Attention to the Unseen

The Forward reports: Israeli cabinet ministers faced the wrath of anguished citizens and doctors during visits to local hospitals on Thursday. Israel is in mourning after a surprise attack by Hamas on Saturday, which has resulted in the deaths of more than 1,200 people. But the country, before the attacks, had been convulsed for months over a judicial reform package pushed by the right-wing government, which has led hundreds of thousands of Israelis to protest in the streets. “You’ve ruined…

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Kenneth Roth writes: Hamas’s appalling attack on Israeli civilians has been widely described as the country’s “9/11 moment”. It is an appropriate description of such wanton cruelty. But the analogy carries a cautionary note as well. The US government lost the world’s sympathy, and the moral high ground, when its response to 9/11 degenerated into a highly abusive war in Iraq, systematic torture, and endless detention without trial in Guantánamo. The Israeli government should be careful not to replicate this…

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CNN reports: The United States has collected specific intelligence that suggests senior Iranian government officials were caught by surprise by Saturday’s bloody attack on Israel by Hamas, according to multiple sources familiar with the intelligence. The existence of the intelligence has cast doubt on the idea that Iran was directly involved in the planning, resourcing or approving of the operation, sources said. The sources stressed that the US intelligence community is not ready to reach a full conclusion about whether…

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Nicholas Grossman writes: No American president caused Hamas’ surprise assault across the Gaza border that killed over 900 Israelis—mostly in deliberate, brutal attacks on civilians, including 260 at a music festival—and kidnapping about 150 more. But U.S. policy, especially the Trump administration’s, contributed to the unsustainable situation that made an outbreak of violence more likely. Claims that “Trump brought peace to the Middle East” are almost an inversion of reality. He shifted U.S. policy fully in Israel’s favor—reducing support for the Palestinians and treating their quest for statehood…

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Reuters reports: A careful campaign of deception ensured Israel was caught off guard when the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas launched its devastating attack, enabling a force using bulldozers, hang gliders and motorbikes to take on the Middle East’s most powerful army. Saturday’s assault, the worst breach in Israel’s defences since Arab armies waged war in 1973, followed two years of subterfuge by Hamas that involved keeping its military plans under wraps and convincing Israel it did not want a fight….

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The Washington Post reports: The surprise attack started around 6 a.m., with a barrage of rocket fire followed by cross-border attacks. Yet it wasn’t until late afternoon that buses and trains were mobilized to ferry soldiers south. It took some 10 hours for the first troops to arrive in towns overrun by militants. Miri Regev, Israel’s transportation minister and a longtime Netanyahu ally, was in Mexico. Private citizens donated food, flashlights and other basic supplies to the reservists as they…

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Politico reports: The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America is facing a political firestorm after the organization promoted a pro-Palestine rally in the wake of Hamas militants’ attacks on Israeli communities. The group did not organize Sunday’s rally, its leadership said Monday. But several lawmakers with DSA ties are distancing themselves from what was said at the event. “It should not be hard to shut down hatred and antisemitism where we see it. That is a…

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The New York Times reports: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has long cast himself as a friend of Israel and the Jewish people. He helped establish visa-free travel between Russia and Israel in 2008, presided over the construction of a sprawling Moscow Jewish Museum in 2012 and, side by side with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem in 2020, unveiled a memorial to the victims of Nazi Germany’s siege of Leningrad. But amid the worst attack on Israel in…

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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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