In a few days will be the anniversary of the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas on the Zionist State resulting in the Zionist genocide against the Gazans
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz.
Cross-posted from Pearls and Irritations
At dawn, on 7 October 2023, Hamas fighters blast over 100 holes in the walls and fences that separate the Gaza Strip from Israel.
More than 3000 fighters pour through the gaps and launch a surprise attack on nearby military bases. Some fly over the barrier on motorised para-gliders, others take to small boats to attack north of the Strip. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood is underway.
Much of what we thought we knew about the attack has turned out to be false or only partially true. We owe it to ourselves and, above all, to the Palestinian people, to understand both what really happened that day and why it happened.
7 October dawns
Thousands of Hamas Al Qassam fighters wake in the early hours to messages calling them to arms, directing them to assembly points across the Gaza Strip. For all but a few this is unexpected. Is it just another training exercise? The Israelis apparently thought so.
6.26 am. Hamas starts to launch a massive barrage of low-yield missiles across the barrier fence.
At 6.30 am, Muhammad Deif, commander of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, broadcasts a message. The Western media avoided sharing his words which make clear what drove Hamas to this fateful point.
“Since the criminal occupation continues to inflict an outrageous siege on our beloved Strip, and considering the ongoing crimes against our people and nation, the occupiers’ provocations and their disregard for international laws and resolutions, as well as American and Western support given to them and international silence, we have decided to put a stop to all this with God’s help, so that the enemy can understand that no more can they sow chaos without being held to account. We announce the beginning of the ‘al-Aqsa Flood’ operation.” Muhammad Deif .
The Israelis tend to hold Palestinians in contempt, as their racial inferiors. In Mohammad Deif, they massively under-estimated their enemy: his ability to master tunnels, professionalise Al-Qassam, co-ordinate a weapons manufacturing industry inside one of the most tightly sealed 3600 borders in the world and plan a military break-out from a concentration camp that was, in terms of military-on-military, a resounding success. Well-educated and cultured (he formed a theatre group and was an amateur actor), he also came from a family that had fought the occupation from the founding of the State of Israel.
Deif made clear that he wanted the Israelis to pay a price for “the crimes committed throughout these long, wretched years”.
Morning
Hamas operatives use a variety of tools to blind the Israeli border surveillance technology and take out the autonomous guns. It takes the Israelis hours to appreciate the scale of what is underway.
Formations of Hamas fighters head straight for the headquarters of the Gaza Division at Re’im Army Base where Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld leads the defence. Mid-morning an IDF officer messages through to the Kiryat bunker in Tel Aviv where political and military leaders are gathered: “The Gaza Division has been defeated.” Panic and confusion sweep across the military the length and breadth of the country.
Meanwhile Hamas’s elite Nukhba fighters launch assaults on dozens of army bases and posts, most of which soon fall to the lightly armed but better trained Palestinian fighters.
It will take three days for the Israelis to retake all territory that falls on 7 October.
”The Zionist entity has occupied our land, driven out our people, destroyed our cities, our towns and our villages, committed hundreds of massacres against our people, killing children, women and the elderly, and buried innocent, peaceful people under the rubble of their homes, in contemptuous violation of all international norms and human rights and rejecting international laws.” Muhammad Deif in his broadcast of October 7
Deif repeatedly references international law and its persistent violation by Israel and its Western allies as a casus belli. To well-schooled Western ears, this may seem curious – but Hamas continues to this day to call for respect for international law and says they would welcome an international commission of inquiry into the events that led to 7 October and the genocide. Western and Israeli leaders have very good reasons to want to avoid this ever happening; genocide is, after all, the crime of crimes, and we might finally hold the real terrorists to account.
Noon. A catastrophic success.
From a purely military perspective, the Hamas attack was a brilliant success. Out-soldiered and out-general led, the Israelis were defeated and hundreds of soldiers killed, dozens taken hostage, including senior commanders.
So successful were the Al-Qassam fighters that the attack started to lose structure as the fighters operating without centralised command and control moved from completed missions on to targets of opportunity, including the kibbutzim and the Nova Music festival – which Hamas had not known about in advance, according to Israeli intelligence. Hundreds of civilians were killed by a mix of Hamas fighters, other resistance groups, random Palestinian individuals, and an unknown number by the IDF itself.
British author and expert on Palestinian resistance, Helena Cobban, called 7 October Hamas’ “catastrophic success”. It triggered the disgraceful Israeli war by tantrum, war by war crimes that we have witnessed every day since.
“The Gods of the Western world came down on them,” Cobban said. She recalled the earlier massive demonisation of the PLO. ”Let’s not give in to this deliberate demonisation. The genocide has to end and the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank have to end. De-demonising Hamas is an essential part of this,” Cobban told Nima Alkhorshid on Dialogue Works recently. I couldn’t agree more: as I wrote recently, Hamas is better than us.
Just as the US did after the Chinese and Koreans decimated the US army and drove it in shambolic disarray back over Korea’s 38th Parallel in 1951 (the US used airpower to kill three million civilians in revenge), Israel has, for the past two years, turned to the standard Western tool when faced with indigenous resistance: genocidal violence and unimaginable cruelty. They are our close friends and allies with whom our leaders tell us we share values.
“We warned the leaders of the Occupation not to persist in their crimes and we appealed to world leaders to take action to end the occupiers’ crimes against our holy sites, our people, our detainees and our land, and to compel the occupiers to abide by international law and resolutions. But the leaders of the occupation have not heeded us, nor have the world leaders taken action. Instead, the occupiers’ crimes have increased beyond all limits, especially in Jerusalem and the blessed al-Aqsa Mosque, the first of the two Qiblas and the third holiest site.” Muhammad Deif in his broadcast of October 7
Mid Morning: Non-Hamas Palestinians who crossed the border that day
To this day “Hamas” are said by our media and leaders to have killed the 1195 soldiers and civilians on the Israeli side. Attributing anything like the full body count to Hamas does not stand up to scrutiny.
In 2024, Israeli media reported that thousands of non-Hamas Gazans had crossed the security perimeter that day. The Times of Israel acknowledged that “Hitherto, figures … did not take into account Gazans who crossed the fence and participated in the atrocities but were not Hamas members.” These include thousands of fighters from other Palestinian groups who spontaneously joined the attack once news spread like wildfire through Gaza.
Footage shows fighters from Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as well as thousands of civilians who spontaneously crossed the perimeter pursuing a wide variety of motives – a first look ever outside the concentration camp, a look at the lands stolen from them, looting, attacking Israelis, etc. Thousands of them will die on 7 October, most of them guiltless of any crime more serious than petty thieving. They are never mentioned in the racist white Western media; they don’t count. Dumping everything done that day at Hamas’s door is an important part of the demonisation strategy, as is the suggestion that 7 October was unique, when in fact there had been countless “October 7ths” inflicted on the Palestinians over decades, after which the West always yawned and moved on.
Afternoon: The laws of war abandoned
It is now likely that Hamas killed most of the soldiers and less than half the civilians on the Israeli side on 7 October. The Israelis definitely killed more civilians, if Palestinian civilians are included, as well as many of their own citizens. Getting to the facts and shedding the propaganda is why an international tribunal is needed. All those who committed crimes leading to and including 7 October, and the two years after, must face justice – and, yes, that includes, powerful white people like our presidents and prime ministers.
One of the first images that troubled me in the days following 7 October was the shocking lines of utterly incinerated cars, many dozens, if not hundreds of them, which the reporting at the time suggested was part of the Hamas onslaught. It didn’t seem possible and now we know what actually happened. Israeli Apache attack helicopters were ordered to obliterate any vehicles heading to Gaza, regardless of who was on board.
The 30mm Chain Gun used on the Israeli Apaches can fire 650 rounds per minute, spraying bullets the size of a hand over a wide area. Their on-board cannon and missile systems have devastating power. They opened fire at unidentified vehicles returning to Gaza; they destroyed ambulances inside Gaza and even fired on people at the Nova Festival, according to first-hand accounts of pilots and survivors, as reported in Israeli media.
IDF tanks also played a major role that day. Some of the houses at Kibbutz Be’eri were on the receiving end of heavy weapon fire, entire frontages blown out, entire structures blackened and turned into rubble by the kind of firepower that Hamas simply did not possess inside Israel. An exploding tank shell generates the kind of heat/fireball that is more than capable of incinerating whoever is near it.
According to a Times of Israel article, titled “IDF commander who oversaw Oct. 7 battle in Be’eri apologises to bereaved residents”, General Barak Hiram ordered a tank to shell a house in Kibbutz Be’eri with hostages inside. It resulted in killing 13 Israelis, including children. Separately, tank officer Colonel Nissim Hazan fired shells into homes, later saying he did not know there were hostages inside. “We needed to shake things up that day,” he told Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The charred bodies were immediately recruited into service by the IDF and a willing press corps spread the lie that Hamas had burned people alive. Joe Biden lied about seeing beheaded babies and the story went viral, despite no babies having been killed that day.
The War Zone: “In one remarkable part of the account, Lt. Col. E. describes firing upon an ambulance on the Gaza side of the border, admitting that they were not entirely sure whether the wounded person being carried was a hostage or a militant.” Either way, deliberately firing on a clearly marked ambulance is a serious war crime under the Geneva Convention.
Despite all this first-hand testimony from Israeli officers, despite the footage of Apaches in action supplied by the IDF, despite the testimony of survivors at Nova and in the kibbutzim, the Western media continues to peddle convenient lies about Hamas. Again, the only solution is for an international war crimes tribunal to be convened to investigate crimes by all sides involved.
I’ll give the last word to Muhammad Deif who was assassinated in 2024 and replaced by Yahya Sinwar. He makes a telling remark about the most forgotten of all the hostages.
“All the while, the occupation authorities continue to detain thousands of our heroes, and subject them to the most heinous forms of oppression, torture and humiliation. Hundreds of detainees have spent 20 or more years in the darkness of prisons.” Muhammad Deif, commander of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, broadcast 6.30 am, 7 October 2023
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