For "Vreme" from Israel
Already after a short time spent in Israel, it becomes clear that there is no such force in this world that can dissuade the Jewish state from its intention to make Hamas nothing more than an ugly story. The military campaign against this Palestinian terrorist organization for the Israelis is more than a war - it is an existential determinism, something that arises from everything and therefore must be, something that is immutable because it is written in the blood of Israeli civilians.
The ideology of the flaming sword with which the Israeli military force strikes the Gaza Strip in the hunt for Hamas commanders and fighters is the collective pain of 1.400 massacred, killed and kidnapped Israelis, children, women, old men, and soldiers. Everyone knows someone, or someone who knows someone, who has been kidnapped or killed. And even if it were not so: every Israeli woman and every Israeli, probably every Jewish woman and every Jew in the world can identify with parents who mourn their children or wait for weeks for news about whether they are alive.
The details of the circumstances under which these people were killed or abducted vary, but the suffering of their loved ones is similar and they are carving out a new Israeli existence. The victims are not statistical numbers, but compatriots whose names are always and everywhere re-pronounced, who are talked about for what they are or what they were. Those little stories add up to one about how Israel woke up on Saturday October 7th - the "Black Shabbat" - and was never the same.
The need for revenge
"I have experienced many tragedies, but nothing like this, my generation has not experienced anything like this," says the former head of the Mossad, Dani Yatom, who was born in 1945.
And if he says that, it has weight in Israel because he has experienced all kinds of things. For more than three decades, he was a member of the Sayeret Matkal special unit, which focused on anti-terrorist actions. He was the head of the Central Command of the Israeli army, then the director of the Mossad until 1998, the first whose name was disclosed while he was the head of the intelligence service. He was then a security advisor to Prime Minister Ehud Barak and a member of the Labor Party in the Knesset.
"We now live in the new Israel." "We feel the need for revenge," says the retired general.
He talks almost angrily that they were not prepared for what happened to them, that the security system collapsed, that after the massacre, the Israelis were scared and feared that Hamas terrorists would come to their houses and start killing their children, that for a moment Israel showed a fatal weakness.
He talks about Hamas, which "aims to kill as many Jews as possible and destroy their state", about the "axis of evil" consisting of Iran, the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas, that Israel should find allies in the region and eliminate the danger they represent, that after the elimination of Hamas, the administration of Gaza should be taken over by Saudi Arabia and some other Arab states.
And he, like all Israelis, is convinced that Israel is capable of confronting all enemies, that it is unquestionable that Hamas in Gaza will be wiped out, and that the key question is whether Hezbollah from Lebanon will join the war.
When asked by "Vremen" how it is possible that the Israeli intelligence services overlooked a Hamas operation of such a scale, which was certainly prepared for years, in which dozens of people had to be instructed, he says that he does not understand it either, but that he knows who is responsible - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who should resign.
Wall of rejection
Regardless of whether it is the minister for the Diaspora, the head of the military law department who is a corporate lawyer in civilian life, the spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the former head of the Mossad, the owner of a large company, a salesman in the traffic or a clerk at Ben Gurion Airport, all Israelis they tell the same story: Israel has the right to defend itself, Israel is not responsible for the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, Hamas is a terrorist organization, the Ministry of Health in the Palestinian Territory lies about the number of civilian casualties because it is controlled by Hamas, Hamas is the one who cut the water and electricity supplies to the Palestinians, Hamas does not allow civilians to leave the north of Gaza, which is showered with Israeli missiles, the Israeli army is doing everything to reduce the number of civilian casualties, but Hamas civilian facilities - schools, hospitals, camps under the supervision of the UN - a - uses them as military targets which makes them legitimate targets according to the law of war, it is Hamas who uses civilians as human shields which is a war crime...
One would have to listen carefully in Israel to hear the dissonant tones.
There is a widespread narrative that there is a struggle between civilized values and barbarism, and that Israel is fighting a battle for the Western democracies, which would be the next to be attacked by the "axis of evil", if the Israelis do not win it.
Mentioning the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, from which over 2 million people have nowhere to flee, is usually met with a stone wall as thick as the Wailing Wall.
Ghost town
Sderot, about 3 kilometers from the border with Gaza, is a ghost town. His story is part of the story of the former head of the Mossad. A little less than 7 inhabitants lived in it before October 30.000, now the streets and houses are empty. The entire "war zone south" was emptied, over 100.000 people were temporarily displaced.
We encounter a large number of heavily armed policemen gathered around the place where the police station was located. They pay tribute to the twenty colleagues who were killed by Hamas fighters that fateful day. A few orthodox Jews in their black robes and hats offer their services, but they are not welcome.
Hamas fighters also killed 50 civilians here. The very next day, the army took control of the city, but life will not return to it so soon.
Sderot is a frequent target of Hamas rocket attacks. The sounds of fighting in northern Gaza can be clearly heard here: aerial rocket strikes, artillery fire, the barking of heavy machine guns, fighter jets. The Israelis shoot at hundreds of targets every day. No one counts the civilian Palestinian victims on the Israeli side of the bloodshed.
On Thursday, the Israeli army announced that Gaza City was surrounded. On the night of Friday, that zone was the most heavily bombed since the beginning of the war. Heavy street fighting is ahead. It is assumed that the complex of tunnels dug by Hamas stretches for hundreds of kilometers. Israeli soldiers begin a cleanup operation. Media in Tel Aviv report that over 130 Hamas fighters were liquidated on Thursday alone. The Israeli army lists 23 dead in action. Those numbers will grow in the coming hours, days and weeks.
And there are 242 hostages held by Hamas.
The one who is not here
In such an environment, we go to the press center in Sderot, which is located in a bunker. They want to show us a short film about the atrocities of Hamas edited from the mobile phone footage of the murdered killers and the cameras they wore on their bodies, footage taken by the victims on death row. They want to show us that film so that we can pass on what we saw, because what we will see is so unimaginably inhumane that no one among the Israelis believes that it really happened like that.
The light goes out, the projection begins. The recordings are so brutal that no western television can play them, no social network should miss them.
I hesitate whether I should recount them. I really can't describe the details, but it's about rape, living over the wounded, over the corpses... Over a thousand Israeli civilians were killed in that one day. It was one day of the Shoah - the Holocaust, the first after 1945, said Dani Yatom.
"I hope you now understand why we have to fight," says our host in the press center.
Yes, I understood. I also understood that this land, which should be holy for Jews, Muslims and Christians, has become cursed. All of them resemble that one God, whom they call differently, and whose ancient, first name is Yahweh - I am the one who is. It's just that here, in this country to which Jews and Palestinians are condemned, it has ceased to be. Their conflict, which began in the middle of the last century because of the land, is taking on Old Testament proportions.
The end of humanity
Images of the end of humanity from the Gaza Strip, 70 kilometers from Tel Aviv, reach me via CNN. The Israelis' rationalization of what is happening to the Palestinians in their war against Hamas does not change the fact that people are dying in large numbers from Israeli missiles and that the defeat of Hamas will therefore not be a victory for Israel.
The United Nations warns the Israelis against the "use of excessive force." US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that he will come to Israel on Friday to persuade the Netanyahu government to provide a "humanitarian pause" in Gaza.
A Palestinian filmed at the moment of greatest tragedy amid the destruction said: "Not even a stone can withstand this."
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