This is the best summary I could come up with:
In weeks of interviews, Hamas leaders, along with Arab, Israeli and Western officials who track the group, said the attack had been planned and executed by a tight circle of commanders in Gaza who did not share the details with their own political representatives abroad or with their regional allies like Hezbollah, leaving people outside the enclave surprised by the ferocity, scale and reach of the assault.
The attack ended up being broader and more deadly than even its planners had anticipated, they said, largely because the assailants managed to break through Israel’s vaunted defenses with ease, allowing them to overrun military bases and residential areas with little resistance.
Was it mainly a governing body — responsible for managing day-to-day life in the blockaded Gaza Strip — or was it still fundamentally an armed force, unrelentingly committed to destroying Israel and replacing it with an Islamist Palestinian state?
With the attack, the group’s leaders in Gaza — including Yahya Sinwar, who had spent more than 20 years in Israeli prisons, and Mohammed Deif, a shadowy military commander whom Israel had repeatedly tried to assassinate — answered that question.
Some Israeli officials now express deep regret that they so profoundly misjudged Mr. Sinwar and his intentions, one of many security failures that allowed Hamas to pour through the border fence and rampage, largely unimpeded, for hours.
A tough, unsmiling man with closely cropped white hair and a trim beard, he hailed from the first generation of Hamas, an armed group founded during the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in the late 1980s and ultimately classified as a terrorist organization by the United States and many other nations.
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