Attention to the Unseen

Janine Zacharia writes: I started hearing from friends in Israel on Saturday that the number of partygoers murdered at an all-night rave near the Gaza border was much higher than authorities were disclosing. Soon after, distraught relatives began appearing outside hospitals, recounting on live TV their final conversations with their missing loved ones. “Nissim, I am dying,” one grief-stricken man recalled his brother saying before he lost contact with him. Many said they then heard conversations in Arabic before lines…

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The Israeli military affairs journalist, Yossi Melman: IDF spokeperson Brig-General Danny Hagari said that there is no indication of an Iranian involvement in the war in Gaza. — Yossi Melman (@yossi_melman) October 9, 2023 Israeli researcher in Iranian studies, Raz Zimmt: My two (or more) cents about Iran's involvement in recent developments in Southern Israel. In my opinion, two crucial distinctions are required. First, it is necessary to distinguish between Iranian support to Hamas, as well as the ongoing coordination…

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David Ignatius writes: Israel seemed to be coming apart in the months before Hamas fighters broke through the Gaza cage. Thousands of Israelis were marching in the streets of Tel Aviv to protest Netanyahu’s attempt to alter what they saw as the fundamental character of the state. Did that political chaos contribute to the Gaza attacks? I don’t know. But, surely, the domestic feuds of the past few months might have led Hamas and its backers in Tehran to believe…

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The Guardian reports: Palestinians across the besieged Gaza Strip have described their terror and confusion, as thousands fled a wave of Israeli airstrikes after Hamas’s unprecedented cross-border incursion. “When we began asking about the situation inside the hospitals we work with, one person described it as a slaughterhouse,” said Mahmoud Shalabi of Medical Aid for Palestinians, who is overseeing support to hospitals across the Gaza Strip. “There were bodies laying on the ground, there wasn’t enough space in the emergency…

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The Daily Beast reports: Gaza residents suffering wave after wave of Israeli bombing on Monday reacted with horror, as Hamas threatened to start executing Israeli hostages on camera each time a civilian is killed in an airstrike without warning. Abu Ubaida, a spokesman for the armed wing of Hamas, made the blood-chilling threat after a day of heavy bombing across the Gaza Strip in response to the militants’ raid on Israel over the weekend, which killed at least 700 people…

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The lead editorial at Haaretz says: The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to key positions, while embracing a foreign policy that…

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Haviv Rettig Gur writes: It was a horror, interminable, impossible. Hour after hour, families sat huddled in their homes awaiting rescue from the Hamas gunmen streaming through their towns and villages. Families were butchered in cold blood. In one home, a terrorist shot the parents dead, took a child’s cellphone and started broadcasting it all in a livestream on their Facebook account. Grandmothers were pulled in wheelchairs to waiting vehicles ready to carry them as hostages into Gaza. Then came…

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Michael Young writes: The surprise offensive by Hamas on October 7 has launched a thousand morsels of speculation. There is indeed much that can be concluded from the organization’s attacks against Israeli towns, its random killing of Israelis, its abduction of Israeli military personnel and civilians, and its firing of thousands of rockets against Israeli towns and cities. But one thing that is undeniable is that what we saw, and are continuing to see, in Gaza is Iran’s hostile takeover…

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Kim Ghattas writes: The Hamas attack against Israel is not only a massive Israeli intelligence and military (as well as a U.S. intelligence) failure, but also a dramatic success for Iran’s axis of resistance from Yemen to Gaza. The highly choreographed, multipronged, day-long operation and incursion into Israel itself, involving the use of motorized paragliders and drones and the taking of hostages, required months of planning and training that only Iran and Hezbollah could have provided. Late yesterday, a Hamas…

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Jonathan Guyer writes: It took Hamas’s deadly attack today to remind Israel, the United States, and the world that Palestine still matters. The militant group based in occupied Gaza launched aerial attacks and broke through the heavily secured fence into the State of Israel. Hundreds of Israelis have been killed, a historic scale of violence for the country. The Israeli counterattack will inevitably lead to more death and destruction for Palestinians and a tightened occupation. It comes after nearly two decades of…

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  Former CIA Director John Brennan told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki that it was “incomprehensible” that Hamas was able to carry out an attack on Israel. Brennan said that it was possible Israeli intelligence sources were compromised and may have provided misinformation to Israel.