The great allied decryption scandal was not the only story this weekend suggesting a profound malaise in our security apparatus.

Barely 18 months since we were last dragged into a war with Hamas, Gaza’s Islamist rulers have regained their confidence about going to war with us again. Their former prime minister Ismail Haniyeh gloated on Friday that rocket development has proceeded apace — as we know from the incessant instances of Hamas testing its rockets with launches into the Mediterranean — and that tunnel digging is making unprecedented progress.

For all the promises that sophisticated, super-start-up Israel would find an answer to the terror tunnel threat, Israel again now finds itself playing cat-and-mouse on the Gaza border. History repeating itself as dangerous farce, the residents of Israel’s Gaza-border communities again feel the ground shaking beneath their feet as Hamas’s tunnelers penetrate beneath them.

In the last war, Hamas failed to make maximal use of its cross-border tunnels. It failed to send the hundreds of gunmen it envisaged into Israel, to capture an army base, kibbutz or moshav, and utterly re-engineer the balance of power between us. It has since worked relentlessly to better its chances of pulling off a shattering attack at the start of a new round of conflict. And Israel? Israel never got around to so much as allocating the budget for the technology to devise an Iron Dome-style tunnel remedy.

Read the article in full at Times of Israel.