Having intelligence that Hamas has some terrorist plot at some point in the future used to be called "common knowledge"

I don't think a simple heightened state of alertness is practical

What about just not taking 8-20+ hours to respond for a nation with national service. It doesn't make sense. There should have been a plan for response far more rapid for any invasion. That's basic stuff for an army in the situation they are in.

... when you have no idea if or when Hamas is going to make that plan a reality.

How about when your own IDF units warned that Hamas are training to execute the very same operation detailed in the previous report, just a couple of weeks before the attack?

One of the soldiers, identified only as Ilana, told Haaretz that troops observed Hamas terrorists training to take over an observation post amid unusually high drone activity.

“In the last two months, they started sending up drones every day, sometimes several times a day, right near the border, some 300 meters from the fence, and sometimes less than that,” she said.

“A month and a half before the war, we saw that in one of the Hamas training camps they had built an exact, scaled model of an observer’s position, like the one we operate. They started training there with drones to hit the [machine gun] shooter,” Ilana said.

Ilana said that when the attack started, terrorists used drones to hit their positions using the same methods as they had been observed training.

Haaretz

Yeah, but jews bad so use something to attack them regardless of reality.

You're completely correct though. If they attacked, you'd get the usual screeching from the usual suspects. And if they did more border control/etc, you'd also get the screeching.