Any Israeli will remember where the October 7, 2023. That morning Hamas stormed into Israel to “put an end to all the crimes of the occupation,” as announced by the military commander of the Palestinian militia, Mohammed Deif. Paragliders and rockets took to the sky. Gunboats outlined the Mediterranean. The assumption “iron wall” between Gaza and Israel was razed by bulldozers in 30 different gaps. Thousands of projectiles flew towards Israeli cities. Coastal military bases invaded. More than 1,500 armed men wreaked havoc 30 kilometers inside Jewish territory. A blood-soaked music festival.
Images of the massacres still play endlessly on Israeli phones. That day 1,300 people died In Israel. They died murdered in their homes, in their streets. That day forever changed the State and people of Israel.
“Never since Holocaust“Not even then did they murder so many Jews in a single day,” he repeats. Gabriel Trzewik, Argentine-Israeli from Kibbutz Dvir. More than 31 kilometers from the Gaza Strip, nothing but the daily sirens reached there during that tragic shabbat. But, in any corner of Israel, the feeling is the same. The unprecedented incursion of Hamas into its territory and the violence carried out against its population, with murders and kidnappings towards Gaza, have brought the trauma of the Jewish genocide into their homes. Nobody in the State with the highest militarization rate of the world was prepared to protect him.
“Solidarity networks”
The miscalculation was catastrophic. Although a large part of the citizenry believes that This is not the time to point fingers. But the details that are becoming known (unnoticed breakdowns in the surveillance balloons, underestimation of the enemy, a disregarded Egyptian warning, and a disastrous etcetera) are angering the population. After hours of combat that lasted until nightfall, some 1,500 Hamas fighters killed in Israeli territory. In their bodies, they were discovered plans and maps showing that they had information about the number of soldiers they could find, how long it would take for local reinforcements to arrive and from where. They knew they had to kill and take hostages “to negotiate.”
As the population of southern Israel succumbed to chaos, the silence of their leaders It ended up making them desperate. In full ‘shabbat’, sacred day of Judaism, which coincided with the end of the festivities of Sukkot, it took the authorities at least a couple of hours to respond. “All protest networks [en contra de la reforma judicial del gobierno del primer ministro, Binyamín Netanyahu] “They became solidarity networks,” explains Trzewik. “The official country was not there”, complaint. But the answer, or revengeDepending on how you look at it, it has not ended until today, although it will not end tomorrow either. As Israel has been burying its fallen after discovering the horrors perpetrated in these border towns, it has launched 6,000 bombings on Gaza.
Accusations of ethnic cleansing
A couple of days after the surprise, he subjected the Palestinian population of the enclave to a total lock: without electricity, without water, without gasoline, and without food. On Monday, Hamas threatened to execute a hostage for every attack on civilian targets without prior warning. Israel ignored the threat and has continued bombing, killing at least 2,215 Palestinians in a week. The European Union and United States They have turned to the Israeli authorities, giving them political and even military support. An unexpected gift for the unpopular Netanyahu. Meanwhile, the streets of the West roar against the “genocide and ethnic cleansing in real time” to which Israel is subjecting the Palestinians of Gaza.
The deadliest attack ever carried out on Israeli territory is causing another, much larger carnage in the blockaded enclave. The massacres committed in the southern kibbutzim, places known for their leftist ideology, have shaken a population that, until not long ago, participated in initiatives for peace with its Gazan neighbors. “It doesn’t enter my imagination or my memory that Israeli soldiers go house to house in Gaza and kill people,” says Trzewik. His wife Yael’s NGO used to pick up children in need of medical assistance at the Gaza border and transfer them to Israeli hospitals. “But I don’t want to dominate another people if we go back in and occupy them; “They are not going to convert to Judaism no matter how much we bomb them,” she says ironically.
Gaza Evacuation
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As a survival mechanism, Israelis try to overcome the trauma by creating networks of solidarity, to the point that Netanyahu has formed a unity government with the leader of the opposition, Benny Gantz. “While we were protesting, they called us anarchists, but we were there because we love our country“, like today,” says Trzewik from the kibbutz. “God is not going to save us, we are going to save ourselves,” states this socialist. After the biggest security breach in history of Israel, neither the country nor society nor their trust in the Government, the Army and its intelligence services will be the same. Nor his position in the region in recent years, nor his relationship with the Palestinians.
But, above all, what will never be the same again is the Gaza Strip and that is one of the objectives expressed by Israeli leaders this week. The thousands of bombardments have not stopped while the Israeli Army demanded that the 1.1 million population of northern Gaza leave the area before 3:00 p.m. Thousands of families They have fled in panic, fearing the imminent land invasion and without knowing if they will ever be able to return. Israeli planes have bombed the safe roads on which they have been ordered to travel. They have also announced the assassination of some leaders of the October 7 attack. The UN points out that their shelters are no longer safe, while Gaza and Gazans disappear. A week after that Saturday that changed everything, Netanyahu finally visited his troops in the Strip for the first time in a speech in which he asked them: “Are you ready for the next phase?” .