Gaza fence limitations
...the main failure was said to lie with over-reliance on the remote-controlled border fence and improper defences of it, which allowed drones controlled remotely by Hamas to bomb and disable communication towers...
(TIMES OF ISRAEL) – The Gaza-Israel border fence was not designed, on its own, to withstand the kind of assault carried out by Hamas on October 7, according to the former CEO of the defence firm responsible for constructing and maintaining the barrier in a 2018 interview.
Saar Koursh, then the CEO of Magal Security Systems, specified that the barrier could not withstand thousands of people attempting to trample it and burst into Israel.
“It would take about 30 seconds to cross,” Koursh told Bloomberg. “This fence wasn’t built to stop riots … It was built to give real-time indication if somebody is trying to cross the border.”
Upon its completion in 2021, then-defence minister Benny Gantz praised the project, saying at an opening ceremony for the new 65-km barrier that it “places an ‘iron wall,’ sensors and concrete between the terror organisation [in Gaza] and the residents of Israel’s south.”
Koursh indicated in the 2018 interview that the barrier, and the technologies embedded into it, needed to be accompanied by the appropriate military measures and deployments to be effective.
“When you combine several technologies together with the military, you have an effective barrier, a system in place that can deter, delay and detect,” he said.
According to details reported on October 10 by The New York Times, citing initial assessments by four senior Israeli security officials, the operational failure began when an urgent alert on the morning of October 7 by intelligence officials about a sudden surge of activity in Hamas communication networks wasn’t acted upon by border guards, who presumably didn’t get it or read it.
But the main failure was said to lie with over-reliance on the remote-controlled border fence and improper defences of it, which allowed drones controlled remotely by Hamas to bomb and disable communication towers, surveillance centres and remotely-operated machine guns near the border, as well as disabling security cameras with sniper fire, instantly rendering the border defenceless.
Few soldiers were stationed near the border, both because forces had been diverted to the West Bank and because the reliance on the high-tech barrier led the military to believe troops didn’t have to physically guard the frontier in large numbers.
Explosives and bulldozers then created breaches in the fence, allowing some 2500 terrorists to stream into Israel.
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