort-behind-the-hamas-israel-truce-deal

[16] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231107-probe-launched-as-us-soldier-dies-at-qatars-al-udeid-air-base/

[17] https://www.lesechos.fr/idees-debats/cercle/iran-et-qatar-leconomie-pour-seul-partage-137024

[18] https://www.france24.com/fr/20080517-acteurs-crise-libanaise-pourparlers-a-doha-liban-qatar

[19] Comme celui de former une commission chargée d’établir une nouvelle loi électorale.

[20] Ce groupe inclut la France, les Etats-Unis, l’Arabie saoudite, le Qatar et l’Egypte.

[21] https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1350705/mediations-et-donations-quatre-decennies-de-soutien-qatari-au-liban.html

[22] https://news.un.org/fr/story/2009/02/150212

[23] https://www.france24.com/fr/asie-pacifique/20210717-afghanistan-des-discussions-%C3%A0-doha-entre-taliban-et-gouvernement-malgr%C3%A9-les-combats

[24] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/qatar-held-separate-talks-with-us-iran-touching-nuclear-drones-2023-09-20/

[25] https://www.reuters.com/world/american-prisoners-freed-by-iran-head-us-after-choreographed-swap-2023-09-19/

[26] Le 11 janvier 2020, le pays a passé officiellement le cap des 100 millions d’habitants (https://www.la-croix.com/Monde/Afrique/100-millions-dhabitants-lEgypte-vit-contre-transition-demographique-2020-02-13-1201078114)

[27] https://www.jeuneafrique.com/1443289/politique/conflit-au-soudan-comment-legypte-veut-simposer-dans-la-mediation/

[28] https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/egypt-launch-fresh-sudan-mediation-attempt-during-summit-2023-07-13/

[29] https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2020/09/turkey-libya-sarraj-resignation-ankara-accepts-egypt-role.html

[30] Les deux pays avaient notamment connu un pic de coopération militaire durant la seconde moitié des années 2010 afin de lutter contre l’expansion des groupes djihadistes dans le désert du Sinaï (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/world/middleeast/israel-airstrikes-sinai-egypt.html)

[31] https://www.timesofisrael.com/egyptian-leader-says-peace-treaty-with-israel-stable-and-permanent/

[32] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-military-says-mistakenly-hit-egyptian-position-near-gaza-border-2023-10-22/

[33] https://press.un.org/fr/2017/cs13035.doc.htm

[34] https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-fatah-meet-in-egypt-in-attempt-to-broker-reconciliation/

[35] https://www.rtbf.be/article/conflit-israelo-palestinien-mediation-de-legypte-pour-tenter-dapaiser-les-tensions-entre-gaza-et-israel-11043611

[36] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/germany-voices-support-for-egypt-s-mediation-efforts-between-israel-and-palestine/3011787

[37] https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-egypt-plays-second-fiddle-to-qatar-on-hamas-mediation-1001463254

[38] https://www.timesofisrael.com/red-cross-cannot-force-its-way-in-to-see-hostages-but-critics-say-it-could-do-more/

[39] https://english.aawsat.com/arab-world/4671886-egypt-nearing-breakthrough-israel-hamas-deal

[40] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/qatar-hopes-gaza-humanitarian-pause-deal-will-lead-to-serious-peace-talks/3061234

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The keys to the Middle East is an information site on the history and current affairs of the Middle East. According to the site's editorial line: "How history explains current events", current events in the Middle East are thus placed and analyzed in their historical context. These scientific assessments, carried out by university professors, doctors, researchers, soldiers and members of the private sector, are published in the sections “Historical benchmarks”, “Analysis of current events”, “Portraits and interviews” and “Cultural information”.

From <https://www-lesclesdumoyenorient-com.translate.goog/Le-Qatar-et-l-Egypte-discrets-mais-incontournables-mediateurs-de-la-crise.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en>

Antony Blinken

Tony Blinken is managing director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and the Herter/Nitze Distinguished Scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Tony has held senior foreign policy positions in two administrations over three decades—including Deputy Secretary of State in the Obama administration, the nation’s number two diplomat. Tony helped to lead diplomacy in the fight against ISIL, the rebalance to Asia, and the global refugee crisis, while building bridges to the innovation community. Before that, Tony served as Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama. He chaired the Deputies Committee, the administration’s principal forum for formulating foreign policy. During the first Obama term, he was National Security Advisor to Vice President Biden. Tony served as Democratic Staff Director for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2002 to 2008 and was a member of President Clinton’s National Security Council staff from 1994 to 2001.

Tony was a reporter for The New Republic magazine and has written widely about foreign policy. He is the author of Ally Versus Ally: America, Europe, and the Siberian Pipeline Crisis. He is also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and a global affairs analyst for CNN.

Tony is a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Law School.

From <https://www.academyofdiplomacy.org/member/antony-blinken/>’ 

Maurice Blinken, 86; Early Backer of Israel

July 15, 1986

From <https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/15/obituaries/maurice-blinken-86-early-backer-of-israel.html>

Maurice H. Blinken, a New York lawyer who founded the American Palestine Institute after World War II, died Sunday at the Good Samaritan Hospital, West Palm Beach, Fla., after a long illness. He was 86 years old and lived in Palm Beach.

In 1946, under Mr. Blinken's direction, the institute initiated and financed a report by several economists, ''Palestine: Problem and Promise,'' which argued that an independent Jewish state was economically viable.

This rebutted a British white paper that contended Palestine could not economically support a large immigrant population.

The institute's report is said to have helped persuade the United States Government to support the establishment of the State of Israel.

Mr. Blinken was born in Kiev, Russia, and was a graduate of New York University in 1921 and of its law school in 1924.

From 1939 to 1951, he represented the United States interests of Marks & Spencer, the British department store company. A former resident of Yonkers, he served as president of the city's school board and as chairman of its public library board.

In 1954, Mr. Blinken and his son Robert founded the Mite Corporation, a company that manufactured hardware machinery. In 1985, it was acquired by Emhart Industries.

Mr. Blinken is survived by his wife, the former Ethel Horowitz; three sons, Donald, of Manhattan, Robert, of Bedford Hills, N.Y., and Alan, of Manhattan; and nine grandchildren.

From <https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/15/obituaries/maurice-blinken-86-early-backer-of-israel.html>

Antony Blinken steps into the spotlight with Obama administration role

16 Sep 2013 |  The Washington Post

Tony Blinken, rising

Abstract: Blinken is deputy national security adviser to President Obama, who has also invoked the Holocaust as his administration wrestles, often painfully, with how to respond to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's alleged use of chemical weapons.

 ***

Tony Blinken enters the spotlight

Obama's deputy national security adviser wields influence by helping to set the agenda on Syria and beyond.

As a precocious teenager growing up in Paris, Antony J. Blinken asked his stepfather, the world-renowned lawyer Samuel Pisar, to open up about his experience surviving Auschwitz and Dachau.

"He wanted to know," Pisar said. "He took in what had happened to me when I was his age, and I think it impressed him and it gave him another dimension, another look at the world and what can happen here. When he has to worry today about poison gas in Syria, he almost inevitably thinks about the gas with which my entire family was eliminated."

Blinken is deputy national security adviser to President Obama, who has also invoked the Holocaust as his administration wrestles, often painfully, with how to respond to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's alleged use of chemical weapons. One of the government's key players in drafting Syria policy, the 51-year-old Blinken has Clinton administration credentials and deep ties to Vice President Biden and the foreign policy and national security establishment in Washington. He has drawn attention in Situation Room photos, including the iconic one during the May 2011 raid of Osama bin Laden's compound, for his stylishly wavy salt-and-pepper hair. But what sets him apart from the other intellectual powerhouses in the inner sanctum is a life story that reads like a Jewish high-society screenplay that the onetime aspiring film producer may have once dreamed of making. There's his father, a giant in venture capital; his mother, the arts patron; and his stepfather, who survived the Holocaust to become of one of the most influential lawyers on the global stage. It is a bildungsroman for young Blinken - playing in a Parisian jazz band, debating politics with statesmen - with a supporting cast of characters that includes, among others, Leonard Bernstein, John Lennon, Mark Rothko, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, Abel Ferrara and Christo.

Despite being astoundingly pedigreed, Blinken further distinguishes himself in this transactional town by being almost universally regarded as unassuming and collegial. It is a character trait that has smoothed over significant policy rifts with his bosses and aided his long career in a field trudged by enormous egos. Beyond the White House gates, he shares a Dupont Circle home with his equally photogenic wife Evan Ryan, a former Hillary Rodham Clinton scheduler, Biden campaign staffer and now a State Department nominee. And Blinken periodically dusts off his guitar to jam the blues and Beatles covers with White House press secretary Jay Carney and other Washington pals. ("He's a good singer," said Dave McKenna, a writer and bandmate.)

Discreet even among his closest family, Blinken, who declined an interview request for this article, has for decades been Washington's consummate staffer. But now, as he transfers from aide to policymaker in the middle of what is perhaps the administration's most delicate and volatile foreign policy crisis, he is inching into a spotlight.

A much-discussed Wall Street Journal article in January attributed greater administration focus on Syria to Blinken, who frequently insisted that "superpowers don't bluff." On Sept. 6, Blinken caused a mini-stir on NPR, saying that "it's neither [Obama's] desire nor intention" to strike Syria without congressional backing. Three days later, he told MSNBC's "Daily Rundown" that the United States doesn't do "pinprick" attacks, a line repeated by Obama in his national address Tuesday night. Blinken "seemed to be the leader of the pack" in a briefing with counterparts from the State and Defense departments in his old Capitol Hill stamping grounds, according to Rep. Steven Cohen (D-Tenn.), who also participated in a Blinken-led call with other Jewish lawmakers.

Blinken, his advocates say, seems groomed for this enhanced and increasingly public role.

"Tony Blinken is a superstar and that's not hyperbole," Biden said. The vice president joked that "the president recognized that after four years with me and stole him." Blinken, he added, "could do any job, any job."

Process over advocacy

Deputy national security adviser might sound like a junior job, but in a town where winning bureaucratic arguments can determine national policy, Blinken wields enormous influence by helping to set the agenda.

On policy, Blinken is considered a deeply knowledgeable and nonideological consensus-builder, allowing the facts of each situation to guide his questions and advice and emphasizing process over advocacy. He is also known for his light touch ("He has a way of telling people hard things in soft ways," said Sandy Berger, Clinton's former national security adviser and a Blinken mentor) and eye-roll-worthy puns. (He began a recent White House meeting on Arctic policy by saying, "Before I go any further on this topic, I think we need to break the ice.")

Officials and friends say that Blinken's lessons learned while working on Bosnia in the Clinton administration and myriad other national security matters play a significant role in informing his views on current issues. They describe him as sharing much of the centrist, realist thinking of Biden and former national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon, another Bidenite with whom Blinken is close, but with a stronger interventionist streak. Blinken surprised some in the Situation Room by breaking with Biden to support military action in Libya, administration officials said, and he advocated for American action in Syria after Obama's reelection. These sources said that Blinken was less enthusiastic than Biden about Obama's decision to seek congressional approval for a strike in Syria, but is now - perhaps out of necessity - onboard and a backer of diplomatic negotiations with Russia. While less of an ideologue than Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (a job for which he was considered), he not surprisingly shares her belief that global powers such as the United States have a "responsibility to protect" against atrocities.

"I came from oblivion," said Pisar, Blinken's stepfather. Sent to a labor camp at 13, he survived Majdanek and Dachau, escaped the gas chambers of Auschwitz and, in 1945, emerged an orphan at age 16. A refugee, he got his hands on a BMW 500 and sped over the German highways, turning to thieving and the black market, and he was jailed by American MPs before distant relatives found him and sent him to Paris and Australia. There, he excelled academically and won a scholarship to pursue a PhD at Harvard.

Pisar's controversial Cold War thesis about coexistence and commerce between the United States and Russia ("a very hot topic today," he noted) won awards and the attention of then-Sen. John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who later recruited the polyglot as an adviser and signed, as president, a special act of Congress making Pisar an American citizen. After Kennedy's assassination, Pisar practiced law in Hollywood and counted many stars among his clients. He eventually returned to Europe as a UNESCO official and opened a law office in Paris representing high-watt names, including Catherine Deneuve, Jane Fonda, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, whose first divorce he negotiated. He counseled President Valery Giscard d'Estaing of France, represented Coca-Cola and the Republic of China. Pisar met Blinken's mother, Judith, at a New York soiree in 1968.

Judith was then married to Donald Blinken, the son of an influential Yonkers lawyer, and had given birth to Antony in 1962. Judith managed Merce Cunningham's dance company and socialized with Arturo Toscanini and Bernstein at the couple's Park Avenue home. Donald was a New York powerhouse and arts patron, counting Rothko and Robert Rauschenberg among his friends. When Tony Blinken interviewed for the exclusive Dalton school as a kindergartener, the teacher asked him what he thought of a painting on the wall.

" 'Some people would call it a painting,' " Blinken said, according to his mother, " 'but I would call it a picture.' "

Blinken was Dalton material. His mother recalled him sitting in the pit at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where she was the director of music, as John Cage conducted and let the boy play with whatever he wanted. "It didn't matter if another strange sound was heard," she said.

The Blinkens divorced in 1970, and Judith married Pisar the following year and relocated to France with Antony.

"I was concerned how he would take to being shipped abroad so suddenly to live in a strange city with a different language and his parents divorced," said Donald. "And it could have worked out very badly. But, happily, both his mother and I were supportive of him all along, and he never blinked."

Pisar said that he was careful never to try to supplant Blinken as the boy's father. "I was his friend and maybe his mentor a little bit," Pisar said.

As chairwoman of the American Center for Students and Artists in Paris, Blinken's mother further expanded his horizons. The artist Christo, who hired Pisar as his lawyer to assist in a project to wrap Paris's Pont Neuf, recalled Blinken as a "very exquisite, demanding and curious" young man. "His mother was taking him around to all the exhibitions."

Rolling Stones breakout of the castle

Blinken talked politics with family friend Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the author of "The American Challenge," and other U.S. dignitaries that Judith called the "hungry Americans," including Sens. Jacob Javits (R-N.Y.) and Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Wash.). But Blinken also had a more carefree side. As a high school student at the Ecole Bilingue, he delighted in puns, played hockey and scored gigs in a jazz band to raise money for the school's first yearbook. He sneaked out of his family's apartment on Avenue Foch Square, facing the Debussy garden shared by the pianist Arthur Rubinstein and Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, to see a Rolling Stones concert, recalled one friend.

"He wasn't a goody-goody," Judith said.

He asked his stepfather for a motorcycle, and Pisar, recalling his reckless postwar rides, suggested a car instead. Blinken also spent time with his half-sister Leah, who also became a Clinton administration official, at the Pisars' apartment in New York, where the family displayed a 96-inch-wide Christo drawing of the Pont Neuf above the modernist living room. He took in Yankees games with his father.

By then, the elder Blinken had co-founded E.M. Warburg, Pincus & Co., a powerhouse global venture capital firm. He was also president of the Rothko Foundation and a major Democratic donor, and was named chairman of the New York state university program by Democratic governors. Tony Blinken made his bar mitzvah at Temple Emanuel in Yonkers and spent summers in East Hampton, where his father got him a job as a counselor at Boys Harbor, a camp for underprivileged kids.

While Blinken was not religious, his father said, thoughts of the Holocaust always lingered. The year before Blinken received his French baccalaureate degree, Pisar published his memoir, "Of Blood and Hope."

Blinken also pursued the writing life. At Harvard, he joined the Crimson as a freshman and ultimately edited the paper, as well as the weekly art magazine, What Is To Be Done, with the highly regarded New York political reporter Errol Louis. Blinken wore his hair long, played the guitar and cherished a John Lennon autograph his mother scored for him one day after she spent hours reading poetry with the musician and Yoko Ono.

Friends say he was torn about whether to pursue a career in the arts or in politics. He attempted to split the difference by interning at the New Republic, writing pieces critical of Reagan administration and Republican hedging on apartheid. He graduated from Harvard in 1984, the year of the Los Angeles Olympics, which he attended with his stepfather, then general counsel of the International Olympic Committee. Seated upfront for the 100-meter dash, Blinken's sister complained about being splashed with Carl Lewis's sweat as the sprinter blazed past. "Shut up and bottle it," his stepfather recalled Blinken saying.

In Paris, Blinken organized a film festival and his family hosted a gathering for Spike Lee, who, Judith recalled fondly, "kept calling me 'sister.' "

Blinken, too, had filmmaking ambitions, even organizing a short film festival in Paris. "I talked him out of it," Pisar said.

"Everyone age 21 wants to make films," said Donald Blinken, adding that he and his second wife, Vera, "hoped that he would go on to law school."

He did, attending Columbia and furthering his education in international affairs. In 1987, the same year Blinken worked as a summer associate at the prestigious Rogers & Wells law firm, Praeger published his Harvard senior thesis - "Ally vs. Ally: America, Europe and the Siberian Pipeline Crisis." ("I've reserved the rights for the miniseries," he told the Los Angeles Times. "But we haven't discussed who'll play the part of the pipeline.") He also became active in Democratic politics, helping his father raise money for Michael Dukakis's 1988 presidential run. The campaign's finance director, Robert Farmer, recalled Blinken fondly as bright, but "not an outgoing young man." He remembered Blinken bartending at fundraisers at his Brookline home.

From N.Y. to D.C.

The Clinton administration was in many ways an adult version of Dalton - a magnet for gifted, ambitious Democrats with sterling credentials and impressive connections.

In 1993, during Blinken's stint at another white-shoe New York law firm, a friend of Pisar, "a significant individual and important journalist" whom Pisar declined to name, suggested that Blinken apply for an opening at the State Department.

Stephen Oxman, then the assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs who hired Blinken, recalled that a former colleague, Laurence Grafstein, brought Blinken to his attention. Oxman said he wanted the new perspective a "smart cosmopolitan" could bring to his team.

It was a banner time for the Blinken men. Bill Clinton appointed Tony's uncle, Alan, as ambassador to Belgium and then named his father ambassador to Hungary, where he helped the government in compensating Holocaust survivors. Around that time, White House speechwriter Robert Boorstin lured Tony Blinken to the National Security Council staff, where Blinken eventually became the president's chief foreign policy speechwriter. "I was looking for somebody who both could write speeches for President Clinton and think a little bit more broadly about where we were headed more strategically," said Berger, then the deputy national security adviser.

But Blinken also remained involved in cultural pursuits. In 1995, he earned an associate producer credit on Abel Ferrara's "The Addiction," a gritty New York vampire movie starring Lili Taylor and Christopher Walken. ("It was so long ago," Ferrara wrote in an e-mail.) That year, Blinken noticed Evan Ryan, the attractive granddaughter of a former Secret Service director and the first lady's scheduler.

Within four years, Blinken found himself, as Berger put it, making the "leap from communications to substance" as senior director of Europe at the NSC. When Berger left the White House, Blinken, film producer to the wonks, put together a "Star Wars"-themed send-off video.

The ascendancy of George W. Bush in 2000 pushed Blinken out of government, but he was now entrenched in the foreign policy establishment. He became a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and in 2002 trudged around Idaho in his uncle Alan's ill-fated Senate campaign to defeat Republican incumbent Larry Craig.

The 39-year-old Blinken had better luck in his personal life. He married Ryan, then a 30-year-old colleague from a D.C.-area middle-class, Irish Catholic family, at Georgetown's Holy Trinity Church in a bi-denominational ceremony.

"At first his mother was quite skeptical about it," said Rabbi Harold White, who co-officiated with a Catholic priest. At the reception, Blinken spoke about bringing different nations and religions together and with guest Hillary Clinton in attendance, thanked the "the 40-odd million people who voted for Bill Clinton because without them I would never have met Evan at the White House."

A month later, Blinken embarked on another enduring relationship - with Biden. As staff director to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he worked on issues involving the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, relations with Pakistan and nuclear disarmament. In the process, he became "a member of the family," said Carney, who was brought into the Biden fold by Blinken.

Foreign policy veteran Les Gelb recalled a lengthy delay on a shuttle from New York to Washington during which he and Biden discussed a proposal to end the Iraqi civil war by partitioning the country into a federalist system. "At the end of it, [Biden] says, 'Okay, now you do it all again with Tony Blinken,' " Gelb said.

Blinken went on to work on Biden's 2008 presidential bid and returned to the Senate with Biden after the unsuccessful run. Bad luck turned to good fortune when Obama selected Biden as his running mate, catapulting Blinken back into the White House.

The president gave Biden - and by extension, Blinken - a broad portfolio that included overseeing the administration's Iraq policy.

"We would not have gotten out of Iraq in a way that left the government with a fighting chance to make it without Tony Blinken's hard work," Biden said. "He was the go-to guy. He still is the go-to guy."

Blinken had, by this time, also become close to Obama and an integral part of a small circle of national security experts, including Biden, Donilon, his deputy Denis McDonough and counterterrorism chief John Brennan, who briefed the president daily. "That was a very highly stable group for 41/2 years," Donilon said.

That lineup has changed since Obama's reelection, with Donilon leaving government and McDonough becoming chief of staff. Now, the national security team Blinken helps lead is under intense criticism for the administration's response to the Syrian conflict. But if his past is any indication, he'll remain part of the inner circle and his influence will be felt for some time to come.

"I'm glad he's in the room," Berger said.

Jason.Horowitz@washpost.com

(Copyright The Washington Post Company, Sep 16, 2013)

http://ezproxy.lapl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/tony-blinken-rising/docview/1432540846/se-2?accountid=6749

16 Sep 2013 |  The Washington Post 

Father - Donald Blinken (Dad of Tony)

Antony Blinken, son of Donald Blinken and Judith Frehm

Wikipedia profile - Donald Blinken (Tony's father)

Donald M. Blinken  

Donald Mayer Blinken,

Born: Yonkers, NY- November 11, 1925 –

Died. East Hampton, NY- September 22, 2022 (aged 96)

Spouse Judith Frehm (m. 1958; div. 1971)

Spouse Vera Ermer (m. 1975)

United States Ambassador to Hungary April 1, 1994 – November 20, 1997

Antony Blinken (Child)

Meir Blinken (grandfather)

Alan Blinken (brother)

Donald Mayer Blinken[1] (November 11, 1925 – September 22, 2022) was an American businessman and diplomat.[2][3] A co-founder of the investment bank Warburg Pincus, he was the chairman of the board of the State University of New York from 1978 to 1990. He also served as the United States Ambassador to Hungary from 1994 to 1997. His son, Antony Blinken,[4] is the current Secretary of State to U.S. President Joe Biden.

 Early life and education

Blinken was born on November 11, 1925, in Yonkers, New York,[5] the son of Maurice Blinken and his wife, Ethel (Horowitz).[6][7][8] His father and mother were of Jewish descent and his father was originally from Kyiv (now the capital of Ukraine). His grandfather was author Meir Blinken. Blinken had two brothers, Alan[9] and Robert.[10]

 The brothers grew up both in New York City and Yonkers. They attended the Horace Mann School.[10] Blinken graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in economics from Harvard University in 1948,[11][12] after serving in the United States Army Air Corps during World War II in 1944.[2]

Career, Philanthropy, and Public Service

In 1966, Blinken co-founded E. M. Warburg Pincus & Company, an investment bank in New York.[13] He served as a director for Warburg Pincus, and served as chairman of the board of directors.

 Blinken met Mark Rothko in 1956 and became an art collector. He was president of the Mark Rothko Foundation from 1976 to 1989.[14][15] In 1984, the foundation distributed 1,000 art pieces to museums,[16] including to the National Gallery of Art.[17], where Blinken was a member of the trustee council.[18]

 Among Blinken's other philanthropic commitments included serving as president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music from 1970 to 1976;[19] on the executive committee of the New York Public Library;[20] board member and chairman of the Commentary Publication Committee (which at the time was a part of the American Jewish Committee);[21] and vice-chairman of the New York Philharmonic Symphony Society.[22]

 Blinken was appointed to the board of trustees for the State University of New York by Governor Hugh Carey in September 1976 and was appointed the board's chairman in 1978.[23] The board clashed with Governor Mario Cuomo as Cuomo wanted the board to cut spending. Blinken announced his resignation from the board in October 1989, which took effect with the confirmation of his successor in 1990.[24]

 During the presidency of Jimmy Carter, Blinken served on a special nomination panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals.[19] In 1994, President Bill Clinton nominated Blinken to be the United States Ambassador to Hungary.[25] He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate and served in the role until 1997.[4][2][11] From 2000 to 2004, Blinken was the secretary-general of the World Federation of United Nations Associations.[19]

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_M._Blinken>

 ================== 

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_M._Blinken>

===============

Wikipedia profile - Alan Blinken (Tony's Uncle)

Wikipedia – Alan Blinken, B. 24 Dec 37, Harvard BA, Married to Melinda Koch (daughter of Hollywood producer)

Alan John Blinken (born December 24, 1937) is an American businessman, political candidate, and former diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Belgium from 1993 to 1997. Blinken was also the Democratic nominee in the 2002 United States Senate election in Idaho, losing to incumbent Larry Craig.

Early life and education

Blinken was born on December 24, 1937, in New York City,[1] the son of Ethel (Horowitz) and Maurice Blinken. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Kyiv. His older brother Donald M. Blinken, was also a diplomat. Blinken was raised in Manhattan and Yonkers, New York, and graduated from the Horace Mann School. Blinken earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University. Blinken studied business and economics. His thesis advisor was John Kenneth Galbraith.[2]

Blinken was married to Melinda Blinken (née Koch), the daughter of Hollywood producer Howard W. Koch.[6]

The Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA)

About Us

The Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) at Central European University (CEU) is a complex archival institution. OSA is both a  repository  of important collections, primarily related to the history of the Cold War and grave international human rights violations, and a  laboratory  of archival experiments on new ways of assessing, contextualizing, presenting, and making use of archival documents.

OSA is a research institute dealing with archival, taxonomical, informational and historical problems related to its holdings, and also reflecting on the role, obligations, and limits (as well as on overcoming these) of repositories that preserve important historical sources. As an archival institution, OSA seeks to work in a self-reflective way, problematizing its existence, its tasks, its practices. OSA  serves reasearchers coming to work in the archives, and at the same time works together with them, drawing upon their experience to assess and evaluate its holdings and practices. Together with the International Visegrad Fund, OSA provides research fellowships to scholars who are encouraged to digitize, tag, comment, and make publicly available the documents they find in our holdings in the Parallel Archive. We develop tools to help all those interested in our collections to digitize the documents, to organize, tag, and—if they wish—share them; to build virtual collections, and import primary documents from other sources.

OSA, its holdings, and the research based on our collections, are the basis of an expanding teaching  program. OSA receives students from the CEU and institutions around the globe, who come here to study the role and use of archival evidence, the changing functions of the archives, how to build trust in new types of archival institutions, and the special methodological problems of studying the sources of the fantasies on which the Cold War was constructed. Our professional archival and research work is integrated with complex public programs, some of which we also archive, and our Galeria Centralis serves as the focal point of exhibitions, performances, installations, film screenings, lectures, and seminars.

OSA is an archive of the copy,  meaning that we are primarily interested in the content, rather than the materiality of our documents; we actively seek out non-traditional documents—material previously marginalized based on its content, social origin, or form. OSA is also “an archive of last resort,” helping important organizations and institutions whose holdings are in danger for organizational, ideological or political reasons, to find a secure and professional archive for their endangered documents. Through all of these endeavors, OSA advocates open access, equal rights to information, the ethical use of private data, open formats and open standards, and broad access to cultural heritage; and fight globally for the opening of archival collections. OSA is one of the original signatories of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

One of OSA's aims is to  broaden access  to primary sources by overcoming technical, legal, geographic, and socio-cultural barriers. The Open Access Movement has made a valuable contribution by opening up scholarly sources to a wider audience. Nevertheless, as it stands, the concept of open access is still mostly limited to scholarly publications, and excludes archives and primary source material. This has negative implications for the shape of historiography and humanities scholarship. Our goal is to extend the concept of open access to include archival holdings. This is one of the reasons we have developed a strategy which includes large-scale digitization, multilingual description, and the implementation of open-source solutions and open standards. The use of current international benchmarks, and our collaboration in large-scale international digitization programs, serve to secure our status as a trusted digital repository.

The Archives

From <https://www.osaarchivum.org/about-us>

Facts and Figures

[bullets]

established in 1995, opened in 1996

archival holdings comprise approx. 7,500 linear meters, 11,000 hours of audiovisual recordings, and 12 terabytes of digital data

one of the world’s largest repositories of Cold War, Radio Free Europe and samizdat holdings

major international repository of human rights movements and grave human rights violations

the archive of the Open Society Foundations

offers open-access facilities to researchers and the wider public free of charge

our digital repository contains over 117,200 items on former Eastern Bloc history 1951–1994

curates and organizes numerous free public programs, including exhibitions, academic conferences, seminars and artistic performances

offers MA-level courses with the CEU

its ArchivaLab creates archival management and research tools, including the Parallel Archive

conducts research into problems of archiving, data management, memory and forgetting

initiator of the Diafilm virtual filmstrip museum, Budapest 100, Fortepan, and the Verzio International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival

hosts events for numerous Hungarian NGOs, cultural organizations

From <https://www.osaarchivum.org/about-us>

 ==================

Vera and the ambassador

Vera and the Ambassador is both a compelling portrait of a U.S. embassy in a post-Cold War former Soviet satellite and a personal story of a refugee’s escape and triumphant return. Vera and Donald Blinken’s dual memoir openly details their challenges, setbacks, and victories as they worked in tandem to advance America’s interests in Eastern Europe and to restore a former Soviet satellite state to a pre-Communist level of prosperity.

Hungary in all its cultural glory and historical anguish lies at the heart of this dramatic and deeply personal story. Born in Budapest just prior to World War II, Vera was only five years old when the Germans invaded in 1944. In a harrowing account, she describes how she and her mother managed to survive the atrocities of the war and, in 1950, narrowly escape Soviet-occupied Hungary for the freedom and opportunity of America. Making their way to New York, Vera settled into her adopted country with an indomitable spirit, a vow to become the best American she could be, and a hope of finding some way to give back as a show of gratitude for her good fortune in surviving the destruction of the war.

From <https://www.veradonaldblinken.com/>

 CFA: Lessons of the Cold War? - Visegrad Scholarship at the Blinken OSA Archivum

 The Wilson Center

October 24, 2023

The Blinken OSA Archivum invites applications for a research grant program. The grant program provides access to the OSA Archives for scholars, artists, and journalists, and covers travel to and from Budapest, a modest subsistence, and accommodation for a research period of eight weeks.

History and Public Policy Program

Cold War International History Project

Cold War

The Blinken OSA Archivum invites applications for a research grant program. The grant program provides access to the OSA Archives for scholars, artists, and journalists, and covers travel to and from Budapest, a modest subsistence, and accommodation for a research period of eight weeks.

In the context of the current invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing tragic war, many analysts have claimed that we face the real end of (or the confirmation) of the Cold War and its dichotomies. What we witness would be the outright confrontation between civic liberalism and autocracy, or the “West” and the “East”. According to Stephen Kotkin, even if post-communist societies have changed, a military-police dictatorship in some former satellite countries is still fighting a “West” seen as enemy, and this has the reverse consolidating effect on the West which re-emerged and stood up against Putin.

We invite historians, researchers, political scientists, sociologists and socially engaged artists to reflect on the lessons from/of the Cold War by taking cues from the Blinken OSA Archivum collections. The applicants are encouraged to reflect on the connections as well as on the differences between current times and the past by following some recommended sub-topics listed below.

bullets

The importance of homegrown dissident cultures of truth telling and the related counterpropaganda in minimizing them as foreign agents.

Histories of Soviet invasions (1956, 1968, 1979), their stakes, misunderstandings, and miscalculations.

The political instrumentalization and hollowing of concepts, such as “fascism”, “Nazism,” and “imperialism”.

The demonizing methods of propaganda (as not just an alternative regime of facts, but as a stigmatizing tool).

The power of stories: revisionist and public usages of history for political ends.

The relationship between foreign policy, strategic security, and energy relations (at global scale, too).

Lessons from the international security crises (Berlin in 1961, Cuba in 1962, the Sino Soviet split).

Informational asymmetries (cultures of secrecy and obscure decision-making versus cultures of openness and liberalism).

Histories and efficacy of human rights advocacy with regards to abusive regimes.

Post-'89 transitions and their connections to the Cold War (reproduction of secret police networks and the new oligarchies, different understandings of the role of State, the subordination of the legal system, etc.).

Conditions for the maintenance/disruptions of autocratic regimes (the role of ideology, political patronage, corruption, etc.).

Retroactive assessment of international responses to political and security crises: the role of appeasement, of “stability”.

Uncovering the roots of local initiatives for autonomy and reform of politics and society in the Soviet Union, based on the extensive holdings in the Blinken OSA Archivum of Russian regional and provincial newspapers during the late perestroika period. (Work with Professor Rieber, author of Stalin as Warlord (Yale University Press, 2022)).

Un/silencing suppressed voices: detecting instances of epistemic violence/harm and recreating narratives of people pushed at the margins of society (ethnic, religious or sexual minorities, people with disabilities) in Cold War and transitional archives.

We recommend you refer to one of the topics in your application. Please also mention the specific collections you would like to consult. We also suggest possible collections to be investigated, such as the research corpora of Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, Records of Index on Censorship, Records of the EU Monitoring and Advocacy Programs, Soviet Propaganda Film collection, Records related to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Records of the Constitutional and Legal Policy Institute, etc.

Blinken OSA Archivum collections and research tips

The archival collection and research papers of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty constitute the most comprehensive Cold War and post-Cold War archive about the problems of Communism and its aftermath in the early years of post-socialist and post-communist transition. The collection offers important tips both about facts as well as about their conceptualizations from 1949 to 1994. Scholars particularly interested in the former Soviet Union as well as in the aftermath of its dissolution can find relevant the rich collection of sub-fonds Soviet Red Archives, Samizdat Archives, and the Soviet Research Department of the RFE/RL Research Institute (to be compared with the RFE/ RL Russian broadcast recordings). These sub-fonds and series allowed the radios to extract reliable data from the massive body of media produced by the Soviet republics; the Western Press Archives contain the Western representations about the phenomena in the communist bloc and beyond it, about the transition in the 1990s. This archival collection also holds several series of biographical files about major historical figures, dissidents, leaders of national minorities, and those persecuted by the political regimes of that time.

We also suggest many other possible archival collections to be investigated, such as the records of Index on Censorship, the Soviet Propaganda Film collection, the records related to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the documents of the Constitutional and Legal Policy Institute, the records of the Forced Migration projects at the Open Society Institute, the records of the International Human Rights Law Institute relating to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, the records of the American Refugee Committee Balkan’s Programs, the Gary Filerman Collection on Hungarian Refugees from 1956, etc.

Blinken OSA Archivum research program

The current call is part of a reflexive-research program at Blinken OSA Archivum interested in connecting past issues related to oppressive regimes, censorship, violence and information manipulation to current phenomena. We would like to assess the potential of a genealogical project linking the contemporary epistemic and political crisis of democracy to past modes of inquiry and activism.

Admission

We seek to promote exchanges among people with backgrounds in the arts, humanities and social sciences in the way they think through and about archives while being concerned with current problems. From this point of view, the invitation is not only addressed to scholars working specifically on Cold War topics, but to all those interested in theories of knowledge, who would use Blinken OSA Archivum documents as props for larger reflections and activist concerns.

Fellowship requirements and Blinken OSA Archivum support

While working on their own subject, fellows will have the opportunity to collaborate with Blinken OSA Archivum researchers and to transform their archival investigation into a full research experience. The fellows are invited to give a final presentation about their research findings at Blinken OSA Archivum and the ways in which the documents were relevant to their research. The presentations are organized within the Visegrad Scholarship at Blinken OSA Archivum lecture series and as such are open for the general public.

Blinken OSA Archivum academic and archival staff will assist the fellows in their investigations, facilitate contact with the CEU community, and grant access to the CEU library. Besides its archival analogue collections, Blinken OSA Archivum can also offer access to unique, audio-visual materials related to documentary practices, a special collection of RFE (anti)propaganda books and a growing collection on digital humanities, human rights, archival theory and philosophy.

About the Fellowship

The twenty grants of 3000 euro each are designed to provide access to the archives for scholars, artists, and journalists, and to cover travel to and from Budapest, a modest subsistence, and accommodation for a research period of eight weeks. Stipends for shorter periods are pro-rated.

Applicants, preferably but not exclusively, from a V4 country, may be researchers, students after their second degree carrying out research, or artists, journalists, academics, or both.

Scholars at risk from war zones as well as refugees of conscience (scholars fleeing authoritarian regimes) are especially invited to apply.

 From <https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/cfa-lessons-cold-war-visegrad-scholarship-blinken-osa-archivum> 

Unit 8200

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200>

Unit 8200 (Hebrew: יחידה 8200, Yehida shmone matayim "Unit eight two-hundred") is an Israeli Intelligence Corps unit of the Israel Defense Forces responsible for clandestine operation, collecting signal intelligence (SIGINT) and code decryption, counterintelligence, cyberwarfare, military intelligence, and surveillance. Military publications include references to Unit 8200 as the Central Collection Unit of the Intelligence Corps, and it is sometimes referred to as Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU).[1] It is subordinate to Aman, the military intelligence directorate.

2023-2024 Hamas attack

In the failure to forecast the 2023-2024 Hamas attack on Israel by Israel's intelligence agencies, Unit 8200 was blamed for having underestimated Hamas activities.[20] Unit 8200 is alleged to have stopped listening to Hamas's handheld radios in 2022, deciding it was a "waste of effort". Monitoring that radio network might have helped the Shin Bet realize a few hours before the attack that the unusual activity they were seeing on the Gaza border was not just another military exercise by Hamas, Times of Israel noted.[21] The New York Times reported in November that a veteran analyst in Unit 8200 had warned in July that Hamas were preparing for a cross-border attack and that the analyst's concerns were dismissed by senior military leadership as "totally imaginative".[22]

The "Spotters", known as tatzpitaniyot, are female members of the IDF who observe the barriers along the border and activate complex technological systems to prevent the enemy from penetrating into Israel. Their responsibilities have been described as a "difficult, cognitively and emotionally demanding job that entails hours of closely monitoring surveillance cameras, with the knowledge that missing even the slightest unusual event along the border could have disastrous effects on the entire country" but "[t]hey didn’t miss Hamas' preparations for the October 7 attack"; one was quoted as saying, "We were all seeing Hamas militants training for exactly what happened: We saw them training to crash the fence, training to kill civilians, training to take back hostages" and another stated "We knew this would happen. We warned the higher ups. But they ignored us. They told us that they know better, even though this is our job—we have to know every tree, every tent, every pothole in our section, and especially to know when something unusual is happening. And we do."[23][24][25] Only two of the tatzpitaniyot on duty on 7 October 2023 evaded death or abduction.[26]

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200>

 MY NOTES ON NYT INVESTIGATION

New york times

The email thread from the southern command

Codename: Jericho wall (the booklet). Obtained in 2022; translated into hebrew

---Depth of intelligence that hamas to gather on israel; purpose is to take down the GAZAN division, which controls the massive fence & communications & towers & guards with machine guns

--translated into a detailed attack plan--DIVERSION massive bombardment with rockets, mortars, missile

Neutralize security barrier CAMERAS & communication hub using drones and paragliders

Raiding forces to breakthrough in 60 different places

Analyst tell head - this is a preparation for war--it is a plan for invasion not for a raid.

Intelligence - capabilities v. intentions

Capabilities

Nov 2022 - israeli southern command memo:

Hamas has between 20i00 and 3000nukmba  commando gunman trained and ready to be deployed

However hamas only capable of deploying 70

================

 New York Times Journalists covering Gaza beat

Patrick Kingsleyis the Jerusalem bureau chief, covering Israel and the occupied territories. He has reported from more than 40 countries, written two books and previously covered migration and the Middle East for The Guardian. More about Patrick Kingsley

Ronen Bergmanis a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman

Mark Mazzettiis an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A. More about Mark Mazzetti

Ainara Tiefenthäler is a video journalist with the Visual Investigations team. She was among the recipients of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for The Times's coverage of the vast civilian toll of U.S.-led airstrikes. More about Ainara Tiefenthäler

Sheera Frenkelis a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology impacts everyday lives with a focus on social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp. More about Sheera Frenkel

===================================

The Secrets Hamas Knew About Israel’s Military

Patrick Kingsleyand Ronen Bergman

To reconstruct the day’s events, the reporters interviewed more than 20 survivors, soldiers, military and intelligence officials, and reviewed Hamas planning documents and footage of the attacks.

Oct. 13, 2023

The 10 gunmen from Gaza knew exactly how to find the Israeli intelligence hub — and how to get inside.

After crossing into Israel, they headed east on five motorcycles, two gunmen on each vehicle, shooting at passing civilian cars as they pressed forward.

Ten miles later, they veered off the road into a stretch of woodland, dismounting outside an unmanned gate to a military base. They blew open the barrier with a small explosive charge, entered the base and paused to take a group selfie. Then they shot dead an unarmed Israeli soldier dressed in a T-shirt.

For a moment, the attackers appeared uncertain about where to go next. Then one of them pulled something from his pocket: a color-coded map of the complex.

Reoriented, they found an unlocked door to a fortified building. Once inside, they entered a room filled with computers — the military intelligence hub. Under a bed in the room, they found two soldiers taking shelter.

The gunmen shot both dead.

This sequence was captured on a camera mounted on the head of a gunman who was later killed. The New York Times reviewed the footage, then verified the events by interviewing Israeli officials and checking Israeli military video of the attack as well.

They provide chilling details of how Hamas, the militia that controls the Gaza Strip, managed to surprise and outmaneuver the most powerful military in the Middle East last Saturday — storming across the border, overrunning more than 30 square miles, taking more than 150 hostages and killing more than 1,300 people in the deadliest day for Israel in its 75-year history.

With meticulous planning and extraordinary awareness of Israel’s secrets and weaknesses, Hamas and its allies overwhelmed the length of Israel’s front with Gaza shortly after dawn, shocking a nation that has long taken the superiority of its military as an article of faith.

Using drones, Hamas destroyed key surveillance and communications towers along the border with Gaza, imposing vast blind spots on the Israeli military. With explosives and tractors, Hamas blew open gaps in the border barricades, allowing 200 attackers to pour through in the first wave and another 1,800 later that day, officials say. On motorcycles and in pickup trucks, the assailants surged into Israel, overwhelming at least eight military bases and waging terrorist attacks against civilians in more than 15 villages and cities.

Hamas planning documents, videos of the assault and interviews with security officials show that the group had a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of how the Israeli military operated, where it stationed specific units, and even the time it would take for reinforcements to arrive.

The Israeli military says that, once the war is over, it will investigate how Hamas managed to breach its defenses so easily.

But whether the armed forces were careless with their secrets or infiltrated by spies, the revelations have already unnerved officials and analysts who have questioned how the Israeli military — renowned for its intelligence gathering — could have inadvertently revealed so much information about its own operations.

Soldiers from an Israeli military counterterrorism unit battling Hamas in the intelligence hub.

The outcome was a staggering series of atrocities and massacres, in what the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, has described as the worst mass killing of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust.

It shattered Israel’s aura of invincibility and provoked an Israeli counterattack on Gaza that has killed more than 1,900 Palestinians in a week, the ferocity of which has never been seen in Gaza.

It also upended assumptions that Hamas, long designated a terrorist group by Israel and many Western nations, had gradually become more interested in running Gaza than in using it to launch major assaults on Israel.

Hamas made Israelis think it was “busy with governing Gaza,” said Ali Barakeh, a Hamas leader, in a television interview on Monday. “All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack,” he added.

‘Hamas In the Kibbutz!’

The terrorists were inside Addi Cherry’s home, on the other side of an unlocked door.

Ms. Cherry, her husband and their three children were hiding inside their eldest son’s bedroom, listening to the gunmen wander around their living room.

“Please help us,” Ms. Cherry texted a friend, as one of the assailants walked closer and closer to the bedroom door.

Then he gripped the door handle.

The Cherry family’s day had begun with a burst of rockets from Gaza, not long after 6 a.m.

Ms. Cherry, an economist, and her husband, Oren, an engineer, rushed with their children into their eldest son’s bedroom, which doubled as a bomb shelter.

Initially, the events of the morning felt distressingly familiar. The Cherry family lives in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, a rural village of some 500 residents, a few hundred yards east of the border with Gaza. Early morning rocket fire — and the ensuing rush to the safe room — is a frequent feature of life in the region.

“Like always,” Ms. Cherry remembered thinking.

But this morning soon felt different. The rockets kept coming, many of them headed deep into Israeli territory.

Mr. Cherry left the bedroom, and peeked through the shutters on their living room windows.

“Oh God,” Ms. Cherry remembered her husband shouting. “Hamas in the kibbutz! Hamas in the kibbutz!”

It was 7:20 a.m.

Hundreds of Hamas invaders, carrying guns, shoulder-borne rocket launchers and wearing the group’s green headband, were streaming through the village fields.

It was part of a coordinated assault that, documents and video show, assigned squads of assailants to precise targets. As some swept through military bases, others charged into residential areas, ruthlessly kidnapping and killing civilians.

They would reach the Cherrys’ street within minutes.

The family had to act quickly. Their bomb shelter — a teenager’s bedroom — had no lock.

The parents grabbed a chair, and wedged it under the door handle — making it harder to open.

They dragged a small cabinet, and pressed it against the chair.

Then they waited. There was an army base next to the village. Its troops would be here within minutes, Ms. Cherry remembered thinking.

What she didn’t know was that many of them were already dead.

‘Take soldiers and civilians’

All along the border, the Hamas gunmen had already overrun most, if not all, of the Israeli border bases.

Footage from the attackers’ head-mounted cameras, including the video of the raid on the intelligence hub, showed Hamas gunmen — from its highly trained Nukhba brigade — smashing through the barricades of several bases in the first light of the morning.

After breaching, they were merciless, gunning down some soldiers in their beds and underwear. In several bases, they knew exactly where the communications servers were and destroyed them, according to a senior Israeli army officer.

With much of their communications and surveillance systems down, the Israelis often couldn’t see the commandos coming. They found it harder to call for help and mount a response. In many cases, they were unable to protect themselves, let alone the surrounding civilian villages.

A Hamas planning document — found by Israeli emergency responders in one village — showed that the attackers were organized into well-defined units with clear goals and battle plans.

One platoon had designated navigators, saboteurs and drivers — as well as mortar units in the rear to provide cover for the attackers, the document shows.

The group had a specific target — a kibbutz — and the attackers were tasked with storming the village from specific angles. They had estimates for how many Israeli troops were stationed in nearby posts, how many vehicles they had at their disposal, and how long it would take those Israeli relief forces to reach them.

The document is dated October 2022, suggesting that the attack had been planned for at least a year.

Elsewhere, other assailants were posted to key road junctions to ambush Israeli reinforcements, according to four senior officers and officials.

Some units had specific instructions to capture Israelis for use as bargaining chips in future prisoner exchanges with Israel.

“Take soldiers and civilians as prisoners and hostages to negotiate with,” the document said.

‘We Are Going to Die’

The terrorists smashed their way into the Cherrys’ house shortly before 10 a.m., according to texts that Ms. Cherry sent friends at the time.

They had already killed the kibbutz guards, as well as a civilian security volunteer who had rushed to confront them in the opening moments of the assault, according to the village leadership.

Now, the terrorists were going house by house, trying to find people to kill and kidnap.

“Please send help,” Ms. Cherry typed into her phone.

At the Cherrys’ house, they forced in the door. Then they charged in, shouting and ransacking the house, Ms. Cherry said.

“We are going to die,” Ms. Cherry remembered thinking.

The family waited in terrified silence, hoping the intruders would ignore the door to the bedroom and assume everyone was away.

Mr. and Mrs. Cherry put all their weight against the cabinet, to brace the chair underneath the door handle.

Guy, 15, their eldest son, stood next to the door, holding an 18-pound dumbbell. If someone did break in, the plan was to drop it on the assailant’s head.

Then the handle twitched.

The parents began to push the cabinet.

The handle continued to rattle.

Then it stopped. The assailant walked away.

A few streets away, the family of Miki Levi, who oversees the kibbutz gardens, had an even closer call.

After a terrorist squad chased Mr. Levi, 47, inside his safe room, the attackers sprayed bullets at the reinforced door, Mr. Levi said in an interview.

Some of the bullets pierced the door, creating large openings, and Mr. Levi said he also fired back with his pistol, shredding it further. His wife and two young daughters sheltered to the side.

Changing tactics, the terrorists later brought two of his neighbors — a mother and her 12-year-old daughter, Mr. Levi said.

At gunpoint, the mother and child were told to persuade him to open up, Mr. Levi said.

“‘Come out and stop shooting,’” Mr. Levi recounted one of them saying. “‘The terrorists won’t do anything to you.’”

Eventually, the terrorists gave up that approach and returned with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, Mr. Levi said.

It was only when Mr. Levi shot one attacker in the thigh that they finally left, he added.

The mother and child, Mr. Levi suspects, are now captives in Gaza.

‘Bodies Were Burning’

Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus said he drove south without knowing where exactly he should go.

General Goldfus, 46, a paratrooper commander, had been on leave at home, jogging in his neighborhood north of Tel Aviv. Then he saw a video from the south, showing terrorists cruising through a city, entirely unimpeded.

Without waiting for orders, the general said he ran home, changed into his uniform and headed south.

He picked up guns and two soldiers from his base in central Israel, and called friends and colleagues to find out what was happening.

Only a few picked up. Of the rest, “There was nobody really understanding the full picture,” General Goldfus said in an interview.

The speed, precision and scale of Hamas’s attack had thrown the Israeli military into disarray, and for many hours afterward civilians were left to fend for themselves.

Using the few scraps of information he could glean, General Goldfus said he and the soldiers headed to a village north of Nahal Oz, and then gradually worked their way south.

It was around 10 a.m. All around him was carnage and atrocity.

Dead Israelis lined the roads, alongside the husks of burned-out, overturned cars.

At the site of an all-night outdoor rave, gunmen had killed an estimated 260 partygoers.

There and then, the two men came up with their own ad hoc strategy.

“There’s no orders here,” General Goldfus said. “I said: ‘You take from this place and further south — and I’ll take from this place and further north.’”

That was how some of the Israeli counterattack took place: soldiers or civilian volunteers — including retired generals in their 60s — rushing to the region and doing what they could.

Israel Ziv, a former general, reached a nearby battle in his Audi.

Yair Golan, a retired deputy chief of staff and former leftist lawmaker, said he took a gun and began rescuing survivors of a massacre at a rave, who were hiding in nearby bushes.

“We are brought up to run as fast as possible toward the fire,” said General Goldfus. “So that we can be the first one there.”

‘It’s O.K. We’re Jewish.’

The intelligence hub near Gaza was one of the first places to be recaptured by Israel.

In the late morning, soldiers and reservists from different units reached the base from separate directions, overpowering the 10 Gazan gunmen who had filmed their deadly assault on video.

The camera mounted on the Hamas commander’s head captured the moment he was shot and killed. The camera falls off, bouncing along the ground. By the time the video stops, the commander can be seen slumped on the ground, revealing his long beard and thinning hairline.

In other parts of southern Israel, the first formal reinforcements came from an Israeli commando unit that arrived in helicopters, according to the senior Israeli officer.

They were followed by other special operations units, including Israeli navy seals and a reconnaissance unit trained to operate deep inside enemy lines, rather than on Israeli soil.

Sometimes, the commandos joined forces with volunteers without body armor who had rushed into the fray to rescue family members.

Noam Tibon, a former general, drove south with his pistol to try to retake Kibbutz Nahal Oz, where his son, Amir, a journalist, was trapped.

In the early afternoon, the elder Mr. Tibon joined a squad that was making its way through the kibbutz, house by house.

By Sunday afternoon, several villages and bases still had some kind of Hamas presence. The whole area would not be fully secured for days.

Ms. Cherry emerged around 5 p.m. on Saturday in Kibbutz Nahal Oz to find her home turned upside down, the microwave torn from the wall, drawers ripped from their cabinets and a pool of drying blood on the floor.

She had heard a gun battle in and around her home earlier in the day. She believed a terrorist had died in the house — and that his bloodied corpse had been carried off by fellow fighters.

Some survivors refused to open up, even after the army arrived.

When soldiers reached the home of Oshrit Sabag, another resident of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, she feared they were terrorists in disguise.

Even after the soldiers began chatting to one another in Hebrew, to prove who they were, Ms. Sabag, 48, was unconvinced.

It was only their Jewish prayers that made her relax.

“‘It’s O.K., it’s O.K.,’” Ms. Sabag remembered them saying. “‘We’re Jewish.’”

Hamas Attack Exploited Secrets of Israel’s Military. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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Where Was the Israeli Military When Hamas Attacked?

NEW YORK TIMES [ARTICLE LINK]

By Adam Goldman, Ronen Bergman, Mark Mazzetti, Natan Odenheimer, Alexander Cardia, Ainara Tiefenthäler and Sheera Frenkel

The journalists reported from Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and towns and kibbutzim in southern Israel.

A Times investigation found that troops were disorganized and out of position and relied on social media to choose targets. Behind the failure: Israel had no battle plan for a massive Hamas invasion.

Published Dec. 30, 2023 Updated Jan. 3, 2024

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Far beneath the Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv, in a bunker known as The Pit, commanders were trying to make sense of reports of Hamas rocket fire in southern Israel early on the morning of Oct. 7, when the call came in.

It was a commander from the division that oversees military operations along the border with Gaza. Their base was under attack. The commander could not describe the scope of the attack or provide more details, according to a military official with knowledge of the call. But he asked that all available reinforcements be sent.

At 7:43 a.m., more than an hour after the rocket assault began and thousands of Hamas fighters stormed into Israel, The Pit issued its first deployment instructions of the day. It ordered all emergency forces to head south, along with all available units that could do so quickly.

But the nation’s military leaders did not yet recognize that an invasion of Israel was already well underway.

Hours later, desperate Israeli citizens were still fending for themselves and calling for help. Roughly 1,200 people died as the Middle East’s most advanced military failed in its essential mission: protecting Israeli lives.

Image: Civilians killed by Palestinian militants lay covered in Sderot, Israel, on Oct. 7.Credit...Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated Press

The full reasons behind the military’s slow response may take months to understand. The government has promised an inquiry. But a New York Times investigation found that Israel’s military was undermanned, out of position and so poorly organized that soldiers communicated in impromptu WhatsApp groups and relied on social media posts for targeting information. Commandos rushed into battle armed only for brief combat. Helicopter pilots were ordered to look to news reports and Telegram channels to choose targets.

And perhaps most damning: The Israel Defense Forces did not even have a plan to respond to a large-scale Hamas attack on Israeli soil, according to current and former soldiers and officers. If such a plan existed on a shelf somewhere, the soldiers said, no one had trained on it and nobody followed it. The soldiers that day made it up as they went along.

“In practice, there wasn’t the right defensive preparation, no practice, and no equipping and building strength for such an operation,” said Yom Tov Samia, a major general in the Israeli reserves and former head of the military’s Southern Command.

“There was no defense plan for a surprise attack such as the kind we have seen on Oct. 7,” said Amir Avivi, a brigadier general in the reserves and a former deputy commander of the Gaza Division, which is responsible for protecting the region.

That lack of preparation is at odds with a founding principle of Israeli military doctrine. From the days of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and defense minister, the goal was to always be on the offensive — to anticipate attacks and fight battles in enemy territory.

In response to a series of questions from The Times, including why soldiers and officers alike said there had been no plan, the Israel Defense Forces replied: “The I.D.F. is currently focused on eliminating the threat from the terrorist organization Hamas. Questions of this kind will be looked into at a later stage.”

Image: Israeli soldiers in Sderot on Oct. 7.Credit...Tsafrir Abayov/Associated Press

PANDORA

The Times investigation is based on internal Israeli government documents and a review of the military’s cache of materials, known as Pandora, that contains tens of thousands of videos, including footage from body cameras worn by terrorists and closed-circuit surveillance cameras. The Times interviewed dozens of officers, enlisted troops and eyewitnesses, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about military operations.

The documents and interviews revealed new details about the attack, including military assessments and orders like the one given by The Pit early that morning. Taken together, they show that much of the military failure was due to the lack of a plan, coupled with a series of intelligence missteps in the months and years before the attack.

ISRAELI ASSESSMENTS UNDERESTIMATED HAMAS CAPBILITIES & INTENTIONS

Israeli security and military agencies produced repeated assessments that Hamas was neither interested in nor capable of launching a massive invasion. The authorities clung to that optimistic view even when Israel obtained Hamas battle plans that revealed an invasion was precisely what Hamas was planning.

The decisions, in retrospect, are tinged with hubris. The notion that Hamas could execute an ambitious attack was seen as so unlikely that Israeli intelligence officials even reduced eavesdropping on Hamas radio traffic, concluding that it was a waste of time.

NO PREPRATION WHATSOEVER FOR POSSIBLE INVASION

None of the officers interviewed, including those stationed along the border, could recall discussions or training based on a plan to repel such an assault.

“As far as I recall, there was no such plan,” said Yaakov Amidror, a retired Israeli general and a former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The army does not prepare itself for things it thinks are impossible.”

Image: Hamas teams breached the Israel-Gaza border fence in dozens of locations.Credit...Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa/Reuters

The Israeli government had determined that the loosely organized civilian guard, known as Kitat Konnenut, would serve as the first line of defense in the towns and villages near the border. But the guardsmen had different standards of training depending on who was in charge. For years, they warned that some of their units were poorly trained and underequipped, according to two Israeli military officials with direct knowledge of the volunteer teams.

Additionally, the Israeli military reservists were not prepared to quickly mobilize and deploy. Some described heading south on their own initiative.

Davidi Ben Zion, 38, a major in the reserves, said reservists never trained to respond at a moment’s notice to an invasion. The training assumed that Israeli intelligence would learn of a looming invasion in advance, giving reservists time to prepare to deploy.

ISRAEL RESERVES REQUIRED 24-HR NOTICE FROM HAMAS TO GET READY ;(

“The procedure states that we have the battalion ready for combat in 24 hours,” he said. “There’s a checklist to authorize the distribution of everything. We practiced this for many years.”

Hamas capitalized on these errors in ways that further delayed the Israeli response. Terrorists blocked key highway intersections, leaving soldiers bogged down in firefights as they tried to enter besieged towns. And the Hamas siege on the military base in southern Israel crippled the regional command post, paralyzing the military response.

Much remains unknown about that day, including what orders were given inside Israel’s senior military leadership in Tel Aviv, and when. The Times investigation builds on and adds new details to aggressive coverage in the Israeli media of the military response.

UTTER CHAOS ON 7 OCTOBER

 [NOTE-Tel Aviv to Sderot just outside Gaza Strip is only 48 miles drive south--less than an hour drive]

Officers and reservists who headed south that morning, whether under orders or on their own, soon learned of the chaos that they were entering.

Gen. Barak Hiram, who was scheduled to soon take over command of a division along the Gaza border, drove south to see firsthand how the soldiers there responded to what seemed like a routine Hamas attack.

In an interview, he recalled the text messages he received from soldiers he knew in the region.

“Come save us.”

“Send the army, quickly, they are killing us.”

“Sorry we’re turning to you, we’re already out of weapons.”

Unprepared for Battle

Commando units were among the first to mobilize that morning. Some said they rushed into the fight after receiving messages pleading for help or learning about the infiltrations from social media.

Other units were on standby and received formal activation orders.

The small size of the teams suggested that commanders fundamentally misunderstood the threat. Troops rolled out with pistols and assault rifles, enough to face a band of hostage-taking terrorists, but not to go into full-scale battle.

Previously undisclosed documents reviewed by The Times show just how drastically the military misread the situation. Records from early in the day show that, even during the attack, the military still assessed that Hamas, at best, would be able to breach Israel’s border fence in just a few places. A separate intelligence document, prepared weeks later, shows that Hamas teams actually breached the fence in more than 30 locations and quickly moved deep into southern Israel.

Hamas fighters poured into Israel with heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, land mines and more. They were prepared to fight for days. Israeli commandos apparently believed they would be fighting for just hours; one said he set out that morning without his night-vision goggles.

“The terrorists had a distinct tactical advantage in firepower,” said Yair Ansbacher, 40, a reservist in a counterterrorism unit who fought on Oct. 7. He and his colleagues mainly used pistols, assault rifles and sometimes sniper rifles, he said.

The situation was so dire that at 9 a.m., the head of Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security agency, issued a rare order. He told all combat-trained, weapons-carrying employees to go south. Shin Bet does not normally activate with the military. Ten Shin Bet operatives were killed that day.

Making matters worse, the military has acknowledged that it moved two commando companies — more than 100 soldiers — to the West Bank just two days before the attack, a reflection of Israel’s mistaken belief that a Hamas attack was not an imminent threat.

IDF ON HOLIDAY 7 OCTOBER….50 PERCENT OF TROOPS NOT ON DUTY

That left three infantry battalions and one tank battalion along Gaza’s border. But Oct. 7 was the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, and the Sabbath. One senior military officer estimated that about half the 1,500 soldiers in the area were away. He said that another infantry battalion had been reassigned years earlier after Israel finished building a security wall around Gaza.

Whether Hamas knew that the military was understaffed is unclear, but it had fatal consequences. When the attacks began, many soldiers were fighting for their lives instead of protecting residents nearby. Hamas stormed one base, Nahal Oz, forcing soldiers to abandon it and leave behind dead friends.

And just as the civilian volunteers had warned, the first line of defense inside Israel was quickly overwhelmed. Some units barely had enough weapons for an hourslong battle, officials said.

Hamas also worked strategically to weaken Israel’s advantage in firepower. Terrorists targeted Israeli tanks, hitting several of them, said Brig. Gen. Hisham Ibrahim, the commander of the armored corps. Tanks ran out of ammunition, leaving crews to fight with ground soldiers.

In another instance widely covered in the Israeli media, Hamas fired on an Israeli helicopter, forcing it down near Gaza. The paratroopers escaped injury before the helicopter burst into flames.

All of this should have been a clear sign that Israel was under broad attack, facing a dire situation.

But Hamas made another strategic strike that morning that all but blinded Israel’s military at a critical moment.

This group of Hamas gunmen has a clear target: a crucial military operations center.

Image: Gaza-Israel border

Where’s the opening?

Ahmad, it’s here.

Ahmad, it’s here.

OK, go.

Come on.

Go.

Say “God is great.”

God is great.

Go.

Wait, wait.

Wait, wait, wait.

They make their way from Gaza to the Re’im army base, killing civilians in their path.

Image: Outside Re’im base

Give it to me for a little bit.

“Calm down, man.”

“Just for a minute.”

I told him to stay in [indistinct].

Someone should come with me. Someone should come with me.

As terrorists infiltrate the base, the soldiers are unable to coordinate a response across the region.

Image: Inside Re’im base

In this room?

Go in. Go in. Go forward. Go forward.

Throw a grenade. Throw a grenade.

Give me a grenade.

Where Was the Israeli Military When Hamas Attacked? - The New York Times

‘What a Mistake’ - RE'IM CENTRAL COMMAND UNDER SIEGE

The assault on the Re’im military base left soldiers there fighting for their lives rather than coordinating a response to the invasion.

Re’im is home to the Gaza Division, which oversees all military operations in the region. It is also home to two brigades, northern and southern, dedicated to protecting about 40 miles of the border.

Like other bases, Re’im was understaffed because of the holiday. A brigade commander and key staff were away from the base, according to a senior military officer. They were summoned back before dawn, officials said, as Israeli intelligence officials tried to make sense of unusual Hamas activity just over the border in Gaza.

Many soldiers, though, were allowed to keep sleeping. One told The Times that some did not know they were under attack until Hamas was in their sleeping quarters. Several were killed in their bunks. Others barricaded themselves in safe rooms.

The scope of the catastrophe, if not the attack itself, was preventable, according to records and interviews.

“After they built the fence, they put the headquarters in the middle of the sector,” said General Samia, the former head of the Southern Command. He said the three commanders of the brigades and division never should have been housed together so close to Gaza’s border.

Image: Gen. Yom Tov Samia in 2000.Credit...Havakuk Levison/Reuters

“In the same camp, you all had three of them — in the same location,” he said. “What a mistake. What a mistake.”

The Israeli authorities also knew, years in advance, that Hamas planned to take out Re’im as part of its invasion, documents previously obtained by The Times showed. They dismissed that plan, like the prospect of overall invasion, as implausible.

Even in May, when intelligence analysts raised alarms about Hamas training exercises, Israeli officials did not increase troop levels in the South.

The assault on Re’im led to a near blackout of communication inside the unit that coordinates troop movements across southern Israel, according to one soldier who was based there on Oct. 7.

The division that was supposed to be directing the battle was trying not to get overrun.

Even at noon, according to another Southern Command official, officers there did not understand what was happening. They assessed that Hamas had sent about 200 gunmen into Israel. They were off by a factor of 10.

It took the military most of the day to retake control of the Re’im base.

“When your division is under fire, you’re focused on clearing it from terrorists,” said General Ibrahim, the commander of the armored corps, which is based in southern Israel. “It distracts from management of the fighting more broadly.” General Ibrahim defended the military’s response, saying there are few modern armies that could have recaptured the region as quickly as Israel did.

But nobody had trained to repel an invasion.

‘Slowing Our Advance’

Only a few roads connect the towns of southern Israel. Gunmen roam freely along these roadways, including Route 232 and Route 242, on the day of the attack.

Image: Route 242

To heaven, to heaven.

[Indistinct name] will take it.

To heaven. To heaven.

To heaven [indistinct]

Our jeeps are there. Our jeeps are there.

Abu Ahmad.

Abu Ahmad. Our jeeps are there.

Abu Ahmad, our jeeps are there.

They’re descending.

Hamas gunmen terrorize motorists, opening fire on passing vehicles,

Image: Route 242

and gather at major intersections, sowing chaos and taking control of main traffic arteries.

Image: CCTV footage from the front gate of Kibbutz Sa’ad

Where Was the Israeli Military When Hamas Attacked? - The New York Times

Hamas understood how to use Israel’s geography against its military.

Despite the siege of Re’im, reinforcements were not far away. Thousands of soldiers were less than 40 minutes from the towns that were under attack. But as terrified citizens waited in bunkers or hid from gunmen, Israeli soldiers were hung up on the highway, unable to reach them.

A central highway connects military bases in the center and south of the country to the communities near Gaza. Pockets of Hamas gunmen set up ambushes along the route, videos from Pandora show. Israeli commanders were hesitant to send soldiers into those traps, according to two Israeli military officers who took part in conversations that morning.

“Hamas is all over the roads,” one Israeli soldier reported in a conversation recounted by a participant. “They own the street, not us.”

Image: Refael Hayun in his bedroom in Netivot, Israel, last week.Credit...via Refael Hayun

Mr. Hayun watched Hamas videos of the attack in real time on social media and relayed information to Maglan’s officers. He began fielding WhatsApp messages from people trying to save their children, friends and themselves.

“Hi Refael, we’re stuck in a trash container near the party location,” one message read. “Please come rescue us. We’re 16 people.”

Mr. Hayun relayed those locations to the commandos, but they did not grasp the enormity of the fight. One Maglan team killed several terrorists near a base in Zikim, just north of Gaza, but they didn’t realize until 11 a.m. that Hamas fighters had stormed Kfar Aza, where some of the worst fighting took place.

Soldiers crowdsourced information. One team commander told soldiers aboard a helicopter to check Telegram channels and news reports to pick targets.

One general, a reservist who fought that day, said there were many heroes on Oct. 7. But an army only needs heroes, he said, when things have gone wrong.

Soldiers are among those asking how things went so wrong.

Major Ben Zion, the reservist, said that his paratrooper unit left its base in central Israel, not far from Tel Aviv, in a convoy at about 1:30 p.m. They mobilized on their own, without a formal call-up order. To save time, they left without night-vision equipment or adequate body armor.

He expected to see the roads packed with soldiers and equipment and armored vehicles heading south.

“The roads were empty!” he recalled in an interview. Roughly seven hours into the fighting, he turned to the reservist next to him and asked: “Where’s the I.D.F.?”

Reporting was contributed by Gal Koplewitz, Adam Sella, Aaron Boxerman, Dmitriy Khavin, Riley Mellen and Angela Rath. Produced by Alice Fang.

Ronen Bergmanis a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman

Mark Mazzettiis an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A. More about Mark Mazzetti

Ainara Tiefenthäler is a video journalist with the Visual Investigations team. She was among the recipients of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for The Times's coverage of the vast civilian toll of U.S.-led airstrikes. More about Ainara Tiefenthäler

Sheera Frenkelis a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology impacts everyday lives with a focus on social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp. More about Sheera Frenkel

A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 30, 2023, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: On All Fronts, Israeli Military Failed on Oct. 7. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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