Hamas took advantage of that weakness by sending aerial drones to attack the cellular towers that transmitted signals to and from the surveillance system, according to the officials and also drone footage circulated by Hamas on Saturday and analyzed by The New York Times. (…)

The second operational failure was the clustering of leaders from the army’s Gaza division in a single location along the border. Once the base was overrun, most of the senior officers were killed, injured or taken hostage, according to two of the Israeli officials.