EVEN THE DAY BEFORE, the only people who knew exactly what was planned could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Israeli intelligence services had been deceived, or had failed to comprehend. Those who would take part, the militants of Hamas and some allied groups, did not yet know what they had been training for. To keep the secret, Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, had confided in three or four key lieutenants. Only they knew what was to come, and where, and when.
So on that Friday evening, in Rafah and Khan Younis, Tel Aviv and Sderot, in the kibbutzim of southern Israel, in Beit Lahia and Deiral Balah, life went on as usual. Only at 6.29 the next morning, when thousands of rockets launched from Gaza towards Israel across the lightening sky did anyone begin to suspect that this 7 October would be very different. Still, few anticipated the catastrophe it would bring, nor the year of crisis it would provoke.
Last weekend the regional war that so many have feared for so long was apparently closer than ever. More than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, died on 7 October. Of the 250 abducted that day by Hamas, half were released in a short-lived ceasefire in November and half of the remainder are thought to be dead. No one knows how many died in last Friday's massive strike in southern Beirut. More than 41,000 have been killed in Gaza, mostly civilians, one in 55 of the prewar population. More than 700 have died in Lebanon in the recent wave of Israeli attacks, including the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah.
When the sheer scale and brutality of the Hamas attack into Israel on 7 October became clear over the following days, it was obvious that Israel's response would be as unprecedented in scale and violence as the event that provoked it. From London, the big pessimistic picture seemed easy enough to paint: an ever-accelerating cycle of attack and retaliation that would eventually spread across the Middle East.
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