Seeing Hamas in the Light: Demonstration and Warfare in the Baluchistan: Remembering Ami Ayalon
I knew we had lost a righteous soul when I left his funeral last week. It is clear to me. My friend fought against Hamas during his final moments in order to save his friends and family, and he fought against Hamas for years during his activism against the occupation.
That is the lie they told us and that is what is being repeated today in order to convince us that we can eliminate Hamas through a military operation. Despite the sacrifice we had made, Hamas has grown stronger, despite all the destruction we had done to Gaza.
For years, many of us on the left in Israel have been warning that we will never have peace and security until we find a political agreement in which Palestinians achieve freedom and independence. It isn’t just human rights activists taking this position: Even Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Israeli security service Shin Bet, has argued for years that Palestinian terror can be defeated only by creating Palestinian hope.
Iscribbled 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. I learned that in those moments eight members of the Wahdan family, mostly women and children, had been killed when their home soldiers from my unit went to support the family.
Like the invasion that the Israeli military has said is imminent, that campaign was precipitated by atrocities carried out by Hamas terrorists. On June 12 of that year, Hamas kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers; soon after, Israelis murdered a Palestinian teenager. The horrific exchange escalated into a larger conflict; ultimately some 70 Israelis and 2,250 Palestinians were killed over seven weeks. Then, as now, Israelis were told that we were going in to deal a decisive blow to Hamas.
When my Israeli infantry unit arrived at the first village in Gaza, in July 2014, we cleared houses by sending grenades through windows, blowing doors open and firing bullets into rooms to avoid ambush and booby traps. Palestinians had fled, we were told.
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. We jokingly called it the sound-and-light show once we saw the bombardment of the fields next to us.
I realized this wasn’t true as I stood over the corpse of an elderly Palestinian woman whose face had been mutilated by shrapnel. She had been lying on the sand floor of a shack, in a pool of blood.
Many of the 1,400 people who were slaughtered are from the Jewish community near Gaza, and the world has sympathy for them. One of Israel’s hidden minorities, Bedouin Arabs, were also the victims of atrocities.
The people don’t have a place to go when Hamas fires rockets. The largely aluminum roofs of the Bedouin homes turn into deadly shrapnel, which she called “knives.” The members of the Bedouin community were killed by Hamas rockets.
The doctor said that she rushed to the hospital in Beer Sheva to treat hundreds of patients, including Bedouins, who had been shot and who had lost limbs. They gave care to children, seniors and foreigners.
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.
At least 17 people killed in the Hamas attacks were Bedouins in and around Rahat, the biggest city in an impoverished, predominantly Bedouin area of southern Israel. A medic from northern Israel was among the 260 people who were killed at the music and dance festival.
Zikkim beach is near the Gaza Strip, which was attacked by Hamas during the rampage on October 7.