This is the guardian.Tonight, a special update on a weekend ofcarnage in Israel and what might be comingnext Saturday morning around 08:00 a.m.About 3 miles from the fences andwalls that separate Israel from the tinyPalestinian territory called the Gaza the Strip.People were dancing.They’d been dancing all night, hundreds ofthem, at a rave in the desert.And even though they were so close toone of the most dangerous borders in theworld, there was barely any security.Nobody thought they needed it.Gaza is surrounded by barriers,patrolled overhead by drones.Hamas, the militant group that runs the area, wassaid to be more focused on building up Gaza’seconomy, which has been strangled by a 16 yearIsraeli siege, than fighting another war.And so, just 3 miles from the territory,people were dancing, unaware that those fences andwalls were about to be breached.Let’s go.And fighters were coming across the land and the sea andeven from the sky to kill them and take them hostage.Videos show those festival goers completelyunaware, even as hummus paragliders areslowly drifting towards them.So far from that music festival, at least260 people are confirmed to have been killed.October 7 is going to be one of thosedates that becomes part of Middle Eastern history.About a thousand Hamas fighters doing something sounthinkable that when it came, israel took hoursjust to comprehend what was happening.Militants broke into Israel overran military bases,kibbutzes towns, went house to house, killingfamilies, shooting people, waiting at bus stops,anyone they could find.They stole tanks and cars, managed to get halfwayacross Israel before turning back, taking more than ahundred hostages with them, the vast majority civilians.It was a breathtaking and brutalattack, years in the making.And as of Monday afternoon, not over.There are still reports of gunfightsin parts of southern Israel.Israeli jets have been bombingGaza since Saturday afternoon.The military is massing at theborder, preparing to enter Gaza.Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has vowedto reduce the territory to ruins.Civilians there have nowhere to go.They’re not allowed out.In the past few days, Israel’scut off electricity to Gaza.Today, they said imports of anything else,including food and water, are banned.According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, more than500 people there are already dead.The next few days and weeks are going to bebloody and dangerous for the region and the world, andwe’re going to cover it deeply from on the ground,probably many times in the next few weeks.But today, alongside our usual episode in yourfeed every morning, we’re posting this update.Tonight, making sense of what we know so far.From the Guardian.I’m Michael Sarfi.Today in Focus, how Hamas stunnedIsrael and what happens next.Peter Beaumont, you’re a senior foreigncorrespondent with The Guardian, and, infact, our former Jerusalem correspondent.You’ve spent years in israel and alot of that time in Gaza.One of the things that I think Israelis and actuallyeverybody is trying to make sense of since Saturday isthat Gaza has been likened to an open air prison.Its population is thought to be one of themost scrutinized, surveilled and controlled people on earth.So how could Hamas possibly have done this?I think the thing that struck me coveringGaza over the last 20 years is thatHamas is not static in military terms.Every round of fighting, you see some adaptation.It learns from fighting with Israel in a waythat perhaps Israel doesn’t learn from fighting with Hamas.And part of that is the awareness inHamas’s leadership that they are incredibly heavily surveilled.They know what Israeli technology is capable of.They know they’re listened into, they see the drones,they know what equipment Israel can use against them.They know that people who are allowed to go inand out of Gaza are often pressed to become informers.And so they have developedways of maintaining operational security.And that’s apparently what they’ve done.I mean, there are stories doing the roundstoday that this operation wasn’t necessarily communicated toall of the senior members of the Hamaspolitical bureau, that people who were being trainedin the fighting didn’t know what their objectiveswere, simply that they were training.The takeaway is there was this huge investment in asolution, which was a sort of heavily surveilled wall, andall the eggs were put into that basket.But if there’s one other thing I’d want tosay here, is that Israel should have been awareof the vulnerability of relying on a wall.This isn’t the first time that there hasbeen a major breach of a border structure.It’s not hermetically sealed, and it never has been.And so, given that, given that this wallis not impermeable, where were the Israeli troops?Where was the IDF?How was Hamas able to get so farinto Israel facing almost no resistance from oneof the most powerful armies in the Mean?You know, the security situation in Israel and theoccupied territories at the moment is quite complicated.There’s been a lot of unrest on the West Bank,some of it stirred by sort of extremist settler groups.And because of that, that has required quitea heavy deployment by the Israeli defence Forces.And the West Bank is theother large area where Palestinians live.Yes, the other large Palestinian area.And because of that, there’s been quite aheavy deployment of resources to the West Bank.Did that deplete Israeli forces along the wall?I don’t know.But it does feel as though there wasan over reliance on this security barrier.I mean, it goes pretty deep into the ground.It’s designed to kind ofprevent Hamas tunneling underneath.It has ground motion and sensors.There are cameras.But it feels as though somewhere in all ofthis both through the complacency of relying on thisvery, very expensive high tech barrier and because ofa wider complacency about what they thought that Hamas’capabilitieswere, the bull was dropped.Peter, in Israel, the reaction so far has beenshock and grief, and now this anger that justseems to be building with every hour.Take me through how Israel hasreacted to these attacks since Saturday.Obviously, on Saturday, we saw sort of the scramble toget sort of a coherent military response to this.And over the last sort of 36 to 48 hours,even though as of this morning, there were still reportsof some Hamas infiltrations through the border, I mean, mostof the locations that Hamas had overrun have either beenretaken or in the process of being retaken.So that’s the initial response wasto kind of stabilize the situation.Since that, obviously there has been very large mobilization,and a political decision has been made that thiswill be framed not in terms of a roundof fighting or an operation, but in terms ofIsrael at war, which has a psychological importance.I mean, aside from the familiar sights of kind ofIsraeli jets bombing targets inside Gaza, which we’ve seen somany times before, what’s happened in the last sort of24 hours, this is sort of a move to amuch more total siege of Gaza.Even if you sort of wonder how that’s possible.I mean, there’s no food supplies going through thetruck crossings, electricity being cut, the Israeli water supplythat goes into Gaza being announced as being cutin the last couple of hours.Gaza is very, very heavily reliant oncity for its local water systems.And what we’re seeing now is kind of astream of heavy armor heading down towards all the. “  WWW.ARMINIC.COM  “  String points that they’ve mustered up so many timesbefore on the Gaza border waiting to go in.So what could that invasion, if it happens, be like?I mean, one of the big questions is whether oneof the purposes of Saturday was to prompt Israel toenter the urban areas of Gaza, because they must haveknown that that would be the inevitable response, right?They know that’s the inevitable response.I mean, they are far from naive, and they will havethought through what the Israeli response is going to be.To give you a picture for people whohaven’t been to Gaza of what it’s like.It’s small.When people talk about it, often they talk about itas being kind of an entirely dense urban area.It’s not quite like that.The far north of Gaza near the Erez crossingis there’s lots of little farms up there beforeyou start hitting the first industrial units and sortof towns on the north south road.So you have this area up inthe north where there’s essentially farmland thatit’s quite easy for tanks to operate.As soon as the Israelis get into thedense urban areas, it gets much more difficult.I mean, the Hamas and otherfactions have pre prepared positions.They have anti tank guided missiles.Now, you know, they have the capacity todamage Israeli armor, and it makes it amuch more level playing field this time around.Hamas don’t just have those defenses you’re describing.They have more than 100 Israeli hostagesalso scattered throughout the Gaza Strip.So how do you think that will shape theway that Israel carries out whatever it has planned?I don’t know, is the simple answer.If you’d asked me that and the hostages were taken ina different context to this, I would have said that itwould have shaped some caution in an Israeli response.But I think the full scale of the horrorof what has happened, the shock to Israeli society,is so great, and I say that having spokento Israeli and Palestinian friends over the weekend.I mean, the shock is so great thatthe balance between maintaining the safety of thosehostages and the desire to push back atHamas and pursue whatever the military objectives are,it’s going to be quite a difficult call.I think it would be naive to saythat because of the existence of them, thatIsraelis will necessarily take a softer approach.I’m not sure they will.I think that would be an error to think that.And I think with so very many dead and somuch shock, I wonder whether that will mitigate the response.You raised this, but I want to come back to it.Whatever the Israeli response is going to be, it’sgoing to be incredibly destructive to Hamas, to itsleadership, and to the civilians living in Gaza.So given all of that, and given that Hamasmust have known something severe, would happen in response?What is their strategy?What was their plan for doing this?What is the objective beyond fighting the IsraeliDefense Forces in urban areas of Gaza?I mean, one of the problems with talking to sortof Hamas leaders over the years is that they havethis kind of rather cultish messianic view of a longterm of history in which a situation comes about whereone way or another, Israel ceases to exist.Hamas has gone into this with their eyes open.They have triggered a conflict with a muchmore powerful neighbor, with the aim, I think,of fighting them and inflicting as much damageon them as they possibly can.And I think it’s somewhere in the back of theirmind they think that somehow, if they do this, thatsomehow it will energize support in the wider Middle East.I’m not convinced.I mean, generally the Arabpopulations are very pro Palestinian.They really are much morethan their leadership and elites.But at the same mean, I think what they kindof want is it’s in the history books now.I’m not sure that what theythink will happen will ever happen.And I think know, for all their technological capabilityand organizational skills that they’ve developed, that is theissue, is that there is also about Hamas akind of brutal unreality about them, and that’s whatmakes them so difficult to deal with.Well, just this afternoon, Benjamin Netanyahu hasreportedly told Joe Biden that he isplanning a ground invasion of Gaza.So if that is Hamas’s plan, it looks like it’s working.But Peter, the people who are essentially collateral damage inall of this are, of course, the civilians in Gaza,where 50% of the population are under 18, who havebeen ruled by Hamas for 16 years without getting asay in it now for decades, how do they survivesomething like a full scale Israeli ground invasion?I think the message that was coming through this weekend,talking to people was just how very, very frightened peoplewho often will have seen all this before.It wasn’t as bad as this and bad as that.But, I mean, there is a real sense offear coming out of Gaza at the moment.People are absolutely terrified aboutwhat’s going to happen next.And I think part of that is simplynot knowing how bad it could get.But I think that people assume it will be very bad.Coming up, what Saturday’s attack means forthe future of Palestinians and for Israelis.Peter, you say what happened on Saturdayis going to transform the way Israeland maybe the world approach these questionsof Palestinian statehood and Palestinian rights.But it’s decades of violence and thefailure to find a political solution that’sultimately gotten us to this point.And I wonder if there’s any chance that the lessonsthe world draws from these terrible appalling events at theweekend is that ultimately, in this fight more war andmore violence is not going to end it.Sadly, I think the lessons I think we’regoing to see are not good ones.This is going to really, really hurt the Palestiniansmore than it’s going to hurt anyone else.I mean, this is going to leadto more isolation for the Palestinian case.Will people draw the lessons that I personallythink that they should draw from it, whichis that you cannot have meaningful peace processesin the wider Middle East while sidelining Palestiniannational ambitions, which is what has been happeningsince the Trump administration, and I’m afraid tosay during the Biden administration.I mean, ultimately, you just end up constantly circlingback to the point that here is this largegroup of people who have entirely legitimate national aspirations,who have suffered under decades of occupation, who haveseen decades of different kinds of war.Most of whom, when you meet them, want to get on,live prosperous lives and send their kids to school and bepart of the wider world as part of a Palestinian state.We keep moving further and further away from kind ofways of talking about the legitimacy of that ambition.And I’m afraid. “  WWW.ARMINIC.COM  “  To say.I mean, Hamas’s actions on Saturday, massively underminingfor that aspiration massively undermining because all itdoes is in too many people’s minds.It just sort of says there is nodifference between wider Palestinian society and Hamas, andin reality, there is a huge difference.Hamas does not represent Palestinian society as awhole, and we should never forget that.And what about for Israel and Israelis?We talk about Saturday asa day when everything changed.What does that country look like going forward?All I can describe is something that I’ve only ever seenonce before, and that was after 911 in the US.And that is a profound shakingof people’s confidence in themselves.I mean, one friend said to me that they thoughtthat security was a given, that it was promised, thatthis was kind of one of the building block oflife in Israel, is that the government would be sufficientlycompetent to protect you against this kind of absolute horror.And talking about how itmade them wonder about everything.What does this mean?Is everything we’ve been told about what we’veachieved and who we are, what’s true?And that strikes me as going to triggera moment of national introspection and debate aboutwhat Israel means, what can they trust?And I think for what feels like a very wornout and kind of discredited political period over know BenjaminEtnahu has presided in recent years that it feels asthough it will shock us into some new shape, butI don’t know what kind of new shape.Peter, thank you very much.Thank you.That was Peter Beaumont, whose work is atour website, along with the reporting of thewhole Guardian team on this story, including BethanMcKernan, our Jerusalem correspondent, who’s on the groundjust as we’re posting this episode.A Hamas spokesman has warned that if Israel continuesto bomb civilian houses in Gaza, hamas will startexecuting hostages and broadcasting it on TV.This story is moving so fast and will keep changing.So to stay across the latest, go tothe Guardian live blog, which is going tobe running throughout the next days.At least all the newest updates will be there.And that is it for tonight.This episode was produced byNatalie Kinar and Tom Glasser.Sound design was by Rudy Segadlo.The executive producers were HomaKhalili and Phil Maynard.And we’ll be back as usual tomorrow morning.