As Hamas terrorists slaughtered civilians in communities across southern Israel, a young man called his parents. He was very excited.
“Dad, I’m talking from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her and her husband,” the man shouted into the phone. “Ten with my bare hands, dad. Allah is great. Praise Allah.”
MAJOR DEVELOPER HALTS TWO NEW JERSEY OFFSHORE WIND PROJECTS IN BLOW TO BIDEN GOALS
An app on the dead woman’s phone captured her killer’s voice at the edge of hysteria as he insisted that his parents check their WhatsApp messages to “see how I killed them.”
Israeli officials included the audio of the conversation in a 46-minute compilation of massacre footage, which the Israeli Embassy to the United States screened for D.C.-based journalists, including the Washington Examiner.
“Look at your WhatsApp and tell Wiam. See how many I killed with my bare hands, dad,” he yelled, according to an Israeli translation. “Your son killed the Jews.”
The subtitles of that conversation played across a black screen 20 minutes into the screening, a sort of intermission from the grisly scenes that flickered before and after. A reel of photographs of dead civilians included several women and at least two babies who appeared to have been shot to death. There was a picture of a dead Israel Defense Forces soldier’s headless body. Hamas helmet cameras showed the attempted beheading of a civilian bleeding through a green shirt. One of the killers hacked at his neck with a garden hoe.
Toward the end of the screening, there appeared a video of a woman lying on the ground, skirt pressed up above her hips, exposed without underwear, her rigid limbs bent at the angles at which her rapists forced them.
The terrorists killed more than 1,400 people in Israel and wounded another 5,400, according to an Israeli Embassy official. Thirty-three children are among the dead, including 10 under the age of 5. There are 243 missing people, the majority of whom were taken hostage in Gaza by the terrorists.
The attitudes on display in the phone call contribute to the “collective trauma” that Israel has experienced, as one analyst put it.
“You know, you can imagine Israeli soldiers committing war crimes — it has happened before — but I don't think that you could possibly imagine Israeli soldiers reacting that way or believing that their families would applaud them for slaughtering innocent civilians,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Kenneth Pollack, a two-time recipient of the CIA’s exceptional service award for analytical work related to the first Iraq war, told the Washington Examiner. “They are coming from a very different place.”
That difference is not a function of the “clash of civilizations” thesis often invoked in this context, according to a former journalist from Lebanon.
“This is not the West versus Islam or the West versus Arabs. This is liberal democracy versus everybody else,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies research fellow Hussain Abdul-Hussain, who is half-Iraqi and half-Lebanese, told the Washington Examiner. “We have two different models — one that's successful and the other one that's trying to just beat it to prove that, ‘No, you're not successful, we're stronger than you.’”
The screening included a sequence of clips taken from interior and exterior cameras at a home in Netiv HaAsara, an Israeli village on the northern border of the Gaza Strip. A father half-carried one boy out of the house while pushing the other in front of him as they disappeared through the doorway of a shelter.
They were observed. A terrorist tossed a grenade, which bounced off the wall and down the hall after the trio. The blast threw the father back into the doorway. His sons, bloodied by the shrapnel, scrambled over his corpse and back into the house, wailing that their father was dead.
“I’m not joking! It’s not a prank!” one cried to the other.
One of the terrorists opened the refrigerator as the boys sat on the couch together. He seemed to offer them a drink from their fridge. “I want my mom,” one sobbed before the terrorist opted to drink from a bottle of their soda.
As the scene progressed, one of the boys, perhaps the older brother, could be heard asking the other if he could see out of his injured eye. He could not. “It’s not a prank?” No, he really couldn’t see. One of the boys attempted to clean the other’s wounds before they ran out of the now-empty room. When their mother returned, she found her husband in the doorway outside and had to be hauled away by the security team.
At the time of the attack, another son, the oldest of the three, was surfing at Zikim Beach. “He was also murdered as part of an attack by another squad on the beach,” an Israeli Embassy official told the Washington Examiner, adding that the two boys at least “are safe and sound in Israel” with their mother.
The same can hardly be said of anyone in Gaza. Israel Defense Forces have bombarded Hamas targets throughout the Gaza Strip, with a senior general acknowledging that his forces are “not being surgical,” although he maintained “there is always a military target” where they strike. Israeli officials ordered civilians to evacuate northern Gaza, warning that Hamas uses the civilians as human shields.
The terrorists responded by ordering the civilians to ignore the IDF’s warning. A senior Hamas leader acknowledged that they have chosen not to dig bomb shelters for the civilians, on the theory that the United Nations and Israel bear responsibility for their safety.
“These tunnels are meant to protect us from the airplanes. We are fighting from inside the tunnels,” Hamas politburo member Mousa Abu Marzook told RT, a Russian state media outlet, last week. "Seventy-five percent of the people in the Gaza Strip are refugees, and it is the responsibility of the United Nations to protect them.”
The civilian casualties in Gaza have fed an international outcry against Israel, while President Joe Biden’s administration tries to strike a balance between affirming Israel’s right to self-defense, urging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to curb civilian casualties, and warning Iran and its proxies not to expand the conflict.
“Why us, the children of Palestine? The children of Palestine are always suppressed, but Allah is on our side,” an impassioned girl wearing a pink sweater said in a straight-to-camera address that circulated Monday on social media. “We just want to tell the Arab countries that they have to intervene to end this war.”
For Abdul-Hussain and Pollack, much of the historical answer to her question indeed lies with the Arab world. As the imperial British forces prepared to withdraw from the Palestinian region where they had exercised a mandate since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, the United Nations passed a resolution to partition the region into “independent Arab and Jewish States” and a “Special International Regime” to govern Jerusalem.
“In 1948, the Jews declared Israel; the Arabs didn’t declare Palestine,” Abdul-Hussain said. “They just wanted to kick out Israel, and the other Arab countries stepped in.”
The Arab-Israeli war that followed was “a land-grab,” as Pollack put it. Jordan seized the West Bank of the Jordan River, while Egypt took the Gaza Strip. Those territories — along with the Sinai Peninsula, east Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights on Israel’s border with Syria — came under Israeli control through the Six-Day War of 1967, in which Israel launched a preemptive strike against an Arab coalition. Another war in 1973 and then a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt paved the way for the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai.
A deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians has proven more difficult. A summit at Camp David in 2000 offered perhaps the best opportunity for a two-state agreement, but Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat "feared" any agreement would lead to “a Palestinian civil war” with Hamas, according to Chatham House analysis, so he rejected the Israeli proposals and never made a counteroffer. A few months later, the Palestinians took Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s visit to Temple Mount as an occasion to launch the Second Intifada, a mass uprising that persisted until 2005, the same year that Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip.
Israeli settlers gradually have moved further into the West Bank, and the Jordanian foreign ministry accused Israelis of “continuing violations” of the status quo around Al Aqsa Mosque, on Temple Mount, days before the Oct. 7 massacres.
“It’s all because of what’s happening in Al-Aqsa,” a group of young Hamas terrorists can be heard saying in the video screened by the Israeli Embassy. “This is the harvest.”
The attack demonstrates that the status quo is unsustainable.
“The Israeli right, which had convinced itself that it could just ignore the Palestinians and do whatever the hell it wanted. ... That needs to end,” Pollack said. “There needs to be a two-state solution with a real, viable Palestinian state.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Hamas leaders, as Pollack acknowledged, have no interest in such an outcome. “We must remove that country,” Hamas politburo member Ghazi Hamad told a Lebanese TV outlet, according to a Middle East Media Research Institute translation. "The existence of Israel is illogical. … Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things that we do. … Everything we do is justified.”
Of that, the exuberant terrorist who called his parents evinced no doubt. “Their blood is on my hands,” he exulted. “Give me Mom. Give me Mom. ... I killed 10 with my bare hands, Mom."