A Hamas terrorist lands with a paraglider in the Hatara route on October 7/no
A week before the massacre on October 7, if you were standing a short distance from the border of the Gaza Strip, probably in the southern part of Nativ HaTara near the wall, you would not have missed the echoes of explosions and the sound of small arms and machine gun fire from the Palestinian area. In a quick inspection of civilians and soldiers in front of the military in the Gaza Division, it was clearly stated to anyone who asked: this
was the training of the military arm of Hamas. And everyone saw. Then activists uploaded videos to the network and did not hide anything. It can be clearly seen that they also use paragliders (bakai) for raiding. It was a 'wet' exercise before a 'wet' one." A week passed - and the Hamas operation came to fruition and the million dollar question remained open: where was the Air Force?
A Hamas terrorist on a paraglider on October 7/documentation on social networks according to Article 27 A of the Copyright Law
On October 7th at approximately 06:45, when the echoes of the explosions reached their peak from the fall of rockets, mortar bombs and the activation of IEDs attached to the perimeter fence, citizens and members of the standby squad in the Tenat lane, noticed paragliders in the air. There were citizens who estimated that these were aviation enthusiasts who had made a mistake in their flight path. But at least one standby platoon member who heard the sound of the paraglider engine going over his head in combining his knowledge of Hamas and understanding of the attribution threat in the area viewed from the Palestinian side, did not hesitate for a moment. He opened fire at the paraglider on which the bomber was, but was unable to hit it. Shooting experts explained that the range, and the fact that it is a moving target in the sky and not on the ground, makes accurate shooting difficult.
Three Hamas terrorists on top of three paragliders managed to bypass the border line unhindered, and land in the heart of Nativ Ha'Tara, when according to the testimonies of the residents, they were armed from head to toe and ready for a variety of tasks. Very quickly, the terrorists got out of the paragliders on which they had trained for years and began a well-planned killing spree while recognizing the geographical outline of the settlement. The members of the reserve unit of the Tenth Route hurried to organize and fight with courage and valor, but the results were very difficult as the rockets and mortar bombs continue to be launched in the background. The terrorists murdered 13 civilians and four members of the standby squad.
These were literally battles for the house. The entire defense concept of the IDF in the air and on land collapsed. Not far from there, the Navy fighters succeeded in partially repelling an attack by the Nuhba fighters on Zikim Beach, and the IDF fighters along the entire border of the Gaza Strip were busy defending themselves in order to deal with the approximately 3,000 terrorists that penetrated through 60 axes in the fence. The members of the standby squad in the lane of the ten conducted exchanges of fire from close ranges. One of the terrorists was wounded. The shooting continued, but two terrorists managed to return to the Gaza Strip. A security official told Walla! Because the Shin Bet and the IDF managed to eliminate one terrorist and the other is still alive in the Gaza Strip.
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The first pair of helicopters arrived only after 45 minutes. An Air Force combat helicopter over the skies of Gaza/Flash 90, Chaim Goldberg
At the same time, seven armed Hamas terrorists land using the same paragliders in the Kafr Gaza area and begin the massacre. Five more terrorists hover undisturbed in the depth of the country's territory, recognize the Nuva festival in the bad and decide to make a landing in the territory. A senior military official said to Walla! Because according to the investigations of Hamas terrorists in Israel, they did not know about the festival before, but rather they were terrorists who identified the thousands of participants in the festival from the air and passed the information to the Hamas headquarters in the Gaza Strip about the location in order to receive reinforcements of additional terrorists.
Security officials from the Western Negev region confirmed in a conversation with Walla! Because the DPA (possible course of action) for the activation of paragliders was known to all the parties involved in the defense of the area, but there was no training or refinements on cases and clear responses to what would happen when a swarm of paragliders tried to cross the border at various points. The assessment was that Israeli intelligence would know how to warn in time True, and the Air Force will know how to handle an incident, including thwarting it further in Palestinian territory, as in recent years
they have intercepted unmanned
aircraft that rose to altitude and tried to leave the Gaza Strip.
and trying to hit them in the air, but when we saw it was too late. We had no information and no time," explained a security source. "Through the 'in-the-know' they used the advantage of surprise and lethality."
Gazan terrorists unhindered October 7/Flash 90, Abed Rahim Khatib
The pilots landed after an hour - and discovered it was too late
Pictures from the paragliders that passed from the Palestinian side to the Israeli side, with some of them carrying single terrorists and some with pairs of terrorists, became in retrospect one of the first signs that all the rocket launches on the Israeli home front were just a diversionary operation for the murderous attack by Hamas and not another day of rocket launches. The photos and videos that appeared on the Internet in the first day raised very difficult questions about how the IDF prepared for the mission of intercepting paragliders on the border of the Gaza Strip and automatically also cast doubt on the level of the Air Force's defense against the threats from southern Lebanon. Close to the Ground (RoKK) criticized the conduct of the Air Force before October 7, in the first hours of October 7, and in these days when there is no taking responsibility for the issue in the Air Force and no perfect solution for "the day after".
The officers pointed to the first four hours of the attack and explained that this was the time when most of the civilians and soldiers were kidnapped from the Israeli rear and the border. One of them said: "During these hours, the great air force was not really there." The classic example of the Air Force's disengagement from the murderous attack was a pair of fighter jets that were jumped in response to the rocket launches, according to an orderly and well-known procedure to patrol the area of the Rotenberg power plant chimneys with a watchful eye for the gas rig against the background of the fear that at the same time Hamas would use unmanned aircraft to penetrate Israeli airspace to attack in space "The launch of the fighter jets is an automatic operation," one of the officers explained later. The amazing thing about this story is that after the patrol in the air which lasted about an hour, the two pilots landed and were amazed to find out that a murderous attack was taking place on the ground, the dimensions of which are not clear and only later it turns out to be a massacre. One of the veteran pilots asked his friends in amazement: "Why weren't we informed when we were in the air even though we only have air-to-air weapons? Would we have taken observation missions? We would have fired a Vulcan cannon or carried out ultrasonic booms to scare the terrorists on the ground."
"The Air Force did not see this as its mission and waited for the Gaza Division, which faced one of the biggest threats known to the State of Israel from the day it was founded, to ask it for missions," claimed one of the reserve officers. When a huge war broke out on the ground, civilians and soldiers were kidnapped, women were raped and families were murdered, the entire formation of the army's fighter planes stood on the other side and was not really there to save them. The contribution of the fighter planes in the first hours of the war, and even in the first half, was negligible. One of the officers admitted that the war began with about a squadron and a half (the situation is now completely different for the better - AB) as a service to use laser-guided weapons for purposes of the type of paragliders or in the language of the air crews "to attack an occasional target".
F-35 fighter jet/image manipulation, Ruben Castro
From the moment of the attack, a pair of combat helicopters were launched from the Ramat David base, arriving at the border of the Gaza Strip only after 45 minutes. It took them a while to understand what was going on in the settlements, in the outposts and on the border line, and even then the scope of their ammunition was very limited and by the time the additional pair of combat helicopters arrived from the Ramon base, more atrocities occurred. "Those who want to really challenge the system should ask the Air Force how come you haven't thought of buying a squadron of A-10s, an attack and support aircraft close to the ground that can carry a monstrous range of weapons such as a powerful shell cannon, bombs, rockets, missiles, instead of fighter helicopter squadrons. "Nat and more," the officers wondered.
The veteran reserve officers said that the air defense mission is the Air Force's from end to end and the fact that they started to upgrade the Northern Command with means of detection and identification indicates the great gap that existed. "The 'Bakai' is a vulnerable target. A combat helicopter knows how to spray her easily. It flies slowly, it doesn't maneuver quickly and you hear it. Now everyone internalizes that the decision to reduce the array of combat helicopters was a big mistake and is trying to close the gap by procurement. On the other hand, it should be remembered that even a combat helicopter has weak points, such as the fact that an unmanned aircraft can kill a terrorist on the roof of a Palestinian house in Gaza where our forces are located." The
background of the criticism was the heroic actions of the combat helicopter array in the first days of the war, but at the same time it must be emphasized that Their importance gradually decreased as the maneuver progressed and especially when the fighter jets entered the battle picture, taking over 80% of the scope of the airstrikes on pre-planned targets and "flash" targets in short time constants than required (up to half an hour). A senior reserve officer was very critical of the corps in which he grew up Against the background of the heavy price paid by Israeli society in this war. At the beginning of his remarks, the officer said that, to his understanding, Hamas' Bekai teams were the ones who discovered the festival, whose murderous results will be a bloody wound forever.
"The infiltrations proved that the Air Force does not know how to step on itself all at once and to close the event on the ground because he does not see the protection of the fighters on the ground as a mission. This is a conceptually difficult problem and we must deal with it in depth," said the senior reserve officer. "In the end, the ordinary citizen says: 'We paid and bought the best fighter planes and where were you all day during the first day? The Air Force's mission cannot end with the defense of the country's skies. There must be planes in high availability for any air-related scenario, including for the RoK. It is impossible to invest so much in the Air Force and not have this be its mission. The former Chief of Staff Kochavi tried to change it and in part he succeeded, but in border protection it did not change."
Commander of the Air Force, Major General Tomer Bar/Reuven Castro
"What's the point of such a crazy air force if it doesn't know how to protect the border?"
The senior reserve officer insisted on defining the infiltration of the paragliders as a "failure of the result test". "There is the Air Force. Why is there Lek Modi'in? The intelligence on this issue belongs to the Air Force. Why didn't Lek Modi'in know about this? After all, everyone has known about the paragliders since 2014, including the upgrading of the capabilities of the 'Bakai' inside the Strip. The Air Force has responsibility for the final result and has the ability to strike even on the spot. After all, you attack targets every Monday and Thursday, and you attacked in Gaza. So if you know that there is a chance that you will not have real-time intelligence, as we understood at the beginning, then kill it in the Batash, and if you had intelligence where were you to intercept? You mismanaged it. It can't be that so many aerial vehicles infiltrated and you didn't know about it in intelligence and didn't prevent it in advance. Why is it that when there is a new army in the Middle East, you thwart it in advance with the MBM (in the campaign between the wars - IV) or the BTS? Because you know that in real time you won't be able to wait. In the final result, the Air Force suffered a resounding failure. The story of the paragliders was a terrible event. So in the Air Force they will say: 'We were not told to come, so we did not come.'"
In the view of the Air Force Reserve Officers, they would not have criticized if Air Force Commander Major General Tomer Bar had taken full responsibility for this event in the professional forums and especially as the Air Force Shows only the successes and not the failure of each IDF in which there is a significant part. "A necessary change is needed here and an opportunity to ask what the Air Force's responsibilities are and what the Air Force's missions are," explained one of the officers. "What is such a crazy air force worth to us if it does not know how to protect the border in real time. They will say that the orders do not provide an answer because it is a one-point order to attack one unit and that the air force does not see it as its mission, but on the other hand about small pilots that take off from a runway Gaza will do 70 patrols in the air all day because this is their mission."
The officer further explained: "Protecting the soldiers at the border is not their mission? 45 minutes on standby from the Ramat David base? This is an excuse. Why do airmen from Lebanon and Gaza have minutes on standby? Because they fear infiltration and this is their mission. Who says in the Air Force that the Gaza Division should have asked And to turn to the army, this is a world view of a small head and not upside down instead of looking for their responsibilities. There are officers who need to go home. Where were they in the intelligence unit? They should not tell stories. When they are not comfortable, they are suddenly under the responsibility of AMN. Anyone who knows how to shoot down a 2.5-meter long airplane also knows how to shoot down a 'Bakai' paraglider."
An IDF spokesperson responded: "The IDF invests all its efforts, researches, studies and works in order to maintain the security of the citizens of Israel and face new challenges that the war placed."
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