Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am here in our living room in Jerusalem with my brother. It is a bit of a rainy January afternoon here in twenty twenty-six, and the city feels quiet today, but our topic is anything but quiet.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. It is good to be here, Corn. Though I have to say, the topic our housemate Daniel sent over this week is a heavy one. He was asking about the events of October seventh, twenty twenty-three, specifically through the lens of perimeter security and how such a technologically advanced system could fail so catastrophically. It has been over two years since that day, and while the physical scars are healing in some places, the technical and strategic questions are still being debated in every engineering and military circle on the planet.
It is a question that has been at the center of national conversation here for years now. And Daniel really hit on something specific in his audio note. He was wondering how the integration of tech and physical barriers can be balanced so we do not end up relying too heavily on any one piece of the puzzle. It is a classic engineering problem with tragic, real-world consequences. How do you build a system that is smart but not brittle?
Exactly. And since we are sitting here in January of twenty twenty-six, we actually have the benefit of several major investigations that have been released over the last year. Just yesterday, the Supreme Court actually lifted the gag order on that Assaf Shmuelovitz case, which is a whole other layer of security breaches involving the command structure after the initial attack. Shmuelovitz, for those who do not know, was the systems architect who warned about the fiber optic vulnerabilities back in twenty twenty-two. But looking back at the border itself, the failure of what was called the Iron Wall is really a masterclass in what happens when you let technology create an illusion of invincibility.
The Iron Wall. I remember when that was completed in late twenty twenty-one. It was marketed as this impenetrable barrier. Sixty-five kilometers of reinforced concrete, sensors, and underground defenses. Herman, walk me through the technical side of that. What was actually in that wall that made everyone feel so safe? Because I remember the press releases—they made it sound like a sci-fi force field.
Right, so the Iron Wall was a five billion shekel project. That is about one point one to one point five billion dollars depending on the exchange rate at the time. The vast majority of that budget, actually about four billion shekels, went into the underground portion. After the twenty fourteen conflict, the big fear was tunnels. Hamas had been digging these sophisticated cross-border tunnels, and the Iron Wall was the ultimate answer to that. They built this massive underground slurry wall packed with seismic sensors that could detect even the slightest vibration of a shovel or a drill deep in the earth. It was designed to make the tunnel threat obsolete, and in many ways, it did. On October seventh, the tunnels were not the primary way they got through.
But that is part of the problem, right? By solving the underground problem so effectively, did they inadvertently signal to Hamas that they needed to go back to basics and just go over the top or through the fence? It is like if you lock your front door with ten deadbolts, you are basically telling the burglar to try the window.
That is exactly what the twenty twenty-five IDF investigation concluded. It is called the risk paradox. The more you secure one avenue, the more you incentivize a high-risk, high-reward strategy on another. Above ground, the wall had a six-meter-high fence, which was topped with cameras, thermal sensors, and something called Sentry Tech, or the See-Shoot system. These were remote-controlled machine gun stations that were supposed to allow operators back in a command center, miles away, to engage targets without ever putting a soldier in harm's way. The idea was that you could have a single operator managing several kilometers of border from a comfortable chair in a bunker.
I remember the Sentry Tech demos. It looked like something out of a science fiction movie. But on October seventh, those guns were neutralized almost immediately. How does a remote-controlled machine gun get defeated by a group that, on paper, has far less technical capability? Did they hack the software?
No, it was much simpler and more elegant than a hack. This is where the integration failure happened. Those Sentry Tech stations and the high-resolution cameras were all connected to a centralized network. The data was transmitted through cellular towers and fiber optic lines that ran along the border, often in very predictable paths. Hamas used small, off-the-shelf drones—specifically the Zouari fixed-wing drones and smaller quadcopters carrying basic explosives—to target the tops of those towers and the sensor clusters. By dropping a grenade on a communication relay or a camera lens, they essentially blinded the entire system. They did not need to hack the brain; they just poked the eyes out.
So, it was a classic single point of failure. You have the most advanced optics in the world, but if the wire connecting them to the screen is cut, they are just expensive glass and metal. It is like having a high-tech security system for your house that runs on a single Wi-Fi router sitting on your porch.
Precisely. And because the system was so automated, the IDF had reduced the number of physical troops on the border. They thought the technology acted as a force multiplier, meaning you need fewer boots on the ground because the eyes are everywhere. But when the eyes went dark, there was no one there to see the bulldozers moving in. The investigation found that the fence was breached in one hundred and nineteen different locations. One hundred and nineteen. That is not a breach; that is a total structural collapse.
One hundred and nineteen. That is staggering. And we are not just talking about a few people crawling through. The reports say about six thousand people crossed that day. It was a massive, coordinated surge. How long did it take them to actually get through the physical fence once the sensors were dead?
It was shockingly fast. It took only minutes for those bulldozers to tear down sections of the fence once the sensors were out. There is a common misconception that the fence was just a physical barrier. It was actually a detection system first and a barrier second. It was designed to tell you someone was there so you could send a tank or a helicopter. Once the detection was gone, the physical barrier was surprisingly flimsy against heavy machinery. They used snipers to take out the remaining cameras that the drones missed, and then the bulldozers just pushed the fence over like it was a garden gate.
This brings me back to Daniel's point about the integration of these components. If you have a physical barrier and a technical layer, they should ideally be redundant, not interdependent. But in this case, the technical layer was the brain, and the physical barrier was just the skin. Once the brain was concussed by those drone strikes, the skin did not have any muscle behind it to hold the line.
That is a great analogy, Corn. It is a failure of defense in depth. In security theory, defense in depth means you have multiple layers that do not rely on each other. If the cameras fail, you have the seismic sensors. If the seismic sensors fail, you have the human patrols. If the patrols fail, you have a physical wall that takes hours, not minutes, to breach. But the Iron Wall was designed as an integrated system where everything was fed into a single operational picture. When that picture went fuzzy, the whole command structure collapsed into what the reports called a fog of war that lasted for hours. The Gaza Division headquarters at Re'im was actually one of the first places attacked, which meant the people who were supposed to fix the system were fighting for their lives.
And let us talk about the human element, because that is where the most painful parts of the reports live. The tatzpitaniyot. For those who do not know, these are the female soldiers whose entire job is to sit in front of screens and watch the border feeds twenty-four seven. They are the experts on every bush, every rock, every movement in their sector. They are the human heart of the technical system.
And they saw it coming. That is the most haunting part of the twenty twenty-five findings. Months before the attack, these lookouts were reporting unusual activity. They saw Hamas fighters practicing raids on mock-ups of Israeli kibbutzim. They saw them mapping the fence. They even reported seeing paraglider training. One lookout, whose testimony was recently declassified, said she reported a van driving along the fence every day at the same time to map the camera blind spots. But her reports were dismissed by higher-ups.
Why? Was it just arrogance, or was it a technical bias? Like, if the automated AI-driven alerts aren't screaming, then the human observation must be an exaggeration? We see this in aviation all the time, where pilots trust the autopilot even when the plane is stalling.
It was a mix. There was a concept called the Conceptzia in Hebrew, which was the prevailing strategic assumption that Hamas was deterred and more interested in economic stability than a major war. But on a technical level, there was definitely a bias toward digital signals over human intelligence. The IDF had actually closed down its Hatzav unit in late twenty twenty-one. That was the unit responsible for monitoring open-source intelligence like social media in Arabic. They thought big data and high-tech sensors could replace the nuanced understanding of human analysts. They were looking for a digital signature of war, but Hamas was planning a physical one.
It is the same mistake we see in Silicon Valley all the time. The idea that an algorithm can replace a subject matter expert. You can have all the SIGINT, which is signals intelligence, and ELINT, electronic intelligence, in the world, but if you lose your HUMINT, your human intelligence, you lose the context. You might see the movement, but you do not understand the intent. If the AI sees a thousand people training with paragliders and says 'this is a zero percent probability of attack based on historical data,' the human analyst should be able to say 'yeah, but why are they doing it then?'
Exactly. And the intent was hidden in plain sight. Hamas knew we were watching, so they used that against us. They conducted drills so frequently that the sensors and the analysts grew accustomed to the noise. It is the boy who cried wolf, but on a digital scale. The system was tuned to ignore routine movements, and Hamas simply made the preparations for a massacre look like routine movement. They even used 'flash bangs' and small explosions near the fence for months to get the sensors used to the vibrations. By the time the real explosions happened at six twenty-nine AM, the system just flagged it as more of the same.
So, when the attack actually started at six twenty-nine in the morning, the system did not just fail technically, it failed cognitively. The people in charge could not process that what they were seeing was real because it contradicted everything their high-tech models told them was possible. It is like a computer crashing because it received an input it was told was impossible.
Right. The report mentions that the Gaza Division was essentially defeated within the first few hours. Their command and control centers were targeted specifically because Hamas had mapped out where the fiber optic nodes and the communication hubs were. They did not just hit the border; they hit the central nervous system of the defense. They knew that if they took out the Re'im base and the communication towers, the individual soldiers in the tanks and the bunkers would be isolated. And they were. For hours, many units had no idea that a full-scale invasion was happening; they thought it was just a localized skirmish.
This goes back to what we discussed in episode one hundred and fifty-one about network reliability. If you have a centralized network, you have a giant target on your back. In that episode, we talked about how a mesh network is more resilient because there is no single point of failure. If the Gaza border security had been a mesh system, where every camera and every gun could operate independently or talk to multiple hubs, those drones would have been a nuisance, not a knockout blow. Why wasn't it built that way?
Cost and complexity. It is much cheaper to run one big fiber line than to build a redundant mesh. But as we see now in twenty twenty-six, the IDF is moving toward a more decentralized architecture for its border defenses. They are calling it the Smart Perimeter Two Point Zero. The focus is actually on less integration in some ways. They want standalone systems that do not need a central server to function. If a camera sees a breach, it can trigger a local alarm or even a local defense mechanism without waiting for a handshake from a base ten miles away. They are also adding 'analog' backups—things like physical tripwires that trigger flares, which cannot be jammed or blinded by a drone.
That is a huge shift in philosophy. It is almost a move toward edge computing in a military context. You process the data right there at the fence and act on it locally. But how do you balance that with the need for human oversight? You don't want autonomous machine guns firing at every stray dog that hits the fence. That is the ethical nightmare we have talked about before.
And that is the million-dollar question. The twenty twenty-five report suggests a tiered approach. You use the high-tech sensors for wide-area surveillance, but you maintain a heavy physical presence of humans who are empowered to make decisions. They are calling for a return to the old-school concept of a border guard where the person is the primary sensor and the technology is just a tool to help them see further. They are also re-establishing units like Hatzav to make sure they are listening to what people are saying, not just what the sensors are pinging.
It is interesting that the solution to a high-tech failure is often a return to human-centric systems. It reminds me of how some of the most secure facilities in the world still use physical keys and paper logs because they cannot be hacked from a distance. There is a certain dignity in the analog.
Totally. And there is a lesson here for anyone designing a security system, whether it is for a border or a data center. You have to assume the technology will fail. Not just that it might, but that it will. If your system requires one hundred percent uptime of its technical components to be effective, then you do not have a secure system. You have a fragile one. Nassim Taleb talks about 'antifragility'—systems that get stronger under stress. The Iron Wall was the opposite of that.
Fragility is the perfect word. The Iron Wall was brittle. It was incredibly strong until it reached a breaking point, and then it shattered completely. A more resilient system would have been one that could bend and degrade gracefully. If the cameras go down, the physical wall should still be enough to hold them for an hour. If the wall is breached, the local troops should be able to respond without waiting for orders from a blinded command center. We saw that individual heroism was what actually saved lives that day. It was the local security squads, the kitot konenut, in the kibbutzim who had to fight with whatever they had.
They were the ultimate redundancy. When the five-billion-shekel system failed, it came down to a few people with pistols and assault rifles holding the line. In places like Kibbutz Nir Am, the security coordinator, Inbal Liberman, recognized the sounds of the attack and mobilized her team before the official alerts even went out. She bypassed the 'system' because her human intuition told her the system was wrong. That is the definition of a human-in-the-loop success, even in the midst of a systemic failure.
It is a sobering thought. All that investment, all that engineering, and it came down to the human will to survive. Daniel asked what this teaches us about the integration of these systems. I think the biggest takeaway is that technology should be an assistant, not a replacement. It should enhance human capability, not seek to automate it out of existence. When you automate a human out of the loop, you also automate out their ability to handle the unexpected.
Absolutely. And we need to be wary of the data. We get so much data now that we think we have total visibility. But visibility is not the same as understanding. We saw the same thing in the spy gear episode we did a few months back, episode two hundred and eighty-one. Just because you can see everything doesn't mean you know what you are looking at. You can have a four-K resolution video of your own demise, but if you don't believe it is happening, the resolution doesn't matter.
I remember that. We talked about how the sheer volume of surveillance data can actually create a blind spot because you cannot possibly process it all with the necessary depth. You end up relying on AI to filter it, and if the AI is trained on the wrong assumptions—like the assumption that Hamas is deterred—it will filter out the exact thing you need to see. It treats the signal as noise.
Which is exactly what happened with the Hamas drills. The AI saw them as routine. It had been trained to see them as routine. So, it did not flag them as a threat. The humans who did flag them were told they were wrong because the data didn't support their gut feeling. This is a phenomenon called 'algorithmic bias,' but in a tactical setting. We trust the math more than the man.
It is a tragic irony. The more advanced the system, the more likely we are to trust it over our own eyes. So, for the practical takeaways, if you are building a security system—whether it is for a country or a small business—how do you prevent this?
First, you need independent layers. Your communication network for your sensors should be separate from your command network. You need physical redundancies that do not require power or data to work. A thick wall is still a thick wall, even if the power is out. Second, you have to maintain a human-in-the-loop system where human intuition is given weight, even when it contradicts the data. You need a Devil's Advocate unit that actually has teeth.
The Devil's Advocate unit. That is a fascinating concept. I know the IDF has one, called Ipcha Mistabra, but the reports said it had been sidelined leading up to twenty twenty-three.
Yeah, it had shrunk to just a few people. Their job is specifically to look at the intelligence and argue for the opposite conclusion. If everyone says Hamas is deterred, their job is to prove they are not. But if leadership does not listen to them, they are just a box to be checked. For a system to be truly secure, you need a culture that rewards dissent and questioning. You need people who are paid to tell you that your five-billion-shekel wall is a waste of money.
That is a hard thing to build in any large organization, let alone a military. But the cost of not doing it is what we saw on October seventh. It is the cost of certainty in an uncertain world.
It really is. And as we look toward the future, the lessons from Gaza are being applied all over the world. We are seeing a rethink of border security in Europe and the United States. People are realizing that you cannot just build a 'smart wall' and walk away. You have to live the wall. You have to be present. The technology is just a flashlight; you still need someone to hold it and someone to look where it is pointing.
I think about the people living in those communities today, in twenty twenty-six. They are moving back, and the reconstruction is incredible, but the feeling of safety is different. It is not based on a wall anymore; it is based on the presence of soldiers and the knowledge that the system is being watched by eyes that are not just digital. It is a more cautious, more human kind of safety.
It is a hard-earned wisdom. And it brings up a broader point about our relationship with technology in twenty twenty-six. We are so integrated now, with neural interfaces and AI assistants in every part of our lives. But we have to remember that these are just tools. They are fallible because they are built by fallible people.
Fallibility is a human trait, but we have a tendency to think our machines are exempt from it. They are not. They are just as fallible as the people who programmed them and the data they were fed. If we forget that, we are just building bigger and more expensive points of failure.
Well said. I think we have covered a lot of ground here, from the technical specifics of drone-driven sensor failure to the psychological traps of the Conceptzia. It is a lot to take in, but I think it is essential for understanding how to build a safer future. We have to respect the technology, but we have to trust the humans.
It definitely is. And I want to thank Daniel again for sending this in. It is a tough topic, especially living here in Jerusalem where the echoes of that day are still so present, but it is exactly the kind of deep dive we love to do on My Weird Prompts. We need to look at the failures to understand the successes of tomorrow.
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