Our lives are currently divided into before and after: life before October 7 and life after. Israel is stricken with shock, pain, and horror in the wake of the ruthless massacre perpetrated by Hamas on innocent civilians on that Sabbath morning, which was also a religious holiday. My hand trembles as I write these words, describing just a fraction of this brutal assault. Despite the pain, we cannot look away. We must face this absolute evil to understand why Israel is determined to defeat this murder machine.
Starting at 06:30 on Saturday morning, while indiscriminately firing thousands of rockets from Gaza into Israel, over 2,000 armed terrorists broke into the homes of innocent civilians, killing and injuring whole families in their beds. Mothers hid their children in wardrobes, desperately trying to keep their babies from crying, but Hamas had no mercy for either women or children.
They bound mothers to children, and grandparents to grandchildren with wire and burned them alive. This is the kind of evil you cannot look away from. The world must know what happened. Their atrocities included beheading infants with knives, raping teenage girls, and cutting open a pregnant woman’s belly. They set fire to people’s homes, burning them to the ground, while people were trapped inside. Then, they went after young men and women celebrating at the Supernova music festival in the desert.
They chased the festival-goers trying to flee that hell, gunning them down inside and outside their cars – killing them with indescribable cruelty. Hundreds of young families, men, and women were slaughtered right there, in the desert. With inconceivable violence, they separated families and abducted six-month-old babies and terrified children, whose parents had just been murdered before their very eyes. At least 1,400 Israelis were murdered in a brutal act of mass slaughter, minute by minute, over many hours.
Are the murderers ashamed of their actions? On the contrary. They enthusiastically documented the atrocities, posting them live on social media. During this mass slaughter, about 200 people were violently abducted from their homes to Hamas’s dens of darkness, including elderly Holocaust survivors, some of them oxygen-dependent, and infants seeking their mothers. The bereaved father of one of the murdered children, a beautiful 8-year-old called Emily, said: “I was relieved when I heard that my little girl was murdered and not taken captive by Hamas.”
Sometimes, we hear people describing these atrocities as ‘animal behavior’. This is incorrect. Animals do not behave like this. People, proudly torturing entire families to death, are not animals. They are human monsters. The acts of unbearable cruelty demonstrated on October 7 awakened in the minds of many Israelis feelings of horror and helplessness reminiscent of the cellars of the collective memory of the Holocaust. The State of Israel has been established to serve as a home for the Jewish people, to ensure that Jews are no longer led to the slaughter just because they are Jews.
Hence the terrible shock now prevailing in Israel. There are no smiles, only emotions of profound misery and trauma. But there is also a strong sense of togetherness and a deep inner determination that we must fight against this organization of terror and defeat it to eradicate the existential threat hanging over our children and our future. We are fighting for our home, for our right to live!
There is no way to live alongside Hamas
FOR MANY years, the belief that a pragmatic way must be found to live alongside Hamas, while maintaining a certain status quo based on rational considerations, prevailed in Israel and in Western countries, even though everyone is aware of the ideology of violence and antisemitism of Hamas. Everyone is familiar with its doctrine.
We have read the Hamas Charter: Hamas’s founding document by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from 1988 – the most dangerous antisemitic document in the world since Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
The Hamas Charter blames the Jews for all the ills throughout history, demonizing Jews and rejecting any political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. There are numerous instances in Hamas’s Charter, such as clause 13, asserting that “…there is no solution to the Palestinian problem except through Jihad,” that is, through a holy war.
Importantly, the Hamas Charter also expressly addresses a new genocide of the Jewish people. Clause 7 calls for the murder of Jews in every corner of the world, reading verbatim as follows: “...the stones and trees will say: ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding [behind] me, come and kill him.’”
Painfully, that is exactly what happened. They came to kill.
Over many years, leaders of the international community have demanded from Israel: “Do not listen to what Hamas writes and what Hamas says. Ignore its ideology and terrible rhetoric. Despite the threats, Hamas wishes to improve the living of the two million Palestinians, who live under its bleak dictatorship, to guarantee them a livelihood, to allow them to develop and build an infrastructure.”
The well-orchestrated massacre against Israel on October 7 proved this concept wrong. Obviously, now, Hamas has no interest in coexistence or peace. It has no interest in ensuring better lives for the two million Gazans, but rather elimination of the Jewish state and the mass murder of its citizens.
This is not only its jihadist ideological goal, but also its only course of action. Hamas is ISIS, a Palestinian ISIS that worryingly enjoys public relations and very troubling compassion from some of the world’s major populations, including some of the media.
Can there be a more just act of self-defense than a country attacking the Hamas terrorist organization to defend its citizens? Israel is not attacking the Palestinian people and poses no threat to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, as long as it does not join the attack on Israel. Hamas has no interest in establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but solely in the destruction of the State of Israel.
Rather, the establishment of a Palestinian state is directly opposed to Hamas’s conception of its ultimate goal, namely, the establishment of an Islamic state on the entire territory, including the territory of Israel, as they say: “From the River to the Sea”.
It has no interest in creation, but rather total destruction, not in peace but eternal war until extreme fundamental Islam takes over. The only solution, according to Hamas, is wiping Israel off the face of the Earth and the annihilation of its inhabitants.
HAMAS DOES not hesitate to sacrifice Palestinians in its attempt to achieve its monstrous goal. There is no freedom in Gaza, neither freedom of speech nor freedom of religion. What makes the situation in Gaza far more desperate, is the fact that Hamas establishes its military bases within the civilian population, using them as their human shields while being fully aware that the images of dead Palestinian civilians are its most powerful weapon in the media.
This terrorist organization places missiles beneath hospitals and UNRWA schools, firing at Israel from these sites in anticipation of live broadcasts on television networks. Indeed, many reporters, not only from the Qatar-based Al Jazeera channel that spreads false Hamas propaganda, but also reporters from Western media outlets, rush to automatically broadcast Hamas propaganda without any fact-checking, as may be expected of them.
Do not fall into the human shield trap! The only entities that should be blamed for the deaths of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip are Hamas and the other extremist organizations in Gaza, cowardly hiding among women and children, their own fellow civilian Palestinians.
Acting with willful and deliberate malice, it is they – not Israel – who are responsible for these tragic victims. It is they, who are to blame. Israel is defending itself and is fighting for its life, and as a true democracy, it is doing everything in its power to avoid harm to the innocent. It exercises its tremendous military power in an extremely careful and responsible manner, acting in compliance with international law, while Hamas proudly documents its acts of genocide and crimes against humanity, bragging about them in the media.
Make no mistake: the war against Hamas is not Israel’s private war. This is not only about the future of the entire Middle East, but about the future of the world we live in. On the one hand, a valuable and important alliance is forming between the United States, many European countries, and Israel, while on the other hand, a coalition of evil of several aggressive countries and barbaric terror groups, of which Hamas and Hezbollah are the most prominent, is also forming.
“You are not alone, we stand by you,” said President Biden on his recent visit to Israel. We were filled with pride when we saw and heard the President of the United States expressing his full support for Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and its duty to eradicate Hamas.
Other world leaders expressed their solidarity as well, including the leaders of Great Britain, Germany, France, Ukraine, and Italy. In contrast, however, there are other countries, who still hesitate in the face of this murderous terrorist organization, refusing to condemn it, while continuing to host some of its leaders on their soil.
Your time as well is now also divided into two. October 7 compels you to take immediate action – to do everything in your power to facilitate the return of the hostages, some of whom may also be citizens of your own country, to their homes and loved ones. Some of them are women, whose children were murdered before their very eyes, some of them are children left orphans, some of them are elderly, and some are sick or injured. All of them were abducted by force and are being held prisoners by a ruthless murderous terrorist organization.
Defending Hamas is defending ISIS and al-Qaeda and anyone who follows this policy will inevitably bring the murderers into his own home. Decide where you stand on this moral map.
The writer is dean of the Consular Corps of Israel.