"[I do this] To speak up for those whose voice was taken [those who were murdered] but also to those tortured, raped, wounded, held hostage, abused; to the victims' families and the massacre's survivors, who want their story and the truth out, but some of them are still too traumatized, mentally unprepared, to share these stories themselves."

"I documented the atrocities and wrote the book because already on October 7, I immediately foresaw the worldwide denial that we would face. I realized the urgency for documentation. I knew something must be created so that what happened would be commemorated for generations to come -- and so I did."

"The reason I decided to write the book in the most unfiltered, graphic and unapologetic way possible, without censoring any of the atrocities' details, as challenging as it is for the reader, was to shock the international community. To wake them up. To make them comprehend the extent of the cruelty, the evil, the inhumanity."

Alon Penzel, former IDF spokesman

 

"A lot of what Hamas was doing was recorded. So it's not like you can deny it, even though a lot of people around the world are trying to deny that this even happened."

"What we're seeing around the world, all the demonstrations, all this chanting of 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free', I think that people basically don't understand that means no state of Israel."

"They have no idea which river and which sea. They don't even know where we are on the globe. So a lot of people are watching TikToks of 30 seconds, and they're sure that they're experts on Israeli history."

Shelly Tal Merton, Knesset member, Yesh Atid party 

 

"The further we get from the 7th, the easier it is for people to change the narrative. If you can deny what happened on the 7th, then it's much easier to demonize and blood libel Israel."

"In Canada, many try to 'blur the lines'. Our state-funded broadcaster and mainstream media disregarding the 7th, glossing over it, to look at it like a footnote."

"[Film industry colleagues] outright minimized the rape of Israeli women, [some denying rapes occurred at all]."

Igal Hecht, October 7 documentary film The Killing Roads

 

"I actually have family members who either don't believe October 7 happened, or that it was an inside job planned by Netanyahu."

"I've met others with similar and worse beliefs. It's put a strain on my family, and I've lost friends over this."

"It's also interesting that these people refuse to watch our film."

Chris Atkins, filmmaker

Moshe Weitzman, left, one of the first EMIs to respond after the October 7 attacks, is filmed by Igal Hecht, who released his October 7 documentary The Killing Roads online for free in hopes of cutting through misinformation and denialism over the 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel. Photo by Igal Hecht

 

Knesset member Shelly Tal Meron, acting chair of the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, wrote over 100 letters to human rights organizations and women's groups in weeks after the October 7 atrocities in southern Israel, inviting them to condemn sexual assaults as a war weapon. "It's not the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It's not right or left. It's simply the moral thing to do, to say that this is wrong. Nobody responded. Not one."

 

Former IDF spokesman Alon Penzel spoke last year at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands. His efforts led to protesters breaking windows, threatening him with violence, denying the atrocities committed by Palestinian terrorists led by Hamas, screaming "lies", insisting no women were raped on October 7, 2023.  That experience will not deter him from his goal to take speaking engagements across Canada, two years after the invasion of Israeli troops into Gaza.

 

An assistant professor of geography at Radboud university, Harry Pettit, added his own take to Penzel's initiative, posting that he was a "terrorist", on social media, and that Israel was committing a "holocaust". The school, this professor avowed, "should refuse to normalize platforming Zionists". 

 

Documentary filmmaker Igal Hecht. Photo by Igal Hecht.

 

Five months following the October 7 atrocities, Alon Penzel wrote Testimonies Without Boundaries, Israel: October 7th 2023. The publication contained fifty first-hand accounts of the horrors victims had suffered, in an effort to record the reality of what happened, against a tsunami of rejection of the reality of the situation, replacing the actual event with self-serving ideological propaganda seething with hatred of Israel and condemnation of Jews everywhere.

 

Mr. Penzel's speaking tour is organized by the group StandWithUs, through a combination of appearances before student groups at university campuses and at community events, to counter the narrative so widely accepted that characterizes the war in Gaza as a deliberate ploy to destroy Palestinian lives in a 'genocide', shredding the actual atrocities that took place in southern Israel as a figment of imaginary Israeli public relations to turn the world against Palestinians. What motivates Mr. Penzel's determination is the shock of witnessing the world public accepting Hamas's distortion of reality.

 

Shelly Tal Meron, on the other hand, has met with a level of success through a coalition along with France's minister of gender equality, to lead others around the world in acknowledgement that sexual assault is being normalized as a war weapon "not only Israeli, Yazidi women, Ukrainian women, Druze women that just suffered this in Syria and many other conflict areas". Even some countries without Israeli ties have agreed to support the committee against war rape.

 

In the near wake of the October 7 monstrosity, filmmaker Chris Atkins was contacted by a friend, human rights advocate Majed el-Shaffie, Egyptian-born, with a like intention to record the event. Majed el-Shaffie had contracted with a cameraman in Israel to initiate the documenting of the atrocities. Both Atkins and el-Shafie, Christians, agreed to partner in putting together footage and work together to document Dying to Live, screened November 2024 in Toronto. The film documents areas devastated by violence, including the Nova music festival site, using October 7 archival footage, interviewing survivors and victims' families.

 

Toronto lawyer Adam Hummel published Essays from Afar: 700 Days of the Diaspora Experience Since October 7, containing collected accounts from his Catch Substack and two years' worth of weekly commentary in his concern that scant few sources have taken the trouble to fully comprehend what precipitated the Gaza war, how it is being conducted, and the Hamas scheme to sacrifice the lives of Gazans to round out its anti-Israel propaganda fed to the West.  

"[The UN Commission of Inquiry report alleging "genocide" perpetrated by Israel is an  unfortunately misguided piece of fiction."

"I often say that if Israel wanted to kill all the Palestinians, this war would have been over on October 8, 2023."

"They do not, however, which is why 900-plus Israeli soldiers have been killed over the last two years, because Israel has gone above and beyond to protect the lives of innocent Palestinians in Gaza, who have been put in the line of fire because of their own leaders."

Adam Hummel, Toronto lawyer 

 

Screams Before Silence

"Hamas is a political force."

"When you think of Hamas, you should not necessarily think of cutthroats, people armed to the teeth, or fighters. It's not like that." 

"Our collective obliviousness to what led, 100 years ago, to the Third Reich’s expansionism and the genocide of people not in conformity with the 'pure race' is asinine. And it is leading to the commission of yet another genocide..."

"Fellow Europeans, Italians, Germans: after the Holocaust, we should instinctively know that Genocide starts with dehumanizing the Other. If Israel's current attack agst [sic] Palestinians doesnt [sic] prompt our strong reaction, the darkest page of our recent history has taught us nothing."

"...Many Jewish people worldwide, unconditionally in love with Israel, live a lie. Premised upon the invisibilization/erasure [sic] of the Palestinians, Israel's founding ideology [and lie] is now leading to a genocide. What a disgraceful epilogue."

"Time to #UNseatIsrael from the UN."

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese  

A general view shows the assembly during a special session of the UN Human Rights Council on the situation in Iran, at the United Nations in Geneva. (Valentin Flauraud/AFP)

  

After two years of conflict between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, following hard on Palestinian terrorism committing unspeakable atrocities in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, the guns are silent. Almost. The guns are still there. But the full-blown assaults one on the other have been stilled. Hamas deliberately and with malice aforethought planned a devastatingly traumatic event in an orgy of hate and blood-lust, when it dispatched four thousand operatives, mostly representing Hamas, but also Fatah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, with orders to commit mass rape, torture, a wide arc of killing, and the abduction of Israeli children, civilian men and women, and foreign farm workers as hostages.

 

Matters were too silent for too long as far as Hamas, which had signed a ceasefire/hudna with Israel, felt, and matters were proceeding that disturbed their agenda of isolating Israel, demoralizing its population and finagling the Jewish state's elimination, when important Arab/Muslim countries like the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, joined Egypt and Jordan in signing a peace agreement with Israel  under the Abraham Accords, with signals that more would follow. The atrocities the Palestinian terrorist groups, joined by two thousand ordinary Palestinian civilians, wrought in Israel that day were flagrant examples of sadistic savagery meant to traumatize the Israeli population and shock its government. It did all of that.

 

 

And then the enormity of the event, the depth of the depravity in mutilating girls and women while raping and murdering them, of burning entire families alive in their homes, of killing anyone the marauding terrorists found in the streets unaware of a vicious armed invasion taking place, and hunting down thousands of fearful young Israelis at a music festival  to rape, murder and abduct, galvanized the Israeli government and the Israeli Defense Forces into a response, where the military following government orders set out to destroy Palestinian terror, its infrastructures, its weapons depots, its hiding places, while searching for the hostages.

 

The Gaza population was offered as a sacrifice to terrorism's goals with the deliberate intention on the part of Hamas leaders, to have as much collateral damage as possible inflicted on their populace to serve as a springboard in presenting Israel as a genocidal aggressor, augmenting their general representation of Palestinian victimhood at the hands of an oppressor that had nothing better to do than target Palestinians for death, a complete inversion of the Hamas covenant that bound it to the complete eradication of the Jewish state from the Middle East, and the death of Jews anywhere.

 

Screams Before Silence, presents testimonies from victims, rescuers, and researchers about the violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7

 

Latent antisemitism comes alive when Israel is portrayed as a heartless aggressor, and those in any society that seem to have Jew-hate imprinted in their DNA are always eager to take such charges at face value, justifying their own beliefs about Jewish intentions to rule the world. The United Nations, the international institution whose stated goal is world peace, assigned an arm to oversee conditions and give aid to Palestinians in Gaza through UNRWA, and like the UN's Francesca Albanese, its appointed heads have always been thorough antisemites, while their employment of local Palestinians featured members of the various terrorist groups; neutrality is an unknown concept there, as is fairness and decency.

 

The people of Gaza have been ruled for the past several decades by an Islamist totalitarian government. Funded by the international community, overseen by the United Nations which has never had a problem defending the ongoing violence that Palestinians perpetrated over the last 80 years on Israel, while their leaders refused time and again to lay down arms and malice and agree to recognizing Israel's right of existence and establishing a state of their own alongside Israel. Their solution was a one-state settlement; a Palestinian state and no room for the presence of a Jewish state.

 

Armed fighters in Khan Younis, southern Gaza on Monday.  Abed Rahim Khatib / DPA via Getty Images

 

Now that the conflict has been paused, settled, awaiting results, plans are afoot to reconstruct Gaza once Hamas has surrendered its arms and faded into history. Hamas has no intention of doing either, despite its agreement to the ceasefire and its conditions, and the anxiety of the Middle East (with the exception of the Iran axis) to cement peace between Israel and 'Palestine'. In foreign parts across the world, Europe and North America, the massed protests supporting Palestine (and Hamas) calling for a ceasefire, should rightly see a mass sigh of relief, but those who were dedicated to achieving a ceasefire, were also firmly dedicated to opposing Israel's existence.

 

That hasn't changed, thanks to a massive influx of Muslim supporters of Palestine having over time infiltrated Western society, finding common cause with Western homegrown socialists, Marxists, 'progressive' academics and unions and just plain old closet Jew-haters, feeling free now to exit their dank basements to rally alongside fellow antisemites. 

 

And Gaza? How's it faring? If you're a member of Hamas, very well. As a civilian Palestinian who desperately wants an end to endless conflict, to repression, to threats and violence, not so good. Because, no longer distracted with shielding itself from Israeli fire meant to destroy the presence of terrorists, Hamas can now devote all its time to rebranding itself as the rightful governance of the territory they plotted to be the recipient of an Israeli response. Now Hamas is free to 'identify' those Palestinians they claim opposed their rule, and chose to collaborate with Israel or with Palestinian clans opposed to Hamas.

 

The order of the day now in Gaza is threats, beatings, public executions and full-blown violence between Hamas operatives charged to destroy family clans that reject Hamas as the ruling power in Gaza. Hamas once again rules that part of the territory where the IDF has no presence. Insisting they are implementing law and order, and executing the 'criminals' in Palestinian society. The population of Gaza once again faces the threat of death from its leaders, now that Hamas gangsters have emerged fully uniformed from their tunnels. Score-settling has turned a war zone into a death zone.

 

Masked gunmen prepare to execute a group of men in Gaza City.  via Reuters

 

 

Gaza Statement Damning Israel

"The war in Gaza must end now."

"The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths. The Israeli government's aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity."

"We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food."

"[It is] horrifying that over 800 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid." 

"[Israel's aid distribution system is] dangerous." 

 Joint statement; 25 national signatories

 

"The statement fails to focus the pressure on Hamas and fails to recognize Hamas's role and responsibility for the situation. Hamas is the sole party responsible for the continuation of the war and the suffering on both sides."

"At these sensitive moments in the ongoing negotiations, it is better to avoid statements of this kind."

Oren Marmorstein, spokesman, Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry 

Palestinians gather as they carry aid supplies that entered Gaza through Israel, amid a hunger crisis, in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip July 20, 2025.   Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters

 

Israel is held responsible by the international community for a situation engineered by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Nations that have historically supported Israel's legitimate existence as a homeland for the world's Jews, re-established on Judean ancestral land, recognizing its democratic nature in harmony with their own, with a diverse population given equal citizenship and a justice system equal to their own, have taken to chiding Israel in essence for responding to deadly carnage by an enemy sworn to obliterate the Jewish state.

 

What's more, while recognizing Hamas for what it is, a terrorist entity that has time and again attacked Israel with the intention of destroying the country so that in its absence the land that has been in contention since 1948 would fall to Arab Palestinians who claim it as their own heritage, those same countries view that terrorist group on an equal footing with Israel. 'Palestine' has always been historically Jewish, with a population augmented by waves of migrants primarily from Egypt, along with those of other Arab countries. Just as Judaism's precepts and prophets were pilfered to flesh out the Koran, the land consecrated to Judaism by its ancient and ongoing presence has been claimed by Arab Palestinians.  

 

Palestinian propaganda has found a home in the West, where corrupted reality alters history and miraculously changes the violent predator into a victim, the actual victim into an oppressor. Where violently lethal atrocities can be viewed as the unfortunate excesses of an 'oppressed' people struggling to be free from the oversight of a country forced to defend itself from the barbarity of those portraying themselves as victims, dedicated to the destruction of a Jewish presence in the Middle East. 

 

When a situation is as plain to recognize as the reality that abundant humanitarian aid is available for Palestinians in Gaza whose leadership has deliberately sacrificed them for the greater goal of diminishing Israel's credibility in the opinion of the civilized West, while the United Nations insists in supplying that aid through Hamas which amasses the food, fuel and medical supplies in its warehouses rather than distributing it to the population, Israel is condemned. The distribution of humanitarian aid through another source working in tandem with the U.S. and Israel is penalized by the UN refusing to work with it, while Hamas threatens Palestinians who gather that aid from a source Hamas considers in competition with its goal of controlling the aid by selling it at high prices at food markets.

 

The signatories of the statement of condemnation, insisting that Israel stop 'the war in Gaza', include France, Japan and Britain, as well as Canada, traditional allies of Israel, all of which now prefer to believe Hamas's propaganda of 'genocide'. Israel lost no time rejecting the joint statement, which included the pro forma addition of condemning Hamas for holding the remnants of the 251 hostages they kidnapped from Israel on October 7, 2023 when thousands of Palestinian terrorists swarmed into southern Israel to rape, torture and murder Israeli children and their families.

 

Those who signed the statement damned the Israeli proposal to expand settlements in the 'Palestinian territories', and any move to divide the 'West Bank' from East Jerusalem, Israel's capital. Such moves, they decry, would "critically undermine the two-state solution". That would be the Two-State Solution that Palestinian leaders have always rejected in their adamant, timeless refusal to recognize Israel's right of existence. The same Two-State Solution that Palestinians refused in 1947, and have continued to reject ever since.

 

The Two-State Solution that died completely on October 7, 2023. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation posts regular updates on social media relating to its life-saving distribution of humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza. It also posts notices of Hamas killing and injuring their GHF humanitarian workers. As well as threats and attacks against Palestinians who frequent the GHF distribution centers. Besides the U.S., Germany was the only other G7 country that failed to endorse the joint statement of condemnation against Israel.

 

An aid distribution point set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation near the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza on June 25. Eyad Baba / AFP - Getty Images file

 

Release of Israeli Hostages

"Dear President Trump, first of all we want to say thank you for the happy moments we felt this week. But we want to tell you we still have 94 hostages, we need them all at home."

"Please do not stop. Please continue to press and do everything so that all the 94 hostages will come home immediately."

Ayelet Samerano, Israeli mother of hostage Yonatan Samerano

Israeli female soldier hostages Naama Levy, Daniella Gilboa, Karina Ariev and Liri Albag seen on a stage set up by Hamas in front of a Palestinian crowd before being handed over to the Red Cross in Gaza City, Jan. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Abed Hajjar)

On Saturday, four members of the Israeli military, taken hostage by Hamas terrorists on 7 October 2023 during a horrific orgy of mass rape, mutilations,and mass murder, were released finally from their ordeal as captive prisoners held in Gaza by Hamas operatives. They were all four female soldiers: Karina Ariev, 20; Danielia Gilboa,20; Naama Levy, 20; and Liri Albag, 19. 

 

Naama Levy captured the world's attention, her plight seen through photographs and video footage taken by bodycams worn by Hamas operatives as they documented their horrific abuse of Israeli citizens in border farming communities by thousands of Palestinian terrorists prowling through villages killing and raping and looting, laying waste to the villages, burning entire families alive in their homes, hunting down youthful revellers at a nearby music festival, and taking hundreds of children, women, elderly and soldiers hostage into Gaza.

 

One of those soldiers was Naana Levy, seen in the trunk of a car and ordered into another one, her pants bloodied, hands tied behind her back, ankles bleeding, deliberately slashed to keep her from attempting to flee her captors who had raped and mutilated her. Seven female members of the Israel Defense Forces had been taken prisoner that day, from the Nahal Oz military base. Their duty there was to serve as lookouts.

 

Ori Megidish, one of the seven, was rescued on October 30, 2023 in a raid conducted by the IDF. Noa Marciano, 19, killed in Gaza, her body repatriated on November 17, 2023. Among the 33 hostages named by the Israeli government for release during the first phase of the temporary ceasefire is the fifth female soldier, Agam Berger. Israel agreed to free dozens of Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails for terrorist activities in exchange for the hostages.

Hamas terrirusts stormed the Nova festival on 7 October and killed hundreds

In Israel's estimation, a third of the 94 Israeli hostages remaining in Hamas hands in Gaza, are dead although Hamas has failed to release agreed upon definitive information detailing how many of the Israelis held captive remain alive, or listing the names of those who have died. The initial phase of the ceasefire deal is to see 33 of the hostages released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians held prisoner in Israel.

 

It took 90 Palestinian prisoners to secure the release of the first three Israeli hostages a week ago Sunday. Some 100 of the hostages had been released through a brief ceasefire in November of 2023. Since then, the bodies of around three dozen hostages have been recovered, and eight hostages were rescued. "We cannot continue living in uncertainty. All hostages must return, and none of them has time left", cautioned Ayelet Samerano. 

Naama Levy (L) is seen with her hands bound and with a bloodied face in the newly released video footage, which was filmed by Hamas terrorists  Hostages and Missing Families Forum

Profit Bonanza From Smuggled Cigarettes Into Gaza

"The looting has become quite profound [last Tuesday, three-quarters of the goods on board trucks entering from the crossing were stolen]."

"Meaningful decisions now have to be taken about what we will do for civil order in Gaza and who will take care of delivering that."

 Georgios Petropoulos, head, UN Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Gaza

 

"This is largely due to the fact that international organizations have not taken sufficient steps to improve their distribution capacity."

"[The UN – which is the main supplier of aid in Gaza – has insufficient numbers of trucks, and needs] to increase manpower, to extend working hours, to increase storage [and take other] logistical and organizational steps."

COGAT spokesman Shimon Freedman

 

"[Aid officials have] seen cartons of U.N.-branded assistance with cigarettes inside."

"They [the gangs] go directly into the pallet where the cigarettes are]."

Andrea De Domenico, U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Jerusalem

Palestinians loot a truck with humanitarian aid near the Rafah border crossing in the Gaza Strip. (AP Photo/Hatem Ali)

Humanitarian aid convoys scheduled to deliver relief to Palestinians in Gaza are coming under more frequent attacks led by organized crowds of Palestinians looking for cigarette they know that have been smuggled into the humanitarian shipments. Cigarettes in Gaza have become scarce, those that are available on the market sell for between $25 and $30 for each cigarette. Attacks by groups intent on looting the humanitarian aid in pursuit of the cigarettes have posed a real obstacle to delivering aid to southern Gaza.

Everything that goes in and out of Gaza is closely scanned by Israeli authorities in their search for smuggled weapons that will reach Hamas' hands. Despite which, cigarettes slip through with the cargo into southern Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing, in Israeli hands. Mostly Egyptian smugglers have taken to to placing cigarettes in sacks of flour donated by the U.N., in diapers and some were even found in a watermelon, aid agencies and an Israeli military official reported.

The economy in Gaza has been turned inside out since control of goods entering the enclave are closely monitored by Israel. Under intense international pressure, Israel has allowed aid agencies to send large amounts of flour, steeply dropping the price of flour on the Gaza marketplace. Most trucks carrying cigarettes seem to emanate from Egypt which had re-routed the trucks arriving from Egyptian territory through Kerem Shalom once Israel captured the Rafah border crossing.

Palestinian  trucking company owner Manhal Shaibar, carrying U.N. aid, attributed smuggling of cigarettes to Bedouin families in both Gaza and the Egyptian Sinai. Although southern Gaza's state of deprivation is intense, contents of over 1,000 aid trucks have been left for weeks at the Gazan side of the Kerem Shalom crossing. Aid agencies hesitate to send trucks to collect and distribute goods, fearing attacks.

 

Commercial food trucks are seen near a checkpoint near Hebron, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank May 28, 2024. REUTERS/Mussa Qawasma/File Photo

 

Israel has paved new roads to make it easier to ensure U.N. agencies can collect the goods, but those same aid officials claim Israel could be more helpful by allowing them to expand use of other roads and crossings. Private businesses are willing to pay hundreds or thousands in protection money to guards or to the organized gangs to protect their trucks. The convoys carrying U.N. aid are viewed as an easier target by the criminal gangs. They are linked to Hamas which takes a significant cut of the profits they realize from their plundering

According to both U.N. and Israeli officials, smugglers are closely coordinated with organized groups within the territory where aid trucks have been blocked and operatives with light arms, clubs and improvised roadblocks are imperilling the delivery of humanitarian goods. They've noted that the looters appear to know where exactly where the cigarettes are to be found hidden within the trucks.

A cigarette seller in Gaza City spoke anonymously fearing retribution, explaining that Hamas forces remained in the area, but not as police, just as "mafias". Prices, he said, could be as much as $40 for each cigarette for more popular brands. That, despite being impoverished after months of war, desperate smokers were willing to pay for cigarettes, despite their need for food for their families.

 

Palestinians climb onto trucks to grab aid that was delivered into Gaza through a U.S.-built pier, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Islamist group Hamas, as seen from the central Gaza Strip.

 

Disenchantment With Hamas? Too Little, Too Late

"It started October 7, and it wants to end it on its own terms. But time is ticking with no potential hope of ending this."

"Hamas is still seeking its slice of power."

"Hamas does not know how to get down from the tree it climbed."

Raed al-Kelani, 47, former Palestinian Authority government worker in Gaza

 

"If the death and hunger of their people do not make any difference to them, they do not need to make any difference to us."

"Cursed be everyone who trafficked in our blood, burned our hearts and homes, and ruined our lives."

Gaza photojournalist Motaz Azaiza 

"When you realize six months in or seven months in that Gaza is completely destroyed, your life as a Gazan is completely destroyed, that's where people are coming from when they are not supportive of Sinwar or Haniyeh."

Obada Shtaya, co-founder Institute for Social and Economic Progress

"Are there people in Gaza who blame Hamas? Of course."

"This is a natural thing in societies that some people are for and some people are against."

Basem Naim, Hamas spokesman

 

No one really knows how many of these voices exist. Palestinians who bitterly oppose Hamas. These are not necessarily, on the other hand, Palestinians whose humanitarian instincts were awoken with the news of the horrendous atrocities committed by Hamas operatives, by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, by the PLFP, and by ordinary Palestinians from Gaza who crossed the destroyed border openings from Gaza into Israel on October 7 to drive, bicycle, or 'helicopter' into southern Israel, converging in the early morning hours toward kibbutz farming communities and the Nova music festival.

If only, for them, it had ended there. The work done of humiliating the Israeli government, its military, its intelligence experts, as it went about its methodical work of destroying Jewish lives, from babies to the elderly, entire families whose homes went up in flames with them within. Jewish girls and women who were mutilated, gang-raped, murdered. A day of unrestrained savagery and barbaric bloodshed. The anguish and agony suffered by Jews found their malevolent counterpart in the joy taken by the sadists tasked by Hamas to slaughter them.

The terror in the minds and hearts of the 240 hostages, the female IDF soldiers whose initial alerts had been ignored. The confusion and fear in the thoughts of children taken by violent strangers from their homes in Israel, into Gaza, victims of a plan to use their young lives as collateral in future prisoner exchanges between a bereft Israel and a confident terrorist group. A terrorist group that factored in the deaths of their own populations while using them as human shields, knowing the reputational damage it would do to the Israel Defense Forces in the West.

 

Hamas has been criticized by human rights groups for its suppression of civil liberties  Getty Images

 

The Palestinians who today are bitterly opposed to Hamas discovered this frame of mind, when it became abundantly clear that it was not only Israelis their terrorist government calculated as a means to an end, but they themselves, the ordinary people of Gaza who now suffer their own version of death and destruction, the agony of displacement, of never knowing when another precision bomb targeting the Hamas operatives seeking shelter in their schools, hospitals, mosques and the plenitude of tunnels will also strike them.

On the very day of the attack, it was a matter of jubilation among Palestinians that their very own terrorist government was delivering a lethal blow of immense proportions to the Jews living geographically on territory they claimed as theirs, ancestral rights be damned. Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank felt vindicated for the limitless hate they were taught to nurture, regarding Jews as colonialist usurpers squatting on Palestinian land.

Immediately following the gruesome events of October 7, Palestinians expressed reverence for the exploit of their Hamas leaders, extolling their 'courage' and military prowess in subduing the 'occupation' in their exquisitely planned and executed mass atrocity with its celebrated death count. And then, suddenly, they found themselves devastated by the response, for every action has its consequences and theirs should have been anticipated, but evidently was not. The new reality of tens of thousands dead was a counterpart exchange for October 7.

Now, a handful of Gazans express their rage at Hamas, yet even so, holding Israel to blame for everything that has destroyed their insular world. Hamas may have been responsible for provoking Israel into invading Gaza for the purpose of eradicating Hamas which has promised endless October 7s, but it is Israel that has pummeled Gaza into rubble, deprived Gazans of their lives, their homes, their future. 

 

Palestinian women walk by ruined buildings in central Gaza, Getty Images

 

Mr. al-Kelani, formerly a functionary of Fatah/Palestinian Authority, now distributes food aid in shelters to displaced Gazans. Even while Gazans understand Hamas was aware its actions would start a war causing heavy civilian casualties, failing to provide food, water or shelter for survival of the population it governed, they also knew that leaders of Hamas considered them fodder in the ignition of a permanent state of war, on the path of reviving the Palestinian 'cause'.

A March survey by the West Bank-based Institute for Social and Economic Progress polled Gazans about their feelings for Hamas leaders. To which some three-quarters opposed Yahya Sinwar, the Gaza-based Hamas leader, while a similar number opposed its political leader in exile, Ismail Haniyeh. Another more recent poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Gaza indicated support for Hamas leaders in Gaza to be somewhat higher.

"They could have surrendered a long time ago and saved us from all this suffering", offered one Gazan who fled to Egypt, stating her friends and family anticipate Hamas will be defeated in Gaza and only then will the war end. The feeling among some Gazans is that Hamas is determined to raise its global profile by championing universal Palestinian causes for which ordinary Gazans are destined to pay the price. While Hamas and Israeli hostages were safe in underground tunnels, they say, Gazans suffer above ground with no bomb protection.

"I do not want to sacrifice my life, my home and house for anyone."

"There is uncontrolled anger against Hamas."

Ameen Abed, resident of Jabaliya, northern Gaza

The UN estimates that around 250,000 people are affected by the Israeli evacuation orders  Reuters

Slandering Israel of "Catastrophic Palestinian Starvation"

"The available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring."

"The IPC [Integrated Food Security Phase Classification] acute food insecurity analysis conducted in February 2024 projected that famine would likely occur in the northern governorates [of Gaza] by the end of May, based on the assumption that conflict would persist with the same intensity and humanitarian access would remain very low."

"While the use of assumptions and inference is standard practice in IPC generally, the limitations of the available body of evidence and the extent of its convergence for northern Gaza in April leads to a very high level of uncertainty regarding the current food security and nutritional status of the population."

Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report

Bustling street markets filled with produce in the Deir al-Balah camp in central Gaza on June 21, 2024. Photo by Majdi Fathi/TPS-IL

The arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court naming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, accusing both of leveraging the "starvation of civilians as a method of war", levied in May, based its warrants on the warnings issued by the IPC's early reports and those of the UN's World Food Program, both warning that northern Gaza was under a "full-blown famine" in May. Just as the IPC's and UN's warnings were without credibility, so too the ICC's warrants.

Aided and abetted by international media which themselves relied on IPC projections in reporting the conflict, the allegations of war crimes committed by Israel at war with Hamas, gave credence to the public relations campaigns vilifying Israel on behalf of the Hamas propaganda machinery, while selectively bypassing Israel's assurances of efforts during an intense time of conflict, of making every effort to alleviate the food insecurity of ordinary Palestinians.

 

Lorries with aid loads for delivery into Gaza arrive at Larnaca Port, Cyprus, June 26, 2024. REUTERS/Marinos Meletiou

 

While Israel opened corridors with the full knowledge that in so doing, it ran the risk of assisting Hamas leadership and operatives escaping the consequences of the atrocities they committed in southern Israel. In the same token, while Israel was doing its utmost to still international criticism holding Israel to standards never imposed upon other countries forced to defend themselves from gratuitously savage violence, the world looked the other way when evidence arose of Hamas looting humanitarian food and goods convoys meant to sustain Palestinian civilians.

After months of dire warnings of "famine is imminent" in the Gaza Strip, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification released a snapshot report published on June 25. Funded by a number of Western countries such as Canada, the European Union and he United States the new report explains that its revision was occasioned partially from earlier reliance on "assumptions and inference" to "address major gaps in publicly accessible evidence". 

The report's conclusions inspired David Adesnik of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies to characterize the IPC's admission of errors as "one of the greatest slanders of the last eight months", obliquely referencing the beginning of conflict in October stemming from the Hamas invasion of Israel and revelations of the terrorist group's inhumane indulgence in sadistic savagery of horrific proportions that included group rape, mutilation and bloody mass slaughter.

A convoy carrying humanitarian aid for Gaza on its way to the Rafah crossing last month as looted. Photograph: Khaled Elfiqi/EPA

 

"After months of hearing that Israel was blocking the delivery of sufficient aid to Gaza we now see that Israeli authorities facilitated a massive increase in shipments of both aid and commercial goods, alleviating shortages in Gaza while Israeli forces continued to prosecute the war against Hamas."

"This is a decisive rebuke to malicious claims that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war against the people of Gaza."

David Adesnik, senior fellow, director of research, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Excoriating Israel for Genocidal Intent

"Since we can't hope for anything morally courageous from most of the faculty, the best hope we have is to seek to defund the universities, to call for the resignation of their weak-kneed presidents, and to fix the broken hiring system in which a single ideology [and not merit] determines who is in and who is out."

"We must find a better way forward, and not just on campus. As the pro-Hamas fores make blatant use of Jew-hatred, they are testing how far they can go in upending our liberal values."

"If we don't stop them now, this will only be the start of a forced march on the road to much, much worse."

"All of this has its source in an ideology that has gripped the minds of the vast majority of university professors, a neo-Marxist ideology that despises the values of liberal democratic society on which our freedoms are based." 

"We now have a choice. Do we allow the pro-Hamas mobs to take over our campuses? It is painful to observe the students in the encampments serving as 'useful idiots', to see the faculty largely become deluded supporters deceived by an ideology; and to discover that the administrators are weak appeasers. This is clear in their pathetic attempts to 'negotiate' with the campus occupiers by bribing them with faculty positions and student scholarships."

Kenneth Green, professor, Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

Pro-Hamas Encampment, University of Toronto, Globe & Mail

The new 'normal' that has arisen since October 7's Hamas atrocities in southern Israel is one that constitutes a nightmare for Jews in the diaspora where throughout Europe and North America, a tidal wave of antisemitism has surfaced that, in its bold authenticity has shocked and terrorized Jews everywhere. World Jewry since the Second World War sought comfort in the belief that their enormous sacrifice on the altar of Jew-hate would never, ever recur.

 

The world, in the face of the open secret of the death camps, the gas chambers and the ovens that incinerated Jewish corpses to ashes filtered through those giant belching chimneys to sprinkle human ash like fertilizer over the agricultural fields of Europe chose to do nothing, to remain oblivious to the death throes of European Jewry. A chastened world, shocked by the visual evidence of what they knew was occurring, offered a palliative in the UN's decision to permit a re-awakened State of Israel.

Now that same world has turned upon the Jewish State, repeating what a terrorist group has disseminated, that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians. Those Arab communities who named themselves Palestinians, the ancient Roman Occupation word to describe Judean lands administered by Rome, and whose agenda was to claim heritage Palestinian designation as a legitimate Arab-Palestinian state where Israel sits.

It is a narrative that has no basis in reality, one which documented history, ascribing ancestral heritage to Jews who originated in the Middle East as the authentic indigenous people of the region validates. Yet by identifying themselves as victims of Jewish aggression, while in actuality acting out as terrorists whose goal is to embark on never-ending deadly assaults against Jews and Israel, claiming them as oppressors and themselves as beleaguered threatened people of peace, the Western world's progressive left has taken up their cudgel to beat Israel.

Their appeal to the professional and trade unions of the West, eagerly grasping the narrative of 'occupier', 'settlers' and 'indigenous people', the struggle of the underdog against the capitalist threat of the 'colonialists' has led to the snarling references to Israeli 'genocide' against a powerless people deprived of their birthright, ventilating fullblown antisemitism under the canopy of human rights being defiled by a greedy colonialist entity depriving Palestinians of what is rightfully theirs.

Palestinian terrorists crossing the fence separating Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip from surrounding Israeli settlements on October 7, 2023. (Photo by Stringer/APA Images)

And so, there are school encampments throughout the West, demands that universities condemn the Israeli genocidaires, that academic cooperation with Israel be cancelled, that investments and collaboration be cancelled in the name of upholding human rights. The October 7 atrocities interpreted as a just and admirably courageous assertion of the Palestinian right of self-defence, not the sadistic savagery for which there is abundant visual evidence recorded by the Hamas murderers themselves. 

Despite that Palestinian terrorists in their thousands swarmed across the border from Gaza into southern Israel in a well-planned and -orchestrated bloodbath of dreadful proportions, accompanied by mass rapes, the murder of infants and children, burning alive of entire families in their torched homes, the deliberately exacting mutilation of girls and women before their execution after rapes, are all justified as the uprising of a people dominated by a military that refuses them a state of their own.

That would be the state that Palestinian leaders rejected in 1948 and consistently thereafter every time an attempt at negotiations took place between Israel and the Palestinians. Who, while piteously declaring to the West that all they want is their fair share in a two-state 'solution', continue to plan their brutal attacks on Israel and its people to achieve the real agenda of clearing the region of the Jewish State to declare it forthwith a sole Palestinian State.

Whereas Israel has given citizenship and equality to Palestinians within Israel representing 20 percent of its population, the Palestinian leadership, both the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas governing Gaza, have made it clear that not one Jew would remain alive in the Palestinian Territories. And it is to these antagonists of Israel to whom the West gives their unalloyed support while giving wan lip service to the right of Israel's existence as a sovereign state.

An elderly Palestinian man raises a national flag as youths shout slogans during a protest in the southern Gaza Strip. (AFP)

A terrorist group that has committed its version of a genocidal effort to complete what the Holocaust started can characterize Israel as a genocidal state planning to eliminate Palestinians in their entirety, and that assertion is accepted and echoed by Western academics both of Palestinian/Arab/Muslim derivation and non-Arab, Marxist-inspired faculty at universities, upholding the free speech entitlements of non-student organizers and university students to hold a school in ransom to their negative-Israel demands. 

Academics, Jewish and non-Jewish risk being labelled as 'Islamophobic' and 'racist' by asserting the right of Israel to exist, by declaring Palestinian terrorist groups be recognized for what they are, by demanding the disassembling of the university campus encampments with their antisemitic themes, threats and verbal and physical intimidation against any and all who fail to agree with their messaging. That government at any level, and school administrators are too cowardly or in agreement with the pro-Hamas protests to shut them down, is a condemnation of those who have abandoned the democratic values of their own heritage and culture.