Reflections on the October 7, 2023 Massacre
selected from an upcoming book, GENESIS 1:28 CIVILIZATION and ITS ENEMIES
All people of goodwill would like to see those who reside in the Middle East live in peace and mutual prosperity. This was certainly the view of residents and business owners in South Israel who hired 17,000 Muslim Gazan residents to work in construction and on their farms or grocery stores.[1] One Gazan said, “One month of work [in Israel] equals three years of work [in Gaza].”[2]
Then, early in the morning of October 7, 2023, on the Jewish religious holiday Simchat Torah, roughly 6,000 Hamas terrorists launched a land, sea and air attack across the border into South Israel with indiscriminate attacks against civilian men, women and children. In the end nearly 1,200 people, including 300 soldiers, and over 40 Americans were murdered. 252 civilians and soldiers, including 30 children, were taken hostage.[3]
As reported by Human Rights Watch:
The largest number of deaths occurred during the attack on the Supernova Music Festival, where at least 364 civilians were killed. Across many attack sites, fighters fired directly at civilians, often at close range, as they tried to flee, and at people who happened to be driving vehicles in the area. They hurled grenades and shot into safe rooms and other shelters and fired rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) at homes. They set some houses on fire, burning and suffocating people to death, and forcing out others who they then captured or killed. They took hundreds hostage for transfer to Gaza or summarily killed them.
Most of the victims of the attacks were Jewish Israelis. However, fighters also killed, wounded, or took hostage Israeli dual nationals, [Arab] citizens of Israel, Palestinians from Gaza, and foreign workers, including Chinese, Filipino, Nepali, Sri Lankan and Thai nationals, and at least one national each from Cambodia, Canada, Eritrea, Germany, Mexico, Sudan, Tanzania, and the United Kingdom.[4]
Several Hamas terrorists who were captured after the massacre confessed that they were ordered to slaughter everyone. In one of the interrogation videos, a Hamas militant captured during an assault on Kibbutz Alumim said their orders were to enter each home and kill everyone, including the women and children, and that he was given permission to rape the corpse of a girl.
Israel had spent more than a billion dollars to develop a 40-mile-long high-tech barrier, a chain of 20-foot-high walls and fences at its Gaza border filled with sensors and automated weapons. But in the early hours of October 7:
Hamas militants used bulldozers and bombs to breach the barriers in about 30 places, many driving through the gaping holes on motorcycles and in cars. Some sailed over the barrier in paragliders. The first wave of attackers started with a few simple tactics to defeat the smart defenses and keep the alarms from sounding and the guns from firing. First, they fired on the easily identifiable cameras and other sensors and automated machine guns, disabling them. They blew up the three prominent command and communications towers built into the wall with explosives launched on small projectiles or dropped from drones. If any alerts were triggered, they apparently didn't make it to a major military command center.
Nor, apparently, were local military outposts warned; many soldiers at the outposts were killed in their beds, presumably oblivious to the attack. Warning calls probably never reached them or other Israeli outposts and command centers because Hamas was jamming cellphone communications coming out of the border area.[5]
Security force volunteers, including twelve army veterans who had prepared for years, and four IDF soldiers on home leave, at the Mefalsim kibbutz, home to about 1,000 people, were able to fight off about 30 Palestinian gunmen until IDF soldiers arrived. No Melfalsim residents were killed or taken hostage.[6]
Other communities suffered far more casualties. Despite being surrounded by hostile enemies, in 2023 only 2% of Israelis owned firearms, compared with about 30% of Americans who have them. Israeli citizens were limited to 50 bullets. Groups like the Israeli anti-gun activist coalition Gun Free Kitchen Tables oppose wider private gun ownership,[7] which might have allowed more Israelis to defend themselves when Hamas fighters came to attack.
The Israeli government showed around 43 minutes of footage of Hamas’ assault against Israel for 200 members of the foreign press, which included videos showing Hamas terrorists dressed in IDF uniforms, stopping cars and shooting the passengers inside. The terrorists were seen dragging dead bodies out of vehicles and stealing their belongings, which sometimes included their cars.
Another video showed a terrorist attempting to decapitate a man writhing on the ground, while another showed Israeli first responders pouring water over smoldering bodies. In addition to murder and kidnapping, Hamas terrorists subjected women, grandmothers and children to extreme sexual violence. [8]
The attack was followed by near-daily attacks by Hezbollah, another Iranian-backed terror group based in Lebanon.
Many have criticized the Israeli response, which is complicated by Hamas’ practice of firing rockets from and near residential and commercial areas, as well as United Nations-run facilities, including schools, clinics, hospitals, as well as mosques and churches.[9] International humanitarian law strictly prohibits the use of civilians and other protected persons to make certain points, areas, or military forces immune from military operations.[10]
Many have asked why it took so long for the Israeli army (IDF) and Air Force to respond to the Hamas attack on October 7. In late August, 2024, a whistleblower, Inspector General Avi Weiss, explained what happened on that day:
At 11am on October 7, 2024, Prime Minister Netanyahu declared war against Hamas and ordered the Army and the Air Force to launch attacks to stop and reverse the invasion of 6,000 Hamas soldiers. But the Attorney General, Gali Baharav Miara, indifferent to the urgency of repelling an active invasion, said that only the entire Israeli cabinet could declare war and make a change in the existing rules of military engagement.
The leaders of the Israeli Air Force and Israeli Defense Force obeyed the Attorney General, and did nothing until the full Cabinet gathered from different parts of Israel. They finally declared war at 8pm that night,[11] too late to save those already murdered or kidnapped, but early enough to collect dead, mutilated bodies. A triumph of willful stagnation and legalism, belied by the retired soldiers, police officers and civilians, including Arab Israelis, who ignored the bureaucrats, and risked their own lives by driving towards the Hamas killers in order to save as many Israeli civilians as they could.[12] [13] [14] [15]
Inspector General Weiss also reported that Shinbet, the Israeli Intelligence service, withheld intelligence they had gathered for several months about Hamas preparations and war plans for an attack from Prime Minister Netanyahu. They just couldn’t believe that Hamas would not pursue prosperity and peace rather than going forward with their clearly stated murderous plans.
Critics of the Israel Defense Force response point to the tens of thousands of civilian casualties reported by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, the majority of which it says are children and women. In May, 2024, the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) revised its child fatality figure from the Gaza war, which had been based on the Gaza Health Ministry reports, sharply downward, reporting more than 14,500 child deaths on May 6, but then reducing the child fatality total to 7,797 on May 8, a 46% reduction. OCHA also revised its figure for women fatalities from more than 9,500 deaths to 4,959 deaths, a 48% reduction.[16] [17] Needless to say, the deaths of those women and children are tragic, but it does reinforce the notion that the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry cannot be trusted to give reliable information because it wants to hide the fact that more than half of those killed are Hamas fighters. Also, to put it bluntly, the more dead civilians reported, the more Israel is ostracized by the world community. After all, this is not just a military conflict, it is also a political war being fought on the front pages of newspapers, as well as social media and TV news.
To give a wider perspective, what do urban warfare experts say about Israel’s military tactics? John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, has commented:
In my long career studying and advising on urban warfare for the U.S. military, I've never known an army to take such measures to attend to the enemy's civilian population, especially while simultaneously combating the enemy in the very same buildings. In fact, by my analysis, Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history—above and beyond what international law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hamas fighters, who unlike the IDF don't wear uniforms, have also taken the opportunity to blend into civilian populations as they evacuate. The net effect is that Hamas succeeds in its strategy of creating Palestinian suffering and images of destruction to build international pressure on Israel to stop its operations, therefore ensuring Hamas' survival.[18]
Hamas’ Ideology
Until October 7, 2023, it was hard for many in Israel to take seriously the explicit words of the original Hamas Covenant, released on August 18, 1988, which spelled out clearly Hamas’ genocidal intentions.
Quoting Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a constituent member (Article 2), the Covenant proclaims,
“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
Bruce Hoffman, professor at Georgetown University, wrote in The Atlantic that the document’s 36 articles can be summarized with the following four themes:
The complete destruction of Israel as an essential condition for the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a theocratic state based on Islamic law (Sharia),
The need for both unrestrained and unceasing holy war (jihad) to attain the above objective,
The deliberate disdain for, and dismissal of, any negotiated resolution or political settlement of Jewish and Muslim claims to the Holy Land, and
The reinforcement of historical anti-Semitic tropes and calumnies married to sinister conspiracy theories.
As discussed earlier in this chapter, the covenant comes to the Islamic Resistance Movement’s raison d’être: the slaughter of Jews. Quoting the Sahih Al-Bukhari hadith, it states: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”[19]
It is hard for Westerners to comprehend that dying in the act of killing members of another religion is glorified by educators, but this is exactly what has been taught to Palestinian youth at many United Nations-funded schools in the West Bank and Gaza. In a grammar lesson, fifth-graders at a Palestinian school in Hebron are invited to follow in the footsteps of a woman “martyr” who took part in the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre that killed 38 Israeli civilians.
In the attack, several Fatah terrorists landed on a beach near Tel Aviv, hijacked a bus on Israel’s Coastal Road and killed 38 civilians, 13 of them children, and wounded over 70. The lesson includes a graphic of one of the female architects of the terror attack, Dalal Mughrabi, standing in the hijacked bus, pointing a rifle at the Israeli passengers inside and what appears to be a murdered woman on the bus floor next to a Palestinian flag.[20]
Given this kind of childhood indoctrination, ongoing for decades, it is easy to see why Hamas’ murderous agenda has enjoyed widespread support from Gazan and West Bank residents, akin to the widespread support for the Nazi agenda among German citizens during Hitler’s reign. Solving this problem will take far longer than defeating the Hamas terror brigades.
[1] Emanuel Fabian, “Israel okays 1,500 more entry permits for Gaza workers, bringing total to 17,000,” The Times of Israel, September 22, 2022.
[2] Fares Akram and Sam McNeil, “Work permits are a lifeline for Gazan, and a lever for Israel,” Associated Press, August 26, 2022.
[3] www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-terrorism-charges-against-senior-leaders-hamas.
[4] “’I Can’t Erase All the Blood from My Mind’: Palestinian Armed Groups’ October 7 Assault on Israel,” Human Rights Watch, July 17, 2024.
[5] David H. Freedman, “Israel's High-Tech Border Failure Could Happen in the U.S., Experts Say,” Newsweek, November 15, 2023.
[6] David S. Cloud and Anat Peled, “When Hamas Attacked, This Israeli Kibbutz Fought Back and Won,” Wall Street Journal, October 17, 2023.
[7] Michael Shuval and Rhodri Davies, “Israeli gun ownership rising as violence surges,” BBC News, East Jerusalem, March 30, 2023.
[8] “Kill, behead, rape: Interrogated Hamas members detail atrocities against civilians,” The Times of Israel, October 14, 2023.
[9] Pamela Falk, “Israel says these photos show how Hamas places weapons in and near U.N. facilities in Gaza, including schools,” CBS News, November 8, 2023.
[10] “Human Shields,” The Practical Guide to Humanitarian Law, Doctors Without Borders, https://guide-humanitarian-law.org/content/article/3/human-shields/.
[11] “After Hostages Executed, Left Blames Bibi ,” The Caroline Glick Show, JNS TV, September 1, 2024. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jhMUcSjEVI&t=2221s.
[12] Lesley Stahl, Aliza Chasan, “How a retired Israeli general saved his family during the Hamas attack,” 60 Minutes Overtime, October 15, 2023. www.cbsnews.com/news/retired-idf-general-israeli-family-rescue-60-minutes.
[13] Maya Zanger-Nadis, “How one police officer saved dozens from certain death in Kibbutz Re’im on Oct. 7,” The Times of Israel, June 5, 2024.
[14] Eliana Jordan, “Arab-Israeli family risked their lives to save dozens of Jews on October 7,” The Jewish Chronicle, November 6, 2023. www.thejc.com/news/israel/arab-israeli-family-risked-their-lives-to-save-dozens-of-jews-on-october-7-cr9z0vre.
[15] “Meet the Arab-Israeli who saved Jewish lives during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack,” Global National, November 8, 2023 https://globalnews.ca/video/10080646/meet-the-arab-israeli-who-saved-jewish-lives-during-hamas-oct-7-attack.
[16] “UN Halves Its Estimate of Women and Children Killed in Gaza,” Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, May 11, 2024. www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/05/11/un-halves-its-estimate-of-women-and-children-killed-in-gaza/.
[17] Josef Federman, “Takeaways from AP analysis of Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll data,” Associated Press, June 7, 2024.
[18] John Spencer, “Israel Has Created a New Standard for Urban Warfare. Why Will No One Admit It? | Opinion,” Newsweek, March 25, 2024.
[19] Bruce Hoffman, “Understanding Hamas’s Genocidal Ideology,” The Atlantic, October 10, 2023.
[20] “Palestinian teacher posts lesson hailing terrorist in 1978 attack that killed 38,” The Times of Israel, April 26, 2020.