Links
Former Mossad agent ridicules Gaza ship raid
The Israeli commando attack on a civilian flotilla was "so stupid it is stupefying," says former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky.
Ostrovsky spent six years in the Israeli navy, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander before Mossad recruited him in 1982. He quit after four years and in the 1990s he wrote two highly critical, first-person books about the intelligence service.
Monday's raid on a seaborne civilian aid mission to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which left nine dead and about 75 wounded, was carried out by the Israeli navy's commando unit, "Shayetet 13," Ostrovsky said.
"It's a fantastic unit. ... It was not typical of Flotilla 13," he said, using the English translation for Shayetet, which he called "one of the top units in the Israeli military."
Members of the unit "have trained extensively for overtaking a ship," he said. "However, their training was directed at overtaking a hijacked ship."
Evidently the tactics weren't adjusted for this mission.