In early November 2001 I was wisely told that there were three items, which I would always need as a tourist when sightseeing in the Judaean or Negev desert in Israel: a cell phone, handgun and bottled water. I never forgot that advice.
In my opinion, this is generally true throughout Israel except the need for bottled water in such bigger northern cities as Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the verdant Galilee. However, I was warned that the need for a handgun was usually prudent because terrorism although unlikely could suddenly appear with no warning.
Of course, the need for a handgun was especially true when travelling to the legally occupied West Bank.
In the one-sentence second paragraph of the Hamas Covenant of 1988, it explicitly states, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” October 7 clearly showed how either Islam or Hamas defined obliteration, and this obliteration is just as genocidal as Hitler’s Third Reich. Not to believe the Hamas Covenant today is just as naïve and foolish as not to have believed Hitler’s Mein Kampf on January 30, 1933.
Most of the Israelis, who were living or visiting towns or villages near the Gaza Strip on October 7, totally failed to take adequate defensive measures against Hamas whose leaders and fellow Gazans regularly shouted, “Death to Israel” and “from the river (Jordan) to the sea (Mediterranean), Palestine will be free.” The all-night music festival or rave three miles from the Gaza Strip at Re’im where police protection proved woefully inadequate was a prime example.
This bewildering lackadaisical attitude toward Iran-backed Hamas also included the Israeli army leadership and its lack of human intelligence within the Gaza Strip. Plus, building bunkers without doors or having bunkers with heavy steel doors, which could not be locked, was highly ill-conceived. Whoever made that fatal and shortsighted decision years ago really screwed up in ignoring an enemy attack.
The Hamas surprise attack against Israel on October 7 occurred on both the fiftieth-year anniversary of the Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) War in 1973 and the forty-second-year anniversary of Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. That day was the worst intelligence failure in Israel’s history.
The all-knowing, all-wise Mossad (foreign), Shin Bet (domestic) and Israel’s complacent military intelligence or Aman dropped the ball big time. Israel’s incompetent intelligence agencies and Defense Ministry totally forgot how terrorists seem to love anniversaries, Jewish holidays (Sukkot) and the sabbath.
It is estimated on October 7 that the ISIS-inspired and Captagon-taking Hamas terrorists killed with sadistic impunity and animalistic glee 1,400 men, women and children, wounded 3,500 and brutally kidnapped over 200 others. That tragedy would be proportional to approximately 48,300 dead Americans, 120,700 wounded and 6,900 kidnapped since the U.S. population of approximately 335.55 million people is about 34.5 times greater than the size of Israel’s population of approximately 9.73 million.
To say that October 7 was Israel’s Pearl Harbor or 9/11 is not only an understatement but grossly inaccurate. Israel’s astounding death toll would be proportional to over fifteen times the number of Union dead (3,100) at the Battle of Gettysburg from July 1-3, 1863. This is precisely why Israel is on a vengeful and righteous warpath against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) along with the rest of her far leftist Squad are basically a bunch of closed-minded Jew-haters. Israel has a right to exist just as much as a future Palestine, but Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and many U.S. campus protesters all want the “colonizer” Jewish state euphemistically “abolished” leaving Israel no diplomatic ground for meaningful negotiations for the creation of Palestine.
The Hamas terrorists on October 7 behaved just as bad if not worse than the Nazi SS. They easily broke through the border fence undetected using motorcycles, motorized paragliders, rockets and a vast tunnel network to reach such towns as the paradisiacal kibbutz of Kfar Aza, which was located 1.9 miles from the Gaza Strip. Once there and elsewhere, Hamas sadistically decapitated dead soldiers, dismembered corpses, beheaded babies, burned people alive, slit throats, orphaned children, raped women, mutilated the dead, crushed heads, shot dogs, kidnapped civilians and murdered helpless families as they slept.
During that dawn attack Hamas killed more than one hundred (video) of the seven hundred residents of Kfar Aza. All along the Israeli-Gazan border they bloodthirstily attacked towns and villages like Kfar Aza using brutal ISIS or Nazi tactics.
Israel, which now faces the possibility of a two-front war against Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north, has no choice but to eradicate Hamas from the Gaza Strip, which is approximately twenty-five miles long and six miles wide, so that the massacres and atrocities of October 7 will never happen again. Israel’s mantra must now be “Black September.”
Hopefully, Palestinian civilian casualties will be kept to a minimum in the ensuing destruction and ash-colored concrete rubble, but the Israeli armed forces now face a high death toll in an ugly hellacious war, which I predict may last two months or longer resembling the horrid casualties of the brutal house-to-house fighting in Stalingrad in the Soviet Union from August 23, 1942 to February 2, 1943.
However, unlike Stalingrad the Israeli armed forces will also have to contend with a vast and formidable network of tunnels, which resemble the Cu Chi tunnel network located northwest of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) during the Vietnam War, and free over two hundred hostages inside these tunnels throughout the Gaza Strip, thereby making an Israeli victory much more bloody, arduous and difficult.
– Robert L. Maronic
