> Do you think that Israel, with the most advanced intelligence agency in the world, capable of planting bombs in pagers just in case for when they need them, did not know about the october 7 attack beforehand ??

Yes. Quite easily. We missed 9/11. And nobody can still find Al Houthi.

9/11 is incomparable. The amount of resources and interest Israel has to monitor the movements of Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere, particularly the Hamas, cannot possibly compare with US trying to keep tabs on half a continent across the globe.

And finding a simple person that could be anywhere is also an incomparable situation.

Bush was warned about 9/11 in a memo in august. It explicitly said al qaeda was planning to use commercial planes. Bush knew.

> Bush was warned about 9/11 in a memo in august. It explicitly said al qaeda was planning to use commercial planes. Bush knew

You're really hanging your hat on the competence of American intelligence in the Middle East for this one?

What? The memo literally said Al qaeda was determined to strike the us with hijacked airplanes. Almost exactly one month before it happened. Are you not old enough to remember? Here’s the memo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Ladin_Determined_To_Strike...

You’re trying really hard to change reality.

9/11 was different. Yes, that's the difference. airport security was more lax, the way we dealt with hijackings was different, and the security on airplanes was minimal.

You had a heavily fortified military DMZ between the massive surveillance and military state of Israel and Hamas flying in with kites, bulldozers, and motorcycles. I hope it was merely a massive failure due to arrogance and misallocation of resources, because a plausible alternative is sadly realistic and believable.

We still don't have a comprehensive map of Hamas' tunnel systems. I think you're overestimating the degree to which 2 million people can be surveilled.

Perhaps not, but it doesn't help when Israel demonstrates with pretty high frequency the ability to precisely target things, but then goes and drops a couple of 2000 pound bombs on a refugee camp. Or claim they know precisely how many hamas fighters have been killed but have no idea how many civilians have been killed.

Oh sure. I'm just saying that yes, it's overwhelmingly plausible that Israel missed October 7th because Netanyahu was distracted with his court-overhaul gambit.

But they didn't come through via tunnels? They used bulldozers and hang-gliders to go above ground.

> they didn't come through via tunnels? They used bulldozers and hang-gliders to go above ground

And the 9/11 terrorists used planes.

Unless there were literally zero unusual bulldozer and hang-glider citings ever made in Gaza, it shouldn't take that much imagination to see how the three thousandth one gets put to the side.

What was crazy about that, was seemingly the majority of Israels active military personnel were stirring up trouble in the west bank. Its a bit like they were showing their bare arses to Hamas. There were stories over the next few days about conscripts having to take civilian transport to the front line after activating.

The war had to be fought hard, because at the very least it was required to distract from the absolute mess the IDF was in when it started.