Photo credit: Resistance News Network - Telegram
“Therefore choose life, so that thou and thy children may live.”
It was the dark early hours of an overcast morning over the Gaza Strip when rockets started flashing across the sky. At around 06:30 local time, thousands of missiles roared to life, flying across the border dividing the tiny strip tucked in the corner of the Mediterranean from the Israeli state.
Sirens screamed into life across central and southern Israel as missiles hit cities, towns, and kibbutz and Israeli air defence sprung into action. Pearly white buildings belched smoke and cars set ablaze, exploded, and melted in fire. In Jaffa, Tel Aviv, a reporter from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz admitted the barrage had left Israelis in shock. “It’s a holiday, Shabbat day. People don’t go to work, schools are closed. Even the TV channels are trying to wake up and realise it is a whole different reality.” Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (Hamas), the Sunni Islamist organisation that had ruled Gaza since 2007, had thrown down the gauntlet and caught the Israeli army off-guard. At 06:35, the Israeli army sent out a message:
“IDF: Initial report - Sirens sounds in the Gush Dan and Moshav Lachish area. Details to follow. ”
Hamas’s military units on the ground, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, numbering around 3,000, and supported by roughly 1,500 more, moved forward towards Israel’s sophisticated defences that had been carefully erected along the Gaza Strip, territory that had been placed under blockade for seventeen years by Israel and Egypt. Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that had been founded in 1987, ruled the strip with an iron fist and had split years earlier from Fatah in a short civil war, leaving them to govern Gaza.
For 2.2m Palestinians, life on the strip is largely a miserable existence of poverty, unemployment, and hunger that has been periodically broken by five brief but bloody, one-sided wars between Hamas and the Israeli army which had killed thousands of Palestinians. Where Hamas had once used suicide bombs to wreak havoc across Israel during the peace process and the second intifada, rockets now bolstered Hamas’ military arsenal and for years had been used periodically to test Israeli air defences only to be largely swatted aside by the Iron Dome, the crown jewel in its aerial defence systems.
This time, the militants’ missiles served as a distraction. Hamas’s footsoldiers were preparing to walk through Israel’s front door. The fighters advancing on foot with bulldozers towards the walls and fences were supported by drones which set to work disabling automated machines guns and cell towers. Paragliders which had taken off as rockets were launched flew across the border circling Israeli communities and preparing to land.
The Israeli army was momentarily blind as Hamas continued to lob missiles over the border, as smoke lingered over Gaza, and the militants advanced. Explosive charges were placed, detonating in plumes of smoke and hurling concrete high into the air. Bulldozers punched through gaps in the walls while small squads cut through razor wire fences laced with cameras erected around the Gaza Strip, thirty locations in all as men, equipment, motorbikes, and trucks passed through. The Israeli soldiers manning the fences were caught by surprise and quickly overwhelmed.
Many were shot where they stood or butchered as they slept, others were captured as prisoners of war, and military equipment was pillaged and taken back to the strip as many bases went up in flames. Some stopped to pose with Israeli corpses and tear down the white and blue Israeli flags from windows and poles to be replaced by the green, black, and red of Palestine. Tanks and APCs designed to give Israel the edge lay empty as militants walked by.
As the sun crept over the skies, it was scarcely half an hour since the Al-Aqsa Flood operation had begun and Hamas had already scored an audacious military victory with its sophisticated plan. Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades had territory it considered under occupation, humiliated the Israeli army, and laid to waste its deterrence strategy in Gaza. “The Iron Wall” popularised by Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s 1923 essay had malfunctioned and militants now gushed through the breaches and were landing in Israeli communities lying just beyond the strip.
The roads to southern Israel lay open and with the majority of the Israeli army on active duty but largely deployed in the West Bank hours away from Gaza, al-Qassam units fell upon Israeli communities connected by the 232 Highway killing, looting and taking prisoners along a wide front.
At around 07:00, half an hour into the operation, Al-Qassam footsoldiers descended on the Supernova music festival, six kilometers beyond the strip, and surrounded it from all sides. Four thousand people, mostly under 30 intoxicated and drugged youths, were taken by surprise as the Palestinian fighters riddled white-tauplin tents with bullets, lobbed grenades at the partygoers, and threw people into vans and cars to return to Gaza as hostages. Others were allegedly raped and then murdered by Hamas’ fighters and other survivors caught hiding were executed on the spot. Many who tried to escape in their cars were shot at point-blank range as others fled across the flat arid land and hid in shrubs to escape the carnage. More than two hundred fifty were killed.
Homes and cars were burned and pillaged as the fighters methodically hunted down Israelis, going door-to-door seizing and killing men, women, children and the elderly.
Israel and the world largely remained asleep as massacres continued along the Gaza envelope with the army nowhere to be seen as al-Qassam death-squads stalked the streets and engaged in combat with clutches of Israeli policemen and off-duty soldiers.
At 07:40, an hour after reporting sirens being sounded, the Israeli army sent out a message as the gravity and scale of the attack became clear.
““A number of terrorists have infiltrated into Israeli territory from the Gaza Strip. Residents in the area surrounding the Gaza Strip have been asked to stay in their homes. Details to follow.” ”
Not since the 1947-1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, during which the Jewish state was forged in a refugee crisis and ethnic cleansing, had Israeli civilians experienced such levels of violence. Where previous fighting between the Israeli army, Palestinians, and other Arab states had been mostly contained to Lebanon, Egypt’s Sinai, and the occupied Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, since the founding of Israel in 1948, officials now faced an unprecedented crisis. The nightmare of Palestinian fighters entering Israeli kibbutzes and massacring civilians had become a reality.
More than one thousand Hamas fighters were inside the country, killing at will and laying the groundwork for days of bitter fighting inside Israeli towns and villages, many with hostages. As the military assault had demonstrated, Hamas’ men, having already duped Israeli intelligence, were not only radicalised, they were disciplined and prepared for the coming battle with Israel’s stunned security forces.
The fighting to dislodge Hamas from southern Israel was bitter and bloody with the army taking hours to reach key locations hit by militants. 1,200 Israelis were dead and hundreds more were hostages. Israel has responded by imposing a punishing siege on Gaza and sending ground forces into the strip’s northern enclave. Its murderous air raids have killed thousands.
The consequences of Hamas’s massacres and Israel’s brutal response since October 7 have sent shockwaves across the Middle East and have taken the Israelis and the Palestinians into unchartered territory and a bloodier and more terrible chapter in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas has committed the largest massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust and in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict it has killed more Israelis than in the first and second intifadas combined, uprisings which lasted for years.
The Israeli army has now killed more than eight thousand Palestinians and wounded over twenty thousand more with the Israeli air force dropping more bombs on Gaza than the United States did in Afghanistan in the wake of Al-Qaeda’s attacks on September 11, 2001. In the first eighteen days of war, the number of Palestinians killed in the intifadas was exceeded while the current war has already proven to be the strip’s deadliest since Gaza came under blockade. Parts of Gaza have already suffered the same fate as Aleppo, Mosul, Mariupol, and Grozny, reduced to rubble by devastating, retributive air strikes. Israel is a society in shock, and its barbaric air raids have killed civilians, aid workers, and journalists in horrifying numbers as it hunts down Hamas operatives. Many Israeli politicians, ministers, and commentators have called for ethnic cleansing and a second Nakba to drive the Palestinian refugees in Gaza into the Egyptian Sinai. An Intelligence Ministry document revealed by Local Call and +972 shows how the idea of population transfer to the Sinai is reaching official discussions.
In the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers and settlers have unleashed yet more terror on Palestinian communities, entering villages and towns and killing and maiming civilians, restricting their movement, and driving people from their homes.
The West Bank has been a tinderbox waiting to explode for years. In response to escalating attacks against Israelis, the IDF, Israeli Security Agency, and Border police forces have stepped up counter-terrorism activities, launching Operation ‘Break the Wave’ in 2022 to stem the rise of new Palestinian militant groups such as Lions’ Den and the Jenin Brigade in the West Bank. Attacks against Israeli settlers and soldiers against Palestinians rose for a sixth consecutive year and to the highest level since the second intifada ended in 2005. For the Israelis, the price had been high before the Hamas’ assault on October 7.
Twenty-seven Israeli civilians and soldiers were killed by Palestinians in 2022, the highest number since 2008 including a brutal shooting on Holocaust Memorial Day which killed seven shocking the international community. The attack came a day after one of the deadliest raids in years killed nine Palestinians in Jenin. The cycle of violence has deepened in 2023 with the highest rate of Palestinians being killed for perhaps two decades. Fiery rhetoric from right-wingers, including government ministers, deepened the sense of crisis, catalysing violence in the West Bank which culminated in a devastating pogrom in the Palestinian village of Huwara on 26th February.
The Israel-Hamas war now threatens to pull the West Bank into the conflict as many settlers look to take revenge while the IDF has clamped down, cutting off the movement of millions of Palestinians without acting to detain settlers who carry out deadly price-tag attacks. Clashes have also shaken East Jerusalem and the security forces of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the government’s Minister of National Security, have continued to pour fuel on the fire by shutting the Al-Aqsa Mosque to Palestinian Muslims while allowing Israelis, under armed guard, to perform their prayers in the compound, a violation of the delicate status quo in the Old City.
Hamas’s operation and its brutal atrocities did not occur in a vacuum. Qatari money has poured into the group’s coffers while Iran and Hezbollah have nourished Hamas’s power base in Gaza and helped build up its presence in Lebanon, propping up a regime that has killed, abducted, and tortured Palestinian civilians and routinely cracked down on protest and restricted women’s rights. Hamas are a mirror of the many authoritarian Arab regimes that have repressed their own people across the region.
Successive Israeli governments also bear responsibility for the catastrophe that unfolded on October 7 and the slaughter now unfolding in Gaza. Binyamin Netanyahu’s government, the most right-wing and extreme in Israeli history, is extremely dangerous. Israel’s longest-serving prime minister is an Israeli Slobodan Milosevic, following in the footsteps of the manipulative Serbian president who helped unleash untold misery and ethno-nationalist violence on the Balkans in the 1990s and brought his country to its knees. Netanyahu is cut from the same cloth as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban and has pandered to the likes of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, authoritarian strongmen who have utterly corrupted the power they wield.
To cling to power and escape corruption charges, he has let loose some of the ugliest forces in Israeli society and injected them into mainstream politics while seeking to dismantle the two-state solution. Unfettered ultranationalism and Jewish supremacism were already rampant in Israel before October 7. Now, in wartime, in the wake of Hamas’ atrocities, the genie is out of the bottle and it rolling over Israelis and Palestinians alike in a toxic tsunami of hate speech, disinformation, and lawless vigilantism.
The consequences for the country will be profound. Even before the catastrophic intelligence failure on October 7, Israel was bitterly divided over deeply controversial judicial reforms proposed by Netanyahu’s extremist government. The war has, partly, brought Israeli society together but the cracks remain. Israelis sympathetic to the Palestinians’ plight have allegedly received death threats and Israeli security forces have been caught on camera clashing with both ultra-Orthodox Jews demonstrating against the war in Gaza and settlers rampaging through the occupied West Bank. The majority of Israelis believe Netanyahu should resign in the wake of the October 7 attacks and should bear responsibility for the country’s security failure, a sign of the coming blame game which begin after the conflict in Gaza, whatever its bloody outcome, ends.
One thing is certain. The illusion that the Israelis can perpetually occupy the Palestinians without consequence has been brutally and dramatically punctured by Hamas’s military operation. Netanyahu’s intransigence, obstructionism, and expansion of settlements have played a crucial role in burying the Oslo Accords signed in 1993, not just Hamas’ devastating suicide bombs in the first and second intifadas. Successive governments, largely led by Netanyahu, have sought to make peace in the Middle East and North Africa while freezing a peace deal with the Palestinians. The prime minister himself admitted that Hamas was an invaluable asset to dividing Palestine’s political leadership. With no partner for peace, Israel’s right-wing had an excuse to roll out more settlements, encroach on the Palestinian Muslims’ holy places in Jerusalem, and ensure that the “reality on the ground” made it impossible for a Palestinian state to emerge.
A largely apathetic Israel, worn out by the peace process and the bloody years of the second intifada, went along with it. Israel may have disgorged Gaza in 2005 and withdrawn settlements and soldiers from the strip but for years it has tightly controlled the territory by land, air, and sea in collaboration with the Egyptian army, an occupation in all but name. At the same time, settlers have chipped away at Palestinian communities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem with impunity and been empowered by the rise of Jewish supremacists such as Gvir whose ugly brand of ethno-nationalism threatens to tear Israel apart and plunge the country into anarchical violence, perhaps even civil war. With a one-state reality emerging, many human rights groups are beginning to describe Israel as an apartheid state with the occupation acting as a perfect recruitment tool for Hamas.
Israel is in an intractable mess. It must either pursue a two-state solution, a challenge made nearly impossible by the huge number of settlements in the West Bank and with Gaza’s future now in doubt. Attempting to remove settlers from the West Bank would provoke a civil war in Israel while cutting through Gaza with bombs and bullets, committing flagrant war crimes, and trying to topple Hamas will achieve little. Another Palestinian group, possibly worse, would replace Hamas while regime change or re-occupation of Gaza could draw in Iran, Hezbollah, and other paramilitaries across Syria, Iraq, and Yemen into the conflict, igniting a regional conflict.
At the other end of the spectrum, Israel faces a grim one-state reality where it crushes the human rights of the Palestinians with impunity and faces a deepening cycle of violence fuelled by military occupation. As the conflict escalates, Jewish extremists exploiting the conflict will destroy the last shreds of evidence that the country is a functioning democracy. Without rights, humiliated by occupation, and trapped in poverty, some (but not all) Palestinians will, inevitably, turn to the gun and extremism to fight the Jewish state.
Depressingly, in the wake of Hamas’s brutal atrocities, the likelihood of Israel turning its back on its racist settlement project and slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the West Bank looks more distant than ever. Netanyahu is finished politically but even if he is forced from power, the war in Gaza will leave a deep scar on Israeli society and embolden Israel’s ethno-nationalists looking to exploit the country’s current crisis.
A dark future awaits Israel, its minorities, and the Palestinians unless the international community takes action by taking practical steps to guarantee the security and rights of both parties. Hopeful promises of elusive peace and global leaders paying lip service to a two-state solution have brought nothing but blood and suffering to Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East. At this point, the notion of a ‘peace process’ is a twisted joke. Not since 1947-1948 have the numbers of Israelis and Palestinians killed, maimed, and traumatised by the conflict been so high. Binyamin Netanyahu and Hamas’s status quo over the last decade has been irrevocably broken by the horrifying events of October 7. After Black October, there is no turning back but what comes next could be more violent than anything that has come before in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The world must intervene before Israel and the Palestinians plunge deeper into the abyss.