The I.D.F. in Gaza, It Made Me Fight for Peace: An Alternative Approach to the Israeli Military and the Palestinians
I left the funeral last week devastated, knowing we had lost a righteous soul. To me it’s clear. My friend not only fought against Hamas during his final moments to protect his friends and family; he also fought against Hamas during years of activism against the occupation.
That’s the lie they told us, and the lie that’s being repeated today: that we can decisively eliminate the threat of Hamas through a military operation. In the years since, Hamas has only grown stronger, despite our sacrifices and despite the death and destruction we had wrought on Gaza.
Many of my Palestinian human rights partners who organize nonviolent protests are targeted and harassed by the Israeli military. I believe these policies have the goal of preventing pressure for a Palestinian state and permitting Israeli settlement development and creeping annexation in the West Bank.
Source: Opinion | I Fought for the I.D.F. in Gaza. It Made Me Fight for Peace.
A sound-and-light show during the July 17 ground invasion: I remember how I walked in the neighbourhood of Umm al-Nasr
At one point, I scribbled some thoughts on a piece of paper. I wrote that some members of my team had been tallying the number of soldiers killed and discussing whether this operation was worth the losses. “I think it could be worth it,” I wrote, “as long as we decisively eliminate the threat.”
As we withdrew from Beit Hanoun, we heard the roar of Air Force fighter jets overhead, followed by deafening explosions and towering plumes of debris and smoke rising from Al-Burrah. The airstrikes that killed eight members of the Wahdan family were the work of soldiers from my unit who had been there for days while the family was there.
We faced an enemy that utilized the complicated terrain to its advantage. Most of the civilians fled from the advance of the Hamas fighters. Four soldiers were killed at the border fence when Hamas fighters came out of a tunnel behind us on the fourth day of the ground invasion.
The main task I was in the northern Gaza Strip to do was to clear and secure the perimeter of the city to allow combat engineers to identify and demolish the tunnels leading into Israel. We would take up positions in a new house every night because we never wanted to be stationary and easy targets. One house had to be cleared so I found a Kalashnikov rifle with an explosion device in it. At one point, I listened in terror to graphic reports from our radioman of soldiers from my unit searching for body parts after a missile struck a nearby house they had taken over, injuring and killing some of my comrades.
Even today, I remember how the ground shook from the constant explosions as we moved into Gaza at dusk at the start of the ground invasion on July 17. The sound and lightshow that we jokingly called the sound-and-light show occurred as we marched in to the village of Umm al-Nasr.
As I stood over the corpse of the Palestinian woman who had been killed, I realized that this wasn’t true. She was laying on the sand floor in a pool of blood.
Hamas-run ground operations in the Gaza Strip and Israel’s response to a “large-scale” Israeli attack on the Saturday night of Gaza
Israel’s “expansion” of ground operations in Gaza marked a significant increase in the war with the militant group Hamas that began earlier this month.
Hamas said the operation was a failure and Israel took heavy losses. An Israeli military spokesperson said Israel had no casualties in Friday night’s fighting. Neither claim could be independently confirmed.
The Israeli navy was carrying out raids on the Gaza Strip. The IDF said it had struck more than 450 terror targets during the past day, and that IDF forces continue to expand ground activities. It said an IDF officer was severely injured by a mortar shell in the northern Gaza Strip.
Hagari said that assassination and death leads to a better advancement of the war’s stages and allows the forces on the ground to battle a weaker enemy.
Multiple aid groups, including the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Health Organization, reported difficulty contacting local staff in Gaza.
We’re not in touch with our staff and health facilities. I’m worried about their safety,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of WHO, in a Saturday post on the social media site X, previously known as Twitter.
NPR was also unable to reach local staff in Gaza. The UN’s top humanitarian worker for the Palestine territories said that they had only been able to reach Gaza via satellite phone.
More than 1,400 people were killed, including many women, children and old people who were murdered systematically and brutally. Hundreds are held hostage or are still missing. Israel has responded with a ferocious bombardment campaign on Gaza, killing more than 8,000 Palestinians and wounding thousands more, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. The Israeli military on Sunday signaled a heavier assault on Gaza, saying it had expanded its ground incursion overnight.
The Gaza Blackout: How Many Hostages and Missing Persons Were There? An Israeli Defense Official Reveals the Attack on Israel
“Even some of the doctors’ medical staffs, they are saying, what is the benefit of the help that we are doing now? We are not able to help patients anymore. We cannot do anything for them,” said Dr. Mohamad Matar, who spoke to NPR Friday before the blackout.
The Israeli military also said that it was conducting airstrikes in Lebanon after at least 16 rockets were launched from there into Israeli territory. In Gaza, 47 aid trucks crossed the border from Egypt carrying water, food and medicine — the most in a single day since trucks were first allowed in on Oct. 21, but still insufficient compared to the levels of assistance that aid organizations say are needed.
“Whoever will be in this area, which is a protected area, will receive food, water and medicine,” Hagari said. Israel has repeatedly struck southern Gaza, including the densely populated areas of Khan Younis and Rafah, with airstrikes.
Nearly 230 hostages are still being held in Gaza by Hamas, according to Israeli officials. A group of families of hostages and other missing people demanded a meeting with Israel’s war cabinet for assurances that the operation would not endanger the lives of the hostages.
The most terrible night of the year was this one. It was a long and sleepless night, against the backdrop of the major IDF operation in the Strip, and absolute uncertainty regarding the fate of the hostages held there, who were also subject to the heavy bombings,” said Liat Bell Sommer, a spokesperson for the group, which is called the Hostages and Missing Persons Families Forum.
At 3 a.m. on October 7, Ronen Bar could not say if he was seeing another Hamas exercise or something else.
Their judgment that night might have been different had they been listening to traffic on the hand-held radios of Hamas militants. Unit 8200 stopped listening in to those networks a year earlier because they thought it was a waste of time.
The situation wasn’t serious enough for the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to wake up until nearly the start of the attack, according to three defense officials.
The most powerful military force in the Middle East had not only completely underestimated the magnitude of the attack, it had totally failed in its intelligence-gathering efforts, mostly due to hubris and the mistaken assumption that Hamas was a threat contained.
The Palestinian Red Crescent and the Red Crescent have come to an end: Israeli airstrikes and rescue efforts against the terrorist attack in the Gaza Strip
“I felt that I had become blind and deaf, unable to see or hear,” Fathi Sabbah, a journalist based in Gaza, wrote on his Facebook profile on Sunday, after phone and internet service partly returned.
Details of the fighting are expected to become clearer today as phone and internet service begins to return to Gaza. The enclave was in a near-total blackout for much of the weekend. Palestinians said that airstrikes had cut off cell networks, making it harder for them to coordinate medical rescues, speak to family or share news about the fighting.
They didn’t know if their loved ones were alive or dead. Emergency phone lines stopped ringing. Paramedics tried to save people by driving towards the explosions. Wounded people were left to die in the street.
Daniel Hagari said this morning that the war in the north of the Gaza Strip continues and that they will do what is necessary to achieve the goals.
As the barrage continues, the Palestinian Red Crescent said on Sunday it received warnings from Israeli authorities to immediately evacuate the al-Quds hospital in the Gaza Strip.
There have been raids 50 meters away from the hospital since this morning. Israel wouldn’t comment on the claims.
“In the coming week we were planning to increase dramatically the amount of assistance sent for Gaza from Egypt,” said Colonel Elad Goren, the Israel Ministry of Defense agency that coordinates with the Palestinians.
Israeli troops in Gaza are on the verge of a terrorist war: a tweet by Netanyahu on Oct. 7 blames the intelligence ministry and the internal security agency
In a social media post that was deleted after a fierce backlash, Netanyahu publicly blamed Israel’s failures on Oct. 7 on the country’s heads of military intelligence and its internal security agency.
“This is a worrying sign that civil order is starting to break down after three weeks of war and a tight siege on Gaza,” the organization said in a statement.
Thousands of Gaza residents broke into warehouses and distribution centers of the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency, grabbing flour and “basic survival items,” the organization said on Sunday.
People have nowhere to go when Hamas fires rockets. She called it “knives” because the largely aluminum roofs of the Bedouin homes turn into deadly shrapnel. Several members of a Bedouin community were killed.
The doctor who grew up in Tel Sheva said that she went to Beer Sheva to treat many patients, including victims who had lost limbs and others who had been shot. They treated children, seniors and foreigners too.
Ayesha Ziadna, 29, a relative of the Ziadnas who were attacked on the beach, said that the four members of the family who disappeared are still missing, as are a number of other residents of the area, though the exact number was not immediately clear.
During their murderous Oct. 7 rampage, Hamas militants attacked Zikkim Beach near the Gaza Strip where Abd Alrahman Aatef Ziadna and his family had been camping along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
Israel announced it will attack Gaza from the air, land and sea, expanding its war against Hamas days after its tanks began an intense ground operation. The military again urged civilians to move south as troops have entered Gaza from the north (see where troops crossed the border).
The second stage of the war is when the troops arrive and Benjamin Netanyahu warned Israelis to expect a long fight. He didn’t say that Israel had launched a ground invasion. While the number of soldiers in Gaza remains unclear, a more limited initial ground war would align with recent suggestions from the U.S. defense secretary, The Times’s Eric Schmitt reports.
Palestinians say that thousands of people have been killed by bombing campaigns in the first stage of the war. Israel said its airstrikes were intended to hit military targets, like Hamas’s fighters and weapons stores. Experts say it is difficult to hit the group from the air since most of their fighters are underground.
The power was out, which complicated the efforts to evacuate. In the last two weeks, hundreds of thousands of Gazans have been forced to leave their homes, as Israel has ordered them to move to the south.
Two of its soldiers were injured in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, its first reported casualties of the expanded ground incursion. Follow our updates.
The man who killed 17 people in Lewiston, Maine, was paranoid and threatened against his Army Reserve base, prompting an alert to state police
The man who killed 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, had been paranoid and made threats against his Army reserve base last month, prompting an alert to state police, officials said.