Israel is entering a situation in which it cannot control its own fate, veteran Israeli political analyst Meron Rapoport has told Middle East Eye.

The scale of the battles waged by Hamas and other Palestinian factions in Israeli territory has not been witnessed since 1948, when the state of Israel emerged from the Arab-Israeli war and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Not even the 1973 Middle East war – when Egypt launched an attack on Israel almost 50 years ago to the day as it celebrated Yom Kippur – achieved this level of surprise, Rapoport said.

Rapoport described Israel’s intelligence services as placed in a state of shock, and that Israeli faith in the army has been rocked to its core. At least 250 Israelis were killed on Saturday, according to authorities.

“In 1973, we fought with a trained army,” Rapoport said. “And here, we are talking about people who have nothing but a Kalashnikov. It is unimaginable. It is a military and intelligence failure that Israel will take a long time to recover from, in terms of its self-confidence.”

For years, Israel has developed a sophisticated – and expensive – network of surveillance infrastructure in and around the Gaza Strip, which it has besieged since 2007.

“There are supposed to be cameras there, drones in the air,” Rapoport said. “Crossing that fence like that is unimaginable. This is an unimaginable blow to Israeli training itself.”

Rapoport noted that the Israeli army’s intelligence unit, known as Unit 8200, is able to know the most intimate details of Palestinians’ lives, yet was unable to know that a few hundred, or even thousand, fighters were going to stage a complicated and wide-ranging assault.

“They didn’t have the least idea, not 8200, not the Shin Bet,” he said in a reference to Israel’s internal counter-intelligence security service.

The effect that images this Palestinian assault has produced – including fighters strolling through Israeli towns, and leading women, children, and the elderly into captivity in Gaza – will have a profound effect on Israel’s public, Rapoport said.

“These images on television of girls whispering into a phone to the media, asking where the army is, saying ‘we are here alone and they are shooting outside and the army still hasn’t shown up’, the whole day. This will be very hard to recover from.