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 battle that has lengthy traumatized the nation.
Israeli tv channels and newspapers have been stuffed in latest days with commemorations of that battle, and lots of Israelis on Saturday noticed parallels between the assault unfolding round them and the occasions a long time earlier.
That battle 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 an alternative, the armed wing of Hamas, the Islamic group that controls Gaza, fired 1000’s of rockets towards Israel. Concurrently, studies 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 saved underneath blockade for 16 years, citing safety causes.
Unverified photographs quickly started to emerge of closely armed Palestinian militants coming into Israeli border communities in pickup vehicles, on bikes and in not less than one case crossing the fenced border by paraglider. Grotesque 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 secure rooms. Talking in whispers, they pleaded for assist and mentioned they might hear the militants outdoors, and even inside, their properties.
As confusion and concern unfold, many had been asking how the Israeli authorities and its vaunted army and intelligence providers might have been caught abruptly — once more. In one other echo of the 1973 battle, the army scrambled to name up and mobilize army reservists.
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