BRUSSELS—Only a week before Hamas militants breached the Gaza boundary fence, an Israeli one-star general was briefing NATO’s most senior military officer on the nation’s seemingly state-of-the-art defenses.
Walking through Re’im Camp in southern Israel, Israeli troops briefed Adm. Rob Bauer, the Dutch chairman of the NATO military committee, on everything they had arrayed along the 32-mile border to stop an invasion: Drones. Cameras. Artificial intelligence. Robots. A tall wall that ran deep into the ground—and seismic sensors to find out if anyone was tunneling under it.
The Gaza Division of the Israeli Defense Forces had once occupied the 141-square-mile strip of land sandwiched between Israel and Egypt. It had trained for a Hamas invasion. It had waited for it. And just days after those same Israeli troops briefed the Dutch admiral at the top of NATO’s military pecking order, they were fighting for their lives.
