Kind of essential context for the 10/7 attack is that the kibbutzim (full of civilians) were built around the Gaza perimeter essentially as self-sustaining paramilitary infrastructure to occupy and defend it until formal forces arrived, until very recently armed by the IDF
![The IDF Took Away Weapons From Gaza Border Communities in Recent Years, and Armed West Bank Settlers
The Israeli army believed that the chance of terrorist incursion after fence was 'close to nil.' They removed forces from the area, leaving local security as the last line of defense. 'As much as we banged on the table, it didn't help,' says one local security coordinator
Rafi Babian
When the IDF informed him, as the security officer for the Sdot Negev Regional Council, that it intends to take away most of the weapons from the security details in the council's locales, he warned that this was a dangerous decision. "Officers from the norther brigade in [the] Gaza [division] and the division [HQ] demanded the weapons," he recalls. "As much as we shouted and banged on the table, it didn't help."
โฆ Thus, the number of weapons in the south, from Ashdod to Eilat, dropped to 800, including the 57 locales close to the Gaza Border.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GAb6rXebEAALBe0.jpg)
I think they always self-conceived as communities defending themselves but they had a military function and would actively engage in hostilities. By 10/7 theyโd clearly largely lost their combat capabilities, just civilians living in this kind of paramilitary infrastructure
If you were trying to occupy the perimeter (a legitimate military objective) theyโre the fortifications you would have to take, I have no idea how a formal military trying to comply with laws of war would navigate it. Really a nightmare situation
It was always both at the same time! Agrarian communes in militarily strategic locations, that were armed and coordinated with the formal military to act as a first line of defense
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Israel has an exceptionally militarized society and also a whole conceptual framework obscuring the essentially aggressive nature of a โbuild a new nation where other people livedโ project, and it extends to obscuring when youโre actively participating in hostilities
Kibbutzniks would go out in organized squads to fight off Palestinian incursions in the hills, conceiving of themselves as acting in self/community defense when that is just clearly acting as a paramilitary
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