Deceit, delusion, and the inexorable pull of the past transformed a possible means to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a dangerous gimmick. The October 7, 2023 assault by Hamas inflicted unprecedented brutality on Israelis. Israel's military campaign and blockade-induced starvation in Gaza produced mass civilian deaths and treated fighter deaths as collateral damage while civilian slaughter became central. Western collusion and Arab governments' indifference compounded the crisis. Gazans endured prolonged confinement, displacement, and inability to access ancestral lands. Breaches of the fence yielded organized assaults, revenge against perceived captors, and numerous kidnappings. Families continue waiting for missing and martyred loved ones.
Israel's military attacks and forced starvation in Gaza are an onslaught governed by unusual rules, in which the death of Palestinian fighters seems like collateral damage, while the widespread, indiscriminate slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, appears the main event. Killing is the purpose. Death is everywhere, its victims uncertain when or where it will strike next.
October 7th turned relations between Israelis and Palestinians upside down. How much of this matched Hamas's planning and calculation, how much the chaotic, bottled-up frustrations and furies of fighters and civilians of all stripes, is debatable. Confined to the Strip, captives for years, often from birth, because of the Israeli blockade, Gazans could set eyes but not feet on lands from which parents and grandparents had been forced to flee.
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