Israeli government confirms it was hit by DDoS attack

> We have the ability to TRACEROUTE(to use a common, simple term) do we not?

This is more difficult than it looks. You can trace the routes to a set of IPs as much as you want but it doesn't really matter if you end up in a botnet of millions of compromised consumer grade routers. Unless you can find evidence on those routers who is behind the attack, the trail just stops there since you can't feasibly strike back against the civilians. Many DDOS attacks will also use reflection attacks from buggy servers that haven't been patched in 10 years, so once again where the packets come from will tell you nothing about who is behind the attack. Finally there are many DDOS-as-a-service providers in the more shady countries, Russia was/is quite famous for not cracking down on cybercriminals as long as they did not hit any Russian targets. If you find that it was one of those people, you may still not learn who hired them unless you are willing to send in some special operatives and ask them personally.