Next time you hear of Boko Haram attacking a village somewhere in Africa, raping and kidnapping girls and women, killing the men, stealing livestock, and then burning the community to the ground, don’t think that it’s something that can only happen somewhere far away from you. It’s not.
It is what Hamas perpetrated on pastoral communities in southern Israel on October 7. It stems from the same perverted jihadist ideology that brought down the World Trade Center on 9/11; blew up London buses and trains on 7/7; inflicted horrendous casualties at the Bataclan theater in Paris in 2015, and on the teenage audience of an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena in 2017. And that’s a very partial list.
The close to 1,400 dead and 4,500 wounded in the Hamas mega-atrocity includes several hundred young party-goers at a Supernova rave. Imagine Woodstock with techno music. Now imagine it being attacked from all sides, including heavy rocket fire and terrorists who para-glided down onto the site.
The scope of the loss is unfathomable. Whole families burned to death as they hugged each other in their homes; children bound and shot in front of their parents; parents tortured in front of their soon-to-be murdered children.
Is there something worse than death? Ask the families of the 200 being held captive in Gaza. For some, the fact that their loved ones were abducted gives them hope, they’re still alive; but the fear of what the hostages are enduring is almost too much to bear. The country grieves and worries with them. Hamas is capable of horrors beyond the normal imagination.
The struggles of a journalist
The Journalists Association, Jerusalem, opened a mental health hotline for its members. Veteran broadcasters have been breaking down during interviews. I understand them. I have struggled to breathe as I looked at photos, trying to decide where to draw a red line.
How can I convey the extent of the atrocity – the death and destruction – while keeping readers’ sensitivities in mind and showing respect for the dead? Strangely, it wasn’t the photos of bloodsoaked beds, gutted living rooms, and burned nurseries that ultimately caused me most anguish. It was the very dry list drawn up by Israeli physicians detailing the immediate aid required by the captives, who range in age from a baby to wheelchair-bound nonagenarians. “Based on initial and partial intake from their families, many of them need immediate humanitarian intervention due to their medical conditions, including cancers, Parkinson’s disease, cardiovascular diseases, heart failure, and Type-2 diabetes,” the doctors wrote. “There are also many wounded, whose limbs have been amputated or [who have been] raped by terrorists, or patients with special needs, such as autism [and] dementia.”
I can’t imagine the suffering behind that list – the autistic child, sensitive to noise, who is being held without her parents; those with heart disease under the stress of captivity; the asthmatic without an inhaler; the diabetics lacking insulin and with who knows what to eat; and the baby who needs formula.
When the BBC and other foreign media try to justify calling the terrorists “militants” or “gunmen,” I want to scream. To scream at the injustice. It is not only perverted, it is dangerous. If you can’t recognize and name the danger, you can’t counter it. And one of the things Israel has learned the hard way is that terrorists don’t want better economic conditions and prospects for peace; they want to kill, destroy, and enslave. Among the abducted are peace activists who helped transport sick Palestinians to Israeli hospitals for medical treatment.
The impossibility of peace
CERTAIN THEMES recur during Israel’s wars on terrorists. The day after the attack, a social media thread of comments included one from someone who appears to live outside of Israel – and nowhere like the part of Planet Earth where I reside. “This will set the [peace] process back by decades,” he mourned. I resisted the temptation to write “WHAT PROCESS?” in capital letters. Instead, I expressed my wish that we could turn the clock back by decades to the pre-Oslo and pre-Disengagement period – those pre-peace process days when Israelis could safely visit markets and beaches in Gaza and Gazans worked and traveled in Israel.
Another comment from someone existing in a parallel universe declared: “The solution for the conflict is one country for all of its people [with] equal rights...” Yeah, right. Like that’s going to work. Hamas – which massacred more than 1,300 people, wounded thousands, abducted hostages, and launched more than 5,000 rockets on Israel within 24 hours – is not looking for a solution to the conflict; it’s looking for an end to the Jewish state.
Israel can’t deny Gaza basic necessities and humanitarian aid, warned world leaders and influencers. I have a very simple proposal for Hamas: 1. Stop the rocket fire. 2. Release all the captives – including the bodies of soldiers Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, killed and abducted in 2014, and Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, being held since 2014 and 2015 respectively. Then Israel can begin to renew its supplies of electricity, food, and other products.
Where is the sympathy for Israeli families in mourning?
Hearts around the world went out to the one million Gazans who were warned to move to the south of the Gaza Strip, out of harm’s way during Israeli operations against the terrorist regime. The same hearts, for some reason, did not bleed for Israeli refugees – for refugees they are – the hundreds of thousands displaced from North and South due to the incessant rocket fire and the threat of more terrorist incursions from both borders.
The explosion midweek at Gaza’s Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital was immediately blamed on Israel, although even US President Joe Biden during his whirlwind solidarity visit on Wednesday declared: “Based on what I have seen it appears that it was done by the other team, not you.” An IDF investigation found that a failed Islamic Jihad rocket launch, aimed at Israel, had caused the blast. The fact that it resulted in such a blaze could be an indication of munitions being stored there. Last week when Ashkelon’s Barzilai Medical Center was hit by a rocket it was an underreported war crime. Where are the International Committee of the Red Cross, the UN, and human rights organizations? The main difference is that Israeli hospitals have built rocket-proof wards and operating theaters. Think for a minute how outrageous it is that they are necessary.
The Palestinians in Gaza are poor and defenseless only by the design of the Hamas regime. Hamas has perfected the use of human shields just as it propagated the use of suicide bombers. Gazans are being held captive by Hamas, some of them willingly, others too scared to stand up for themselves. Don’t look for Western logic; look at the jihadist culture which elevates the “shahid,” the martyr. Indeed, the quantity of weapons found in the wake of the terror invasion indicates that this was not only well-planned, it was extremely well-funded.
Tehran’s tentacles spread far from the Islamic Republic. “Humanitarian aid” was diverted from the needs of the ordinary people to the desires of its corrupt terrorist regime. Cement did not go into building homes, but to create terror tunnels. This week, as we continued to bury our dead in unfathomably high numbers, we also planted the first seeds of revival.
During a visit to Kibbutz Beeri – which lost more than 100 members in the Hamas assault – President Isaac Herzog symbolically reopened the printing press for business. The daughter and granddaughter of printers, I appreciated that “nothing stops the press” spirit.
Altogether, we have seen a huge surge of internal strength. But take note, while US President Biden was visiting Israel this week in a powerful message of support and solidarity, Russian President Vladimir Putin was in China being warmly greeted by President Xi Jinping – both of them on the same axis with Iran. Biden’s trip was definitely designed to convey the message that the US is standing by its allies in the region and around the world.
Israel is dealing with the barbarians at the gate, but the war on terrorism must be fought by all the global village. When it comes to Israel, too many well-meaning people have a blind spot. Sadly, this also means that they can’t see the dangers that are perilously close to their own comfortable world.
liat@jpost.com