Comment by solatic

Most takes on this matter have little appreciation for the underlying complexity.

The border fence was a $1 billion capital investment with sensors, automated machine guns, cameras, etc. that allowed the military to reduce the manpower needed to patrol the border. This is a good thing - patrol duty is mind-numbingly boring work that hurts morale, and there are always associated risks of getting hit by a sniper.

There are reports that Israel was warned. Sure - a handful of signals in an ocean of noise. Finding those signals (and wrangling apart conflicting signals) is why intelligence is necessarily an imprecise art and not a science, and why no defensive posture relies solely on intelligence.

Much ado has been made about judicial reform infighting weakening the Israeli security establishment, but all the public reporting points to issues with reservist volunteers, who are not essential for peacetime operations.

The far more banal explanation is that there was no dead-man's-switch monitoring on the border fence. The New York Times reported rumors that the attack started by Hamas knocking out the cell towers that were used by the remote sensors on the border fence to send monitoring data back to operators. Losing connectivity to so many parts of the fence at once should have immediately triggered high-severity alarms. It sounds like that didn't happen.

Why didn't that happen? Maybe a gross oversight on the part of the architects and contractors of the border fence. Maybe that alarm had fired once-too-many times in the past as a flaky-false-positive and it was disconnected instead of fixed. Maybe the dead-man's-switch component itself was broken somehow. Maybe someone took something offline for maintenance at what turned out to be the worst possible time, and alternative mechanisms (i.e. manned patrols) were not deployed during the maintenance, or maybe it simply didn't get turned back on, and nobody noticed because it's functionality is not used by operators on a day-to-day basis.

When so many people die, everyone wants to look for a scapegoat. But perhaps we should just, I dunno, build better systems instead?