On October 7th, Israel abandoned the south

Of all the failures exposed on October 7, 2023, the most catastrophic may have been one of strategy, not just security. In a revealing interview, Yehuda Shaul, co-founder of the Israeli veterans' organization Breaking the Silence, presents a damning indictment of the Israeli government’s pre-war political calculus. He argues that the devastating Hamas attack was not a simple intelligence or tactical blunder, but the direct result of a long-standing policy: deliberately weakening the Palestinian Authority while bolstering Hamas in Gaza, under the illusion that the conflict could be indefinitely "managed" by military might. This prioritization, Shaul explains, was starkly visible in the disproportionate deployment of troops, with more soldiers protecting a few hundred settlers in Hebron than were stationed on the entire Gaza border that morning. October 7th, therefore, was not an isolated security breach but the inevitable explosion of a failed paradigm, proving that a strategy of perpetual control over millions of Palestinians ultimately undermines Israel's own security.