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They don't necessarily have a rational plan in place. Sometimes people just go to war for emotional reasons. I mean, despite ~80 years having passed and thousands of historians having looked into the question, there is still no consensus on why Hitler decided to continue the invasion of Poland after the UK and France gave him an "if you don't stop we will declare war" ultimatum on September 3, 1939. In retrospect it is clear that Germany had little or no hope of forcing the UK out of the war and that it would have had to hope for the UK to just get tired of fighting. And generally any strategy that has no way to force your opponents to give up but instead relies on hoping that your opponents decide to sue for peace is a bad strategy! And this should have been rationally clear to the Germans in 1939 given their lack of a navy even close to challenging the UK one or any reason to be convinced that their air force would be able to defeat the UK one. But for whatever reason, Hitler kept going. Politicians are not chess-playing computers, they are human beings who have emotions.
Iran does help them but I'm not convinced that Hamas absolutely needed their help to pull this off. From what I can tell, this Hamas operation was a classic light mounted infantry (in this case mounted on cars and trucks) raid that required secrecy, speed, and willingness to take risks but not necessarily much coordination or sophistication. Basically they just needed to 1) have good reason to believe that the Israeli defenses were vulnerable in certain places, 2) tell all of the commanders to just push as much as possible as fast as possible, and 3) keep the planning secret.
It reminds me of the Prigozhin advance on Moscow. There are many conspiracy theories that swirl to try to explain why he had such an easy time of it, but the simplest explanation is that his opponents were just caught with their pants down and his forces moved really fast.
I can't think of any good benefit that Russia would get by antagonizing Israel. The last few years Russia has been trying to be pretty neutral to Israel by, for example, supporting Assad yet not trying to stop the Israelis from bombing his forces. Although to be fair, the latter can maybe in part be explained by the simple fact that Russian forces in Syria, being geographically cut off from Russia by unfriendly and neutral countries and by oceans dominated by NATO, could not realistically withstand a serious land attack.
Edit: After watching more videos, for example https://twitter.com/LocalFocus1/status/1710995658092458048, I'm somewhat upping how sophisticated I think this was. For example, in that video I see what to me look like drones dropping expolosives onto some kind of surveillance towers. Not that this in itself necessarily takes much sophistication, but coordinating the timing between doing it and attacking the actual wall, and making sure that the soldiers follow the schedule, requires good organizational skill and discipline.
Yes I came to the conclusion it had sophistication earlier.
On Russia I’m not sure if this benefits them. The theory is more instability elsewhere weakens the west and distracts us. Overwhelms our decision making process. They’ve long tried to do things like this which does include the 2016 election interference which didn’t have a huge effect electorally but did launch distrust between American tribes.
There are at least a moderate number of Jews still affiliated with the wider Russian security apparatus and kleptocracy, it seems unlikely to me that this was Russia.
Iranians are a large and moderately intelligent people (I think IQ estimates are substantially underestimated) with a relatively stable state and a large public university system with a focus on engineering and tech. It’s definitely possible that it was just them. Even in the West quite a few eg. ML professors and so on are Iranians.
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I play a series of Real Time Strategy games called Wargame. It is based on the cold war, NATO vs Warsaw Pact. Lots of fun. Yes, it's just a video game, but after seeing experienced players used combined arms over thousands of hours, you learn something about tactics and the failures of human nature.
After many many hours I've seen this type of strategy play out time and again. Occasionally someone will organise an impromptu Thunder Run or more specifically an attack largely formed of fast moving motorised ground elements. (where motorised is very loosely used. Achmed and his mates in the back of a Toyota Corolla speeding down the highway with AK74's would work. No need to even have a Technical)
It just works. It shouldn't, but it does. Defense networks just can't react that quickly to scenarios that haven't already had countermeasures emplaced. There aren't enough QRF's for this type of thing on a large scale. People skilled at defense don't have the resources for every scenario, so oddball bum's rushes are far more successful than they have any right to be.
Thoughts like 'surely someone would have thought about this and put something in place' are very often wrong. Once the dust has settled in Israel, I'm sure these strategies will be patched, only for new ones to take their place the next time Gaza flares up.
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