Israeli intelligence the night before the Hamas attack picked up signs of irregular activity among Hamas operatives in Gaza but top IDF and Shin Bet leaders decided not to put military forces on the borders of the enclave on high alert, three Israeli officials told Axios.
Why it matters: Israeli leaders are facing growing criticism — and questions — over how they failed to prevent or quickly stop the deadliest attacks on its territory in decades. While the Israeli intelligence failure was much broader and strategic, the events of the night before show how most senior officials in the Israeli defense establishment and intelligence community didn’t understand how bad the situation would become. The IDF and the Shin Bet declined to comment for this story.
Behind the scenes: The Israeli officials said that on Friday — the day before the attack — Israeli intelligence saw signs of Hamas activity in Gaza that suggested the militant group could have been preparing for an attack. As a result, several high-level consultations took place on Friday night to try and understand what the new intelligence meant, the officials said. IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi, Shin Bet director Ronen Bar and Aharon Halewa, head of military intelligence, participated in some of these consultations, which discussed whether the irregular activity was a Hamas exercise or initial preparation for an attack. Israeli officials said that one of the possibilities that was raised in the consultation was to put IDF forces around Gaza on high alert because of a possible attack. But after the consultations, the leaders decided to wait for more intelligence to come in. Several hours later, Hamas attacked.
What they’re saying: One Israeli official confirmed that the intelligence received on Friday didn’t turn into an early warning about war but pushed back on claims that nothing was done. The official said that after consultations on Friday night, the director of Shin Bet and the IDF chief of staff decided to send a small Shin Bet special force team and a team from the police counter-terrorism special unit to southern Israel for a scenario of an attempt to infiltrate across the border and conduct a limited kidnapping operation. “These teams literally started fighting on Saturday morning,” the official said. A second Israeli official said, however, that the “decision was to not put out an alert based on the intelligence and it was a misjudgment.”
The Prime Minister’s Office said Netanyahu wasn’t updated about the Friday night consultations and the first time he received an update was at 6:29am local time when Hamas started firing mortar fire on the Israeli villages near the border. “When Netanyahu got the update, he immediately went to his office in Tel Aviv, held consultations and convened the security cabinet,” the Prime Minister’s office said.
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/12/hamas-attack-israel-intelligence-failure-high-alert-shen-bet
Comment: This is a short article by Barak Ravid without editorial comment or slant, just a matter of fact reporting of events. It is damning. Perhaps the Hamas deception measures were just that good, but intelligence information indicating the possibility of some kind of Hamas action was in the system the night of the attack. The information was communicated up the intelligence chain and to high levels of the operational chain. The intelligence people will be nagged by the thought that they didn’t present their information well enough or forcefully enough. The operational chain should be nagged by their decision to either largely ignore the information or just downplay the risk. Or were they under guidance from government officials to keep security costs down? I doubt those politicians have the capacity to feel the personal responsibility and shame that the intelligence and military people undoubtedly feel.
Now may not be the time for resignations or courts martial. That time will come when Hamas is destroyed. Some of those intelligence and military officials may even hope to die in the act of destroying Hamas in a bid for redemption. The politicians certainly won’t. When Hamas is destroyed, the Likudniks must be driven out and neutered.
TTG
Seems that the Israelis are not targeting Hamas, but the whole Gaza. Guess they’re planning to expel all of the Palestinians and level Gaza after that. Feels like a lose/lose strategy for all sides.
It’s not immediately obvious to me where Gazans might go from there. This is likely to lead to mass civilian casualties, which is not IMO Israel’s best way to maintain global sympathy regarding the Hamas incursion. (It also won’t destroy Hamas, so it has the added defect of being ineffective.)
Hamas is the target. the course of action is crude total land war.
a) clear half of Gaza of its population.
b) reduce the “empty half” to debris.
c) enter that empty half.
d) clear all underground facilities in that half of Hamas.
e) rinse & repeat in the other half.
if the Palestinian people or their leaders or their allies in the ME want to change that plan… hand over Hamas. {good luck w/ that}
best for wealthy Arab nations to figure out where to move approx 2M Palestinians in Gaza. {good even more luck w/ that}
Iran, Hezbollah & other fringe players; just shut up & watch…political / religious theater for image at most. maybe some meaningful intercession along the way, but I doubt it. all done for Christmas.
2014 seems like lifetime ago.So much has changed.Its late,think I will head off to bed.
Wonder what the colonel would have written.
Intelligent failure is not the same as intelligence failure.
Wang chung ,7th century dynasty monk.
Good catch, I’ve already sent in my suggestion for the Golden Glove award. As you may or may not know Axios is considering a CIA outlet, so you’re probably accessing highly informed fieldmice as opposed to my fictional little doormouse.
Not only “damning,” Willie Mays (TTG) — it’s TELLING imo. Why do I say that? The morsel about how they simulated or enacted a kidnapping in the South. That’s just too too resonantly similar to what actually occurred for this fictional doormouse handler here (F&L) to overlook as being a clue. You’re going to tell me to calm down, and that you’re the retired US Army Special Forces officer, not me, and add that cross-border kidnappings are par for the course in this endless conflict, and I don’t dispute that. But my little doormouse delivered a package to me very early this morning, and the aromas emanating from his ingeniously wrapped parcel were so enticing, that I opened it hastily only to find inside another parcel inside a box which itself was inside a lacquered black mahogany box containing a silk embroidered purse. Inside the purse was a fortune cookie. I opened the fortune cookie – cracked it with one of my few remaining molars actually, and unraveled a typical small piece of pale thin undecorated paper. On it was written this message, unmistakably in the handwriting of the little doormouse himself: Two Cents Please.
Hamas wont be destroyed. Their operational capacity will be severely degraded, but as an organisation they will be remain. What Israel is doing now in Gaza will guarantee a large and willing pool of new recruits.
There is no military solution in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict short of Israel going full on Genghis Khan, pyramid of skulls outside of Baghdad. The failure of both sides to admit that there is no military solution is a major part of the problem. As long as either side has a hope of a military victory they will not give up.
If I was the IDW I would be worried about entire positions being overrun without much a fight, IDF solders seemingly running away and hiding instead of offering resistance.
If history is any guide, Likkud will do just fine after all is said and done.
From a Ru Telegram channel. It’s interesting that the goddess Venus was married to Vulcan (the MIC) the weapons-maker of the Olympian gods. But she cheated on him like mad with Zeus, Hercules, and others. Vulcan famously had a limp (as did Tamerlane, speaking of pyramids of skulls, and other gruesome world tyrants). That’s a reference to a defect or inadequacy of the male genitals which couldn’t be directed referenced in religion. Gun worship, totem poles, fertility & phallic monuments proliferated then as now – rocket adoration. I prefer Rockettes. My memory says that the character depicted by Bert Reynolds in the early seasons of Gunsmoke was a blacksmith like Vulcan but additionally that he had a limp. But my memory could be defective, maybe I mixing him up with Dennis Weaver, the deputy portrayed by the actor who played McCloud before Festus replacemed him. McCloud was a great heroic person, and his name of course I’m not surprised, appearing on the TV networks owned by weapons manufacturers, was a phonetic for – MIC Loud.
.————-
https://t.me/nonetutto/1098
Israeli defense companies and their US subsidiaries, which manufacture and sell missile defense, air defense, and UAV radar systems, have already signed contracts worth $540 billion since the start of the military campaign.
The best advertising is work on the battlefield and in a real war of destruction.
US companies also received orders for armored vehicles and self-propelled guns of all types, including MLRS and missiles for them. The amount of current contacts in 3 days exceeded $24 billion.
And you still don’t understand who benefits?
Wasn’t Trump a McCloud on his maw’s side? Don’t you dare even think about calling him Festus.
Stefan,
Thanks for the “kneel in submission ” doom post. There is an alternative. It is to civilized the Gazans by attrition.
Fred
Ibrahim Hussein writing in the Atlantic agrees, sort of. This is free today on Apple news on iPhone and the website gave it to me free (because they want to be on record allowing both sides to speak or because even the arch neocon Atlantic under Jeffrey Goldberg the former Israeli prison guard has had its arm twisted by one of our deep state factions?). Despite being blocked today from viewing their long interview with Comrade Kamala Harris. A friend who read that article said it upped his rating of her to 4 from 3 on a 1 to 10 scale.
Hussein doesn’t take your humanity tack, unsurprisingly. He just doesn’t want Goldberg’s precious homeland to get trapped, so an Arab name was typed in the author field. Condom with diaphragm public fuckover. Sure we lie, but we’re fair, see?
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/israel-hamas-war-iran-trap/675628/
F&L,
Will Durant used that line in his book “Age of Faith” when writing about the Christianization of the Germans. I think it will take almost as long.
No one is saying to kneel in submission. Just that there is no military solution to this conflict. Even if Hamas is destroyed, which is unlikely, another more brutal version will arise. But Hamas, for many Palestinians and people around the world will be heros and will remain such, destruction or not.
There is no military solution. This will likely just be seen as the second nakba, but the struggle will continue. Until BOTH sides realise that neither will give up on the land, nothing will chnage.
If you think the Israelis areore civlised than the Palestinians, you have really drank the kool-aid. They are rhe same. They are brothers, nothing worse and more brutal than grudges within the family.
TTG –
As you know I highly disapprove of the tendency to overindulge in or even take a small sip of Auntie’s Emetic medicinal preparation H, especially, but I have been wracking my brains these days lately for some handy amendments, not to the constitution, no, but to some familiar usages. I am devising my questionaires with the kind help of my little doormouse’s new iOs app, which he calls: Online Questionaires for the Devil’s Little Doormouse Community – or OQFTDLDC, in the Eastern Virginia dialect of Pentagonese, which I suspect you are fluent in. (Yes the cat is out of the bag, it ends in DC – Doormouse Community, not District of Columbia. Why was the great American nation never told?)
The final version is of course classified but this is the small portion that I was privileged to espy:
Resolved. That in light of the recent disasters ..
The term Chosen People will henceforth and forever become: The Frozen Peephole.
The month of October will be renamed one of the following:
Shocktober,
Glocktober,
or, in recognition of the fact that in the Hebrew Syllablarry the letters for b and v are indistinguishable except for a tiny dot which can be omitted – either
Rolled-Over, or
Fucked-Over.
The domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet immediately change its name to
Dim Bet.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (say it to yourself slowly and distinctly) will be referred to henceforth and legally have his name changed to:
Bend-him-into a Felafel.
For those who know how to use Telegram go here and scroll up for more. Including the retraction of the beheaded babies story by CNN, and Israeli tanks already in N Gaza.
https://t.me/infantmilitario/109795
Well, the first loss of the Israeli Air Force has been recognized:
Early on the morning of Black Saturday, an Air Force helicopter made an emergency landing with paratroopers in the village of Bari.
The servicemen managed to leave the helicopter, and a few moments later an anti-tank missile was fired at the helicopter, which led to its destruction.
Apparently lost UH-60 or CH-47
Not enough of a hedge, in teh face of incomplete information, Not uncommon,
TTG – that puts to bed the notion that the Hamas terrorist attack was “allowed to happen” by the Israelis. Though it was never a credible notion in any case. I copied it to Dr North’s site in England. I hope that’s OK?
Yisrael Beytenu party leader says the pair were sent by PM two weeks ago to convince Doha not to end its money transfers to the Gaza-based terror group.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/mossad-chief-top-general-visited-qatar-begged-it-to-pay-hamas-liberman-says/
“That time will come when Hamas is destroyed.”
“When Hamas is destroyed, …”
You seem rather confident that Hamas is going to be destroyed. I would argue that no matter how many members of Hamas are killed in the coming weeks, the survivors and the new recruits, no matter what they call their organization, will be more formidable than Hamas at present. Israel is currently killing civilians, dropping white phosphorous on Gaza, and that is the strongest possible recruiting tool for the Resistance.
This circle of violence will continue until the Palestinians are given a state in Gaza and the West Bank with its capitol in East Jerusalem. The international voices are getting louder and louder, highlighting the fact that this is the only way out of this cycle of death. Russia, China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, the entire Global South are all calling more and more loudly for a resolution: the two-state solution. The hegemon would do well to recognize this and start to put pressure on that shitty little state in the Levant to save itself by giving the Palestinians their state.
And then, just about when that happens, Global Warming will render the whole region completely uninhabitable, and everyone will have to leave anyway.
If Israel reacts with Kid gloves (restrictive ROEs, etc) then Israel will be seen as weak, will fail to quell Hamas and Israel’s enemies will be encouraged to continue to attack. If Israel goes in big, hard and ruthless, then civilians die en masse and Israel is seen as evil and is condemned in the [idiot] “global community” and, more salient, the “atrocities” will harden Muslim resolve to destroy Israel. It’s Lose/lose for Israel. Hamas set that up. Therefore, Israel should just ignore global opinion and flatten Gaza and exterminate Hamas, ending the immediate problem and let civilian casualties be what they may be.
Again, Hamas knows the apparent lose/lose equation they have created for Israel and they must not be allowed to enjoy it. Many Israeli troops will be killed in the incursion into Gaza. So be it. There is no other way. Maybe Hezbollah gets involved. Israel must deal with them ruthlessly as well.
Hamas can be eliminated if Israel pulls out all the stops. That also means that Gaza will be depopulated. Thousands of Palestinians had to be aware of the developing attack and none violated Hamas OPSEC. The Palestinians of Gaza therefore bear some level of responsibility for the attacks on Israel and, therefore, asked for what is coming to them.
Hamas reminds me of Black Lives Matter and associated nonsense about oppression. These people are mean spirited beggars and thieves that just want to hate instead of building their own communities and advancing themselves. Time to end it.
Eric Newhill
“Israel should just ignore global opinion and flatten Gaza and exterminate Hamas, ending the immediate problem and let civilian casualties be what they may be.”
So they should liquidate the ghetto, just like the Germans did in Warsaw ?
There are millions of civilians living there, are you out of your mind ?
I was thinking more like Dresden or Nagasaki or Wounded Knee.
If life in Gaza is so terrible, the Palestinians should be happy to become refugees in Arab lands. At least they’d be free from Israeli oppression, right?
Eric
“If life in Gaza is so terrible, the Palestinians should be happy to become refugees in Arab lands.”
Why would they cede their ancestral land to Israel ? Maybe a Palestinian family from Gaza could move into your house and you can go and find yourself some new lodgings. If you take up arms and try to fight the eviction, well we’ll just brand you an extremists and do a Dresden on you and your neighbours.
Foreign powers helped create this problem and foreign powers, primarily the US who is Israels’s chief enabler, can help implement a solution
Here’s a point of view of one former zionist and a holocaust survivor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6_GDDa4bmI
Wiz,
“Why would they cede their ancestral land to Israel ? Maybe a Palestinian family from Gaza could move into your house and you can go and find yourself some new lodgings. If you take up arms and try to fight the eviction, well we’ll just brand you an extremists and do a Dresden on you and your neighbours.”
Your comment is so ahistorical and so overly simple as to render utterly disingenuous.
First off, Pre-WW2, Jews sought somewhere in the world they could call their own and where they could be safe and not endure the pogroms that they had for centuries in Europe. Based on their religion, culture and history, Palestine seemed like a good idea. It was largely undeveloped – even in ruins – and sparsely populated, but had potential. Those Jews purchased, fair and square, land in “Palestine” from the Ottomans. The Arabs didn’t like it because they considered the territory to be Arab/Muslim. The Jews began developing the land and then the Arabs attempted, in 1936, to take what the Jews developed by force of arms. The Arabs lost. Arabs seem to have a talent for losing.
Then came WW2 and the Holocaust. In the aftermath there were millions of displaced Jews across Europe and Jewish fear of pogroms and the need for their own country had, understandably, gone off the scale. More moved to Palestine and the Jews established the state of Israel. The Arabs attacked in 1948 and lost again. During that conflict many Palestinians were displaced and moved out of Israel. After the war, they wanted to come back. They actually slightly outnumbered the Jewish population at the time.
Were the Jews supposed to let an overwhelming number of sworn enemies into their country? Are you mad?
The Arabs have all kinds of countries they can live in. The Jews do not (history of pogroms, etc). The Jews built something out of Palestine, the Arabs did not.
If you going to root for people committing heinous acts of terrorism based on some underdog image of being displaced from “ancestral” lands, then you want a world full of continuous hate and violence. In fact, I’m sure you don’t want that. Rather, your argument is highly selective. You are merely exhibiting the same closeted antisemitism combined with a romantic sense of Palestinians as oppressed that a lot of people here are.
Eric,
That’s the poorest thing I’ve seen you write in a long time. As TTG pointed out this op didn’t take that much to coordinate and it is very unlikely that many outside of the initial groups knew what was coming. The million plus in Gaza have been as oppressed by the Hamas government (elected in the one man, one vote, one time tradition) as they were by Israelis.
Fred,
The Palestinians have long framed the the conflict with Israel as a zero sum game. It’s existential in their minds and, in the end, there can only be the elimination of Israel. That is even in Hamas’ original charter. There is only one response Israel can offer to such an obstinate and bloodthirsty enemy.
If Palestinians have the courage to attack Jews on quasi-suicide missions (and 100% suicide missions), then they could be using that same courage to throw-off Hamas’ rule, if, indeed, they are victims of Hamas as tyrannical regime (which I don’t buy).
But sure. Have at it. Join the other 101,756 compassionate geniuses that have tried to find a viable peaceful solution for the past several decades. While you work on that, the Israel’s should just sit there and endure savage terrorist attacks?
CBC interview w/ a long-time Israeli negotiator w/ Hamas… the look & feel of prospects;
https://youtu.be/Gg6LzfDHg3U?si=EJFZyB1TuIPlDO0S
F&L
Disappointed you missed the “shen bet” misspell in the heading.What could it mean?were the Chinese involved?who knows
I was busy with my new dish. For the very first time I mixed Breakstone’s 4% fat cottage cheese with Breakstone’s sour cream. You open the cottage cheese and the sour cream. And you add a tablespoon of sour cream to the cottage cheese, mixing just a bit. Then you eat a portion from the cottage cheese container using only a disposable plastic spoon. The spoon I used was brown and straight out of the plastic wrapper, (the supermarket places a bin of free ones near the cash registers in each checkout lane). Then you proceed, repeating until the container of cottage cheese is empty. If you’re careful, but not overly careful (you can freestyle it), the sour cream will run out at the same time as the cottage cheese. The spoon was not damaged. High calorie count though – 960. So now you understand, hopefully. Note: don’t be too concerned if you leave a little sour cream when the cottage cheese is finished. It’s very tasty all by itself. And now you have a nice project for the month of October.
Right i see.I am also a cottage cheese (full cream) fan.
The best cottage i had was at tel katzir kibbutz back in 1976.
On par with what we used to make on the farm.
Well i wrote this poem last Friday night.Australia time.
Would I ask
Of the earth
Beneath
To speak
With fire and dust
Ashes and shaking
To us mere mortals
In this hour before
The rising sun
And how could we answer
Standing before the power of God
My friend Steve from middle school, high school and college was the funniest person who ever lived with the exception possibly of Milton Berle, Rodney Dangerfield and Don Rickles “The world champion of hate.” But he was positive and cheered everyone up who ever met him. Became a very successful DJ in New Orleans. He also wrote poetry and hilarious songs about his dad, mom and brother. His sister was the most wonderful person on earth. His mom was a British Jew who married his dad, a US Airman stationed over there during the war who was a NY Jew. His songs about his family I remembered like it was yesterday but they include his family name and require musical accompaniment, so it would be impolite and pointless to post them. He wrote one of my favorite poems of all time though (my favorite is TS Eliot’s Four Quartets) but I can only remember the first line. Some of our friends were killed in Vietnam or badly messed up. It stuck with me:
Two boots to wear while talking of slaughter,
That’s all I can remember. It didn’t rhyme. It was so good that even though I used to love writing poetry, I wouldn’t try to reconstruct it. It would be like trying to fix the Mona Lisa. Years later while learning Russian a little bit (we were all Russian jews, he 100%, me 50) I learned that his name literally meant Schoolboy in Russian. Steve my friend from school the Schoolboy.
mcohen, my Jewish relatives used to call my Catholic fair haired mother a shiksa behind her back. I really don’t like that one bit even though I never liked my mother at all. But they weren’t quite as bad maybe as my mother’s bigoted Catholic parents who disowned her immediately for marrying a “filthy Jew.” She came back to visit them holding me, her first child, in her arms as a newborn. They told her to get off their front yard or porch and cursed her severely.
And then I grew just a bit and used to be attacked violently by gangs of Irish Catholic parochial school kids because they decided I was Jewish even though I’m not because mom. I was little they were big. I was alone they were 3 or 4. In England it was even worse – they were 12, 15, 20 or in the working class school in London as many as 50, and usually older. It finally stopped when I beat up the biggest of them, Chris, a giant, so badly that they stopped. I had dared them to at least let me fight their biggest guy. Chris and I became inseperable. I did his mathbooks, he kept everyone away from me.
I’m not big on matzo, mcohen. Lox. That’s my favorite. A big big favorite. Honey is too sweet for me, tasty as it is, but thanks anyway. Are you familiar with the commercial blends which includes pineapple with the cottage cheese? I used to devour those for awhile, too much in fact, but not anymore. Detracts from the creamy cottage cheese taste.
My dad was a Virginia – Maryland Jew who was a genius, sort of who won a full scholarship to Lehigh and MIT but chose Lehigh because he met my mom their during orientation in 1936 or something. He enrolled in the Jewish fraternity but dropped out. He was a farmboy too, his grandfather owned a big farm. I asked him why he dropped out. He said they were full of New York city jews and he simply couldn’t stand them so he quit. I can’t stand them either.
So it goes mcohen. So it goes. Years later some of my closest friends were Irish, many Vietnam veterans. In 6th grade I was already too small to defend myself against the big strong German, Italian and Irish kids. A kid named Petersen was 6 ft 2 200 pounds, very strong. He used to draw swastikas in his notebooks and collect German war memoribilia. He used to beat me half to death and strangle me. Eventually the strongest kid in the county, named Sullivan, the son of a very distinguished doctor, saw it happening and asked Petersen if he’d like to try that on him, and to put me down. He was 5′ 10″ and maybe 165 but Petersen was so frightened that he released me and promised to never to do it again.
You’d expect me to have a lot of sympathy for Israel. I used to, I really really did. I even started teaching myself Hebrew and I read the religious texts voluminously, everything, talmud, Torah, Zohar, and frequented the many excellent religious bookstores in Manhattan adding to my collection. I really enjoyed it. But I also studied Christian religious texts and Islamic including Persian which I also greatly appreciated. But I gave up on Israel years ago and really came to dislike them intensely due to their treatment of the Palestinians. Is it because I know from personal experience what it is like first hand to be set upon to the point of death by brutal gangs of bullies, standing no chance? Possibly, I don’t know. My dad, who did so much for Israel years ago also came to hate them bitterly, as did Albert Einstein who considered their leaders to be criminals. My dad was never beaten up by gangs, he was a very strong US Air force Captain with hands the size of Muhammad Ali’s who I saw knock out a giant 6′ 4″ Englishman with one punch because he laughed at running over a little kid with his motorbike. And his uncle Amos was one of the greatest atheletes of his time who knocked out the main heavyweight contender for the heavyweight championship in twenty seconds of the first round when the impresarios asked if any of you farmboys would like to step into the ring. And my dad was an incredibly viscious bastard, I’m sure no one who didn’t know that his uncle was nearby would have messed with him, based on vibes alone growing up. But I didn’t inherit those 6 ft and 6 ft 3″ genes like my dad and uncle. My dad came to dislike Israel because he had very high ideals concerning justice and he was a man who nearly killed a giant for making fun a weeping mother. Moses killed the Egyptian. Ever see Michelangelo’s Moses? You’re looking at my dad, same incredibly beautiful powerful hands, same overly long powerful forearms. Moses would become white rage and massacre thousands of Jews in the desert. Or kill an Egyptian. He wasn’t a NY Jew either. He was quite OK with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and knew the guys on those 4 planes personally as well as Fermi, Oppenheimer and Teller after the war and was a drinking buddy of Feynman’s. And an absolutely cruel person for reasons he never came close to understanding. He did have a conscience, vaguely, just barely, and near the end of his life attempted to atone for his crimes. So how can I like Jews with a father like that? It’s next to impossible. Count Dracula would move to another continent before knocking on his door. The cause? Inbreeding that went very very wrong after centuries confined to ghettoes and shtetls. Violent explosive temperament is indicative of inbreeding as are many of the other Jewish talents including congenital insanity. It endemic in their population, really bad.
mcohen –
Us Goys like cottage cheese also. My grandmother from the backwoods of Maine used to make it in a big pot and then she strained it with cheesecloth. Great stuff. Better than anything you can find today on a store shelf.
Gramms also made her own blackberry jams and jellies in a similar fashion.
Well sounds like you would be the ideal candidate for baked cream cheese smeared on matzah.maybe some honey.
https://jamiegeller.com/recipes/easy-breazy-dessert-with-matzah-and-cream-cheese/