These are just some of the dozens of people killed by Hamas terrorists at a music festival in southern Israel. Many are not even Israelis (not that it matters).
There are reports that Hamas has killed over 600 people thus far in their attacks of which a small number are IDF… pic.twitter.com/ESfp9EhlXh
— OSINT (Uri) 🇺🇦 (@UKikaski) October 8, 2023
Israel unilaterally pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005. It dismantled Israeli settlements there and turned the Strip over to Palestinians. Gaza has been run ever since by a range of militias including terrorist groups, primarily Hamas.
After taking full control of Gaza from a rival Palestinian faction in 2006, Hamas-launched attacks on Israel from Gaza have occurred on and off, almost continuously. These usually took the form of lobbing rockets at southern Israeli settlements and towns.
After thousands of rockets were launched in 2008, Israel struck back in what’s now knows as the Gaza War of 2008 and 2009, first attacking by air and then mounting a ground invasion. It happened again in 2014 and it’s gone on in greater and lesser degrees ever since.
The reality is Gaza has been waging a low-grade war against Israel since the withdrawal and with some notable exceptions, Israel has responded with mostly small, targeted retaliatory strikes in response for the last 17 years. All of that changed on Friday.
WARNING GRAPHIC: Palestinians strip the corpse of an Israeli woman, put it on display and desecrate it while shouting ‘Allah Akbar’.
Hamas and Israel are now at war. https://t.co/qa1di87ac7— Paul Golding (@GoldingBF) October 7, 2023
Hamas launched thousands of rockets throughout southern Israel. Terrorists broke through a border wall and crossed into Israel by road and sea, some even by paraglider. They wentr house to house and door to door targeting civilians in businesses, homes, apartment blocks and at a music festival (the Rave for Peace) that was being held near the border with the Gaza Strip. Some small towns near Gaza were fully occupied.
Hamas terrorists on the rampage in a neighbourhood near the Gaza Strip. #Israel #Hamas #Palestine #Palestinian #IronDome #Gaza #TelAviv pic.twitter.com/z0x1vBZUQV
— Paul Golding (@GoldingBF) October 7, 2023
Hundreds, maybe over 1,000 Israelis have been slaughtered, thousands injured, and scores — mostly women and children — have been reported kidnapped by the terrorists and dragged back to Gaza. Hamas has broadcast videos of bodies being dragged through the streets by celebrating crowds.
WARNING GRAPHIC: Palestinians strip the corpse of an Israeli woman, put it on display and desecrate it while shouting ‘Allah Akbar’.
Hamas and Israel are now at war. https://t.co/qa1di87ac7— Paul Golding (@GoldingBF) October 7, 2023
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel is now at war with Hamas. The attacks have been called Israel’s 9/11 and, as 9/11 did for America, the surprise invasion and assaults revealed a massive and embarrassing failure of Israel’s vaunted intelligence and defense forces.
The failures that allowed the weekend’s attacks to happen will no doubt be the subject of months of analysis, the assignment of blame, and all of that will play out over time. Now, however, the retaliation has begun and is likely to be massive and unmerciful. It could also provoke a wider conflict in the Middle East depending on the reaction of sympathetic terrorist organizations in the West Bank and neighboring states like Lebanon and Syria.
NEW: Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu tells Gaza residents to “GET OUT NOW” as he vows to use all IDF capabilities to destroy Hamas.
“We will win this war, but the price will be unbearably heavy. Hamas wants to murder us all,” Netanyahu said.
“Murdering children and mothers in… pic.twitter.com/jnyAeRklbf
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 7, 2023
It would seem that the weekend’s slaughter, some of it broadcast to the entire world, will finally put and end Israel’s willingness to endure 17 years of on-again, off-again threats and attacks from a thin strip of terrorist-occupied land on its southern border.
As for the response, a Sherman-like march to the sea, leaving nothing standing would seem to be an appropriate response to the horrors Hamas unleashed on Israeli soil in the last two days. That would also finally put an end Hamas’s reign of terror in Gaza…territory which could then be reabsorbed into Israel.
Along with that, the IDF’s abject inability to protect the average Israeli citizen should also finally put an end to the government’s longstanding reticence to allow the average Israeli citizen to exercise an American-style right to keep and bear arms. Despite the image some have of the country, guns there are “tightly controlled and carefully tracked by the state.”
From the Times of Israel . . .
In other words, as the Public Security Ministry explains on its website, Israeli law “does not recognize a right to bear arms, and anyone wanting to do so must meet a number of requirements, including a justified need to carry a firearm.” There is no inkling of a belief among Israelis that citizens should be permitted to own guns as a check on government power — that is, as a limit to the sovereignty of the state expressed in its monopoly on violence.
Israel’s social reality – the large number of firearms on the country’s streets – may look like an American conservative’s utopia, but it got there via a domineering statist regulatory regime that American gun control activists can only fantasize about.
That was then. This is now. The fear of tyranny may not be the foremost on Israelis’ minds in their desire to own guns, but watching terrorists literally raining down from the sky, wading through blood in the streets, and being slaughtered in their own homes is.
Israelis live in a country that has been under direct threat and sometimes attack since 1948. If this weekend’s atrocities don’t convince the population in general and Israel’s government in particular that Israelis need to have American-style gun rights and the means to defend themselves, nothing ever will.
