Hamas operation was ‘extraordinary accomplishment from military standpoint’: Scott Ritter

The “Operation al-Aqsa Storm” launched by the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas on October 7 was “an extraordinary accomplishment from a strictly military standpoint,” former US military intelligence officer Scott Ritter has said.

Ritter told Press TV on Thursday that “what Hamas did is even in orders of magnitude greater than what many people think.”

“It was stunning,” lauded Ritter, who is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, and former United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspector.

The Gaza-based resistance movements of Hamas and Islamic Jihad launched a large-scale operation on October 7 with a heavy barrage of rockets in response to Israel’s desecration of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and its campaign of aggression, violation, and bloodshed against Palestinians.

The military operation shook the Israeli security establishment, leaving 1,400 Israelis dead and hundreds of others injured.  The attack was considered the biggest intelligence failure on the part of Israel since the 1973 war.

Ritter said that after 2014, and after 2020, Israelis “began to institute some major changes that were designed to secure Gaza.”

“These changes included physical barriers and the incorporation of the lot of remote sensing, a lot of constant intelligence collection,” he said.

“So the Israelis have positioned themselves to have total knowledge of what Hamas was up to. That was their intent. This makes what Hamas did even more stunning because this was not as if Israelis had let their guard down, that the Israelis had failed to consider something,” he pointed out.

“Israelis – and I’ve worked with the Israelis – they’re very intelligent, they’re very open-minded in how they consider problems, and they are very innovative in the solutions they come up with,” he stated.

“So we cannot diminish what Israel has put in place. It was an extraordinarily complex technologically advanced system designed to give Israel as complete a picture as possible about Hamas,” the analyst noted.

“This means that what Hamas did is even in orders of magnitude greater than what many people think,” he said.

“Their ability to defeat this Israeli surveillance system and to be able to initiate an attack on Israeli facilities, at the scope and scale of what Hamas did is an extraordinary accomplishment from a strictly military standpoint,” Ritter noted.  

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“It means that people didn’t give Hamas the level of credit that they deserve,” he stated.  

“It shows a lack of imagination on the part of the Israelis because when you built this system of total intelligence awareness, it is programmed to look for certain things and they were looking for things that were derived from the lessons of 2014, the lessons of 2020, even the lessons of 2021, but they weren’t looking for is what happened in 2023, on October 7, 2023,” Ritter said.

“It’s clear that Hamas has been collecting intelligence against the Israeli targets for some time now,” he said.

“It’s also clear that its intelligence was extraordinarily accurate, that they knew street locations, their house names, the layouts, where weapons were, where security personnel were. They knew the best routes of the given locations,” Ritter said.  

“They knew how the Israeli system worked. They knew where their weak spots were, and Israeli surveillance,” he said.

“They understood the totality of the Israeli surveillance even those aspects which are kept secret. , and not talked about in public spheres because those aspects of secret acts of Israeli intelligence didn’t detect what Hamas was doing,” Ritter observed.

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