‘Not one girl could be shown to her parents’: The horrors of Oct 7 – as told by the survivors

Three weeks ago, I travelled to Israel to try and work out what October 7 had meant as the first anniversary approached. The massacres committed by Hamas on that black Sabbath were among the foulest of the modern era and saw the worst loss of life for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Not much time elapsed, though, before the bloodcurdling crimes were sidelined as international attention switched, rather too eagerly, to Israel’s war in Gaza. Thousands of Palestinians were tragically killed as the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) tried to root out an enemy which used billions of charitable aid to build itself a network of tunnels more extensive than the London Underground. One military expert summed up Hamas’s strategy in two chilling words: Human Sacrifice.

A proxy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas – like Hezbollah – is dedicated to the annihilation of Israel. It’s quite hard to fight a group which hides behind women and children, burrows under nurseries and hospitals; it’s quite hard to do a deal with terrorists whose charter demands your own extinction. Regardless of the provocation, it is always Israel that is blamed for “escalation” and called upon to exercise “restraint”.

As Sir Tom Stoppard, our greatest living writer, observed exactly a year ago: “Who can say where Israel’s response to October 7 will sit in the calculus of suffering by the time the region subsides into the next configuration of uneasy neighbours… We are aware that Jews are not the only victims of this tragedy, Hamas knew that there would be consequences to October 7, but the consequences did not weigh with Hamas. Before we take up a position on what’s happening now we should consider whether this is a fight over territory or a struggle between civilisation and barbarism.”

I was one of those who thought it was the latter; 7/10 seemed to me to be every bit as pivotal as 9/11, one of those hinges in the history of the world when a profoundly shocking event triggers changes heretofore considered unimaginable. That was not always a popular view, particularly among the young who had been taught to see the only democracy in the Middle East, a haven of women’s equality and gay rights, as a colonialist oppressor. (Even within Jewish families, Israel has the ability to set generations at loggerheads). Fear of “Islamophobia”, seeded in progressive minds with considerable skill by Islamists, may have been part of it. One wit put it well on social media: “Israel is fighting to save Western civilisation before Western civilisation can stop it.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/saw-holocaust-many-dead-bodies-070000915.html