NBC6’s Ari Odzer is live from Hollywood with reactions from South Florida’s Jewish community to a New York Times report claiming Israel should’ve seen the Hamas terrorist attack coming.
The seven-day truce between Israel and Hamas came to an end today and Israel resumed hitting what it says are Hamas targets and infrastructure in Gaza.
“It came to an end because of Hamas, Hamas reneged on commitments it made,” said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “It began firing rockets before the pause ended.”
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As the war resumes, a New York Times report is causing a stir.
The front-page article claims Israel had a blueprint for the terrorist attack a year ago but dismissed it as too ambitious for Hamas to actually carry out. In fact, the barbaric October 7th attacks on civilians followed the plan almost exactly.
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So should Israel have been able to prevent the devastating operation which killed an estimated 1,200 people?
“They’re learning what happened right now, they will figure it out eventually, something happened for sure, they will figure it out,” said former IDF veteran Eran Hazan, who lives in South Florida now.
Hazan read the article but was unwilling to bash the Israeli Defense Forces over the Times report, saying there will be a reckoning about what went wrong, but now is not the time. He recently visited the ruins of the kibbutz Kfar Aza, which was overrun by Hamas terrorists.
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“Right now, we’re trying to heal from the wounds, you know, there is so much going on, we have one mission right now, to exterminate Hamas,” Hazan said. “We get threats every day, every week, and these threats are repeating itself because they’re always trying us to see what we gonna do, they learn from how we behave, how we act, how we react to the threats and that’s how they learn what we do.”
A couple of weeks ago, IDF colonel Golan Vach told us the military does shoulder some blame.
“The IDF failed, to talk to civilians nowadays, it’s not an easy thing, they ask us why did it take you so long to get to our houses, to save us,” Vach said.
While more than a hundred have come home, Hamas is still holding 137 hostages. Getting them back is a top priority for Israel and the hostage families.
“It’s hard to know how to feel, you’re angry, you’re sad, you’re frustrated, you’re emotional,” said Oded Eshel of Fort Lauderdale.
His cousin, Alon Shamriz, was among those abducted from Kfar Aza. Eshel says it’s hard to pin blame on anyone or any one institution right now.
“The military failed, obviously intelligence failed,” Eshel said, reacting to the Times article. “When you look back, it’s very easy, when you’re trying to connect the dots, when you’re trying to project forward, it’s much more difficult, but ultimately the blame for this attack lies with Hamas, not the intelligence services.”
