Early on the morning of October 7, 2023, Israeli soldiers guarding the border along the Gaza Strip noticed signs of an imminent attack. Around the same time, the head of the Israeli army’s Southern Command, General Yaron Finkelman, returned to his post after a vacation.

At 6:29 a.m., as several thousand enemy rockets began raining down on Israel, 3,000 terrorists breached the high-tech security fence and stormed into kibbutzim, towns and army bases in what Hamas labelled as Operation Al Aqsa Flood.

Unprecedented in its size, scope and destructiveness, it shattered Israel’s sense of security and triggered the Israel-Hamas war and, later, Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon.

Seth Frantzman, an Israeli journalist who covered the war, resurrects these momentous events in his engaging and usually absorbing book, The October 7 War: Israel’s Battle For Security In Gaza (Wicked Son), which unfolds lucidly in three parts.

The first is a backgrounder on Gaza. The second is a primer on Hamas’ rampage and Israel’s response. The third is a summary of the first five months of the war, which was paused recently by a tenuous six-week ceasefire agreement that may or may not endure.

As he correctly observes, Gaza has played a pivotal role in Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.

During the British Mandate period, the Zionist movement in Palestine built an array of settlements around Gaza ranging from Yad Mordechai and Nir Am to Nirim and Be’eri. The town of Sderot, just one kilometer away from Gaza, was founded in 1951.

Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war were resettled in eight refugee camps in Gaza, which would be incubators for terrorists. Due to a succession of wars,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)