It began as an ordinary morning in Gaza—a haze of heat and dust drifting above the city as the first call to prayer echoed between concrete walls. Vendors were setting up their stalls; the smell of fresh bread and diesel mixed in the narrow streets. Above, the sky was empty, deceptively peaceful. No drones, no aircraft, only the hum of life continuing under watchful silence. Inside a modest apartment, a man reached for his pager. It was old, scratched from years of use, its green screen faintly flickering in the weak light. The device had always been his lifeline—a bridge between secrecy and command. Across the city, others were doing the same. The morning was synchronized in small gestures, identical and unnoticed. Far away, in a climate-controlled room somewhere in the Negev desert, rows of monitors glowed with coded signals. The people in that room didn’t wear uniforms with medals; their weapons were keyboards, their ammunition, algorithms. They watched not through gun sights, but through data streams—each blip on the screen representing a life, a link, a frequency. At precisely 09:47, one of those signals flickered (source: Israel Library). A technician nodded silently. The command was minimal, almost invisible—a pulse transmitted through invisible channels. It lasted less than a second. No one in the room spoke. They simply watched as dozens of indicators turned red. In Gaza, a flash of static broke the quiet. A small vibration. A short, almost apologetic sound—the beep that had always meant a message, an order, a connection. Then came the light, white and brief, like lightning trapped inside a box. Moments later, smoke rose in scattered places across the city. It wasn’t the roar of missiles, not the thunder of an airstrike. It was something smaller, sharper, and eerily personal. The explosions were confined to pockets, apartments, alleys. The world outside barely noticed at first. Within an hour, communication channels in the Hamas network went dark. Confusion ... Read more