What do Gazans think of Hamas and the Israelis? A note on what Israel has done to Israel in the wake of the October 7 attacks
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A shared future is more likely to be a longer way off than it was a month ago. But Palestinians already knew that. Was the day before Hamas’s attacks considered “peace”? Maybe for Israelis it was, but not for Palestinians.
In Gaza, these victims have virtually no legal possibility of recourse from the Israeli state. Under the 16-year siege of Gaza, Israeli administrators have controlled access to electricity, food and water, at one point determining the number of calories Gazans could consume before sliding into malnutrition. They have also allowed Gaza and the occupied territories to serve as a testing ground for Israel’s vaunted security tech firms. Many people from Gaza have died on the journey to get out of the country.
The Oct. 7 attacks broke that state of play. It was clear from the beginning that the occupation was unsustainable, and that it would be impossible to govern two peoples but also to privatize one of them.
Over the past 75 years, there have been periods of increased cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians. But these were usually preceded by times of increased conflict, such as the first and second intifadas, or popular uprisings. The intifadas, in which Palestinians participated in large-scale resistance, are often presented by the western media as random or indiscriminate spurts of savagery, as was the case with the October 7 attacks. That violence did not happen in a vacuum.
Many Gazans have parents and grandparents who were forbidden to travel to their hometown because of the unrest in the area. When they walked through the olive fields of Qumya as a child or adolescents, they conjured up memories of when they were forced to leave the Gaza Strip during the 1948 war.
In the wake of the October 7 attacks, the National Security Minister has been distributing weapons to civilian groups in settlements in the northern West Bank. 10,000 assault rifles have been bought by the ministry for such teams. It’s part of the atmosphere of escalating violence that has killed more than 130 Palestinians living in the West Bank since Oct. 7.
The Fate of Ramallah, the Birth of a Single Mother, and the Awakening of the Third Child: A Tale of Two Sweethearts
For the past month, normal life in Ramallah — a city in the West Bank usually known for its young population and its vibrant nightlife — has been brought to a standstill.
When the world froze in March 2020 and Omri Miran and Lisa Lavi became sweethearts, their love bloomed. They built a home in Nahal Oz, a kibbutz located two miles from the Israel-Gaza Strip armistice line, and married and had two daughters: Roni, who is 2 and a half years old, andAlma, just 7 months old. There were two people who worked in kibbutz and led educational programs to integrate Bedouin-Israeli students into Sapir College, one of the flagship higher education institutions of the northwest Negev region. They were optimistic about their future before the sun came up on the deadliest morning in the history of Israel.
The war resulted in a lot of casualties and suffering. It has dominated headlines and been the subject of shuttle diplomacy. But amid the chaos and complexity of this conflict, the hostages must not be forgotten. Their lives hang in the balance, and their families live in a perpetual state of anguish. The safe return of hostages should be the focus of diplomacy and the focus of the American response to the conflict. World leaders of all political stripes should support our demand for their release.