For Israelis, Saturday’s shock assault from Gaza was a recurring nightmare, coming 50 years and a day after invading forces from Egypt and Syria caught Israel off-guard, setting off a 19-day warfare that has lengthy traumatized the nation.
Israeli tv channels and newspapers have been stuffed in current days with commemorations of that warfare, and lots of Israelis on Saturday noticed parallels between the assault unfolding round them and the occasions a long time earlier.
That warfare additionally started on the Sabbath, with sirens wailing throughout the nation on Oct. 6, 1973 on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.
On Saturday, many Israelis had been planning to have a good time the vacation of Simchat Torah. As a substitute, the armed wing of Hamas, the Islamic group that controls Gaza, fired hundreds of rockets towards Israel. Concurrently, stories flooded in of a serious breach of Israel’s fortifications alongside its border with Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave that Israel and neighboring Egypt have stored below blockade for 16 years, citing safety causes.
Unverified pictures quickly started to emerge of closely armed Palestinian militants coming into Israeli border communities in pickup vans, on bikes and in a minimum of one case crossing the fenced border by paraglider. Ugly unverified movies started to flow into, purporting to point out the bloodied corpses of Israeli troopers and of hostages taken into Gaza.
Terrified Israeli residents in border villages phoned in to native tv stations from protected rooms. Talking in whispers, they pleaded for assist and mentioned they may hear the militants outdoors, and even inside, their properties.
As confusion and worry unfold, many have been asking how the Israeli authorities and its vaunted army and intelligence providers might have been caught unexpectedly — once more. In one other echo of the 1973 warfare, the army scrambled to name up and mobilize army reservists.
