While in my recent article in Blitz, it has been clearly mentioned that more than 73 percent of Gazans are directly or indirectly affiliated with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other militancy outfits, while remaining 27 percent are notoriously anti-Semite, according to recent reports, as Hamas terrorists carried out a highly choreographed pogrom in Israel on October 7, they received a source of support from Gazans that amplified the horror.
Reports quoting videos, eyewitness accounts, and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)said, a mob of ordinary Palestinians spontaneously joined in what became the deadliest pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust.
According to report, whereas the Hamas terrorists wore uniforms and carried military-grade weapons, the Gazans who followed them into the Jewish state were dressed as civilians and mostly unarmed, two officials from Israel’s devastated Gaza border region said. Young men with knives, overweight dads, and at least one elderly man on crutches were among those who exploited Hamas’s rampage to create a second wave of carnage that rivaled the barbarism of the professional terrorists.
The IDF declined to provide details about non-Hamas Gazans’s involvement in the October 7 pogrom. But IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon that large numbers of Gazans who were not members of any terrorist group entered Israel and participated in the atrocities.
“They did what you say they did”, Conricus said.
The extent to which the Gazan public took part in Hamas’s campaign of terror has yet to be fully understood even in Israel. But for the communities near Israel’s Gaza border – home to many of the country’s remaining peaceniks -firsthand knowledge of what their Palestinian neighbors did has already hardened into a new consensus: Coexistence is dead, and Gaza must be crushed.
“The second wave of Arabs who came into the country were just as cruel as the terrorists of the first wave”, Gadi Yarkoni, the mayor of the Eshkol Regional Council, which encompasses most of the Gaza border communities, told the Washington Free Beacon. “We saw that it was not only Hamas who came to slaughter us. It was all the residents of Gaza, including people who worked in our kibbutzim”.
According to a video that was posted online, Gazans used a bulldozer to tear down a section of Israel’s border fence, and hundreds of unarmed men and boys – wearing T-shirts, baseball caps, sneakers, and flip-flops – crossed into the country. They came mostly on foot but also by bicycle, scooter, and motorcycle. Someone appears to have brought a donkey. Other online videos show ordinary Gazans taking selfies on and around Israeli tanks and ransacking a military base on the border. All the while, cries of “Allahu Akbar” rang out.
The mob soon arrived in nearby Israeli communities that Hamas was already terrorizing. Security footage and Hamas videos from Be’eri, Nir Oz, and other kibbutzim capture dozens of ordinary-looking Gazans looting and taking part in killings and kidnappings, including of women and children.
Some of these people extorted their victims. Jacqueline Glicksman, an 81-year-old resident of Kibbutz Ein HaShlosha, told the WashingtonFree Beacon that three teenage boys from Gaza broke through the window of her safe room and demanded money. She told them she had none, and minutes later, her house was burned down. Glicksman somehow managed to jump out of the broken window in her pajamas and run to safety. But her friend, Silvia Mirensky, 80, was killed in an arson attack next door.
Meanwhile, in the streets of Gaza, crowds greeted the returning kidnappers as conquering heroes, online videos show. Some Gazans taunted the Israeli hostages and defiled the dead as they were paraded through the streets.
Raz Cohen, a 24-year-old former Israeli commando, saw both Hamas terrorists and ordinary Gazans kill and rape revelers at the Nova music festival in Re’im, where at least 260 people were slaughtered. After escaping the Hamas terrorists, Cohen hid in a bush with a group of friends for almost seven hours. He watched as a gang of Gazan civilians – men wearing Adidas and armed only with knives and axes – raped and murdered a young Jewish woman.
“While they were raping and killing, they always laughed. I can’t forget how they laughed”, Cohen told the Washington Free Beacon.
Several members of Cohen’s group later ran from the bush and were caught by the same gang of Gazans. He said he heard his friends’ screams as they were tortured and stabbed to death.
“You know when you hear the screams of someone who is dying”, said Cohen, who was eventually rescued by Israeli soldiers.
A young couple who were abducted at the Nova festival also appear to have been victims of ordinary Gazans. Footage shows that Noa Argamani and Avinatan Or were taken away by a group of about a dozen young men, some of them teenagers. As Or’s brother told Israel’s Channel 99, the kidnappers did not look to be armed. Minutes before Or was captured, he texted friends that 20 “people” were hunting down and lynching Jews, according to screenshots published by Israel’s Ynet news site.
An Israeli soldier who responded to the festival massacre told Ynet about his elite unit’s encounter with four amateur terrorists.
“They had no weapons. One of them had a knife”, said the commando, who spoke anonymously. “You can’t say they were tough. I think they are all margarine. They are not good fighters, from what we have seen. But it was their numbers and their evil. That’s all. You unleash a lot of people and say, ‘Do what you want, and have fun. Enjoy the murder. And also loot’”.
Daniel Meir, Nirim’s security chief, told the Washington Free Beacon that dozens of ordinary Gazans attacked his kibbutz on October 7 along with about 50 Hamas terrorists. During an hours-long gunfight with the invaders, he climbed to the top of a grain tower, where he was able to survey the battlefield.
Meir, echoing Yarkoni, said the differences between the Hamas terrorists and the other Gazans were easy to see: The Hamas terrorists wore green camouflage or black uniforms and were armed with automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and hand grenades. The ordinary Gazans wore everyday clothing and came unarmed or carrying only knives, although some appeared to have taken firearms from fallen Israelis or Hamas terrorists.
There was “complete cooperation” between the two groups, Daniel Meir said, with Hamas doing most of the fighting and the ordinary Gazans focused on looting and kidnapping.
“The civilians went into houses and turned them upside down. They took phones, computers, jewelry, whatever they could find,” he recalled. “From what I know, they also took most of the hostages”.
Meanwhile, in a bizarre move, Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of United Nations that I have long branded as dirty diaper blamed Israel for the October 7 pogrom by Hamas, saying the burning, butchering and beheadings of 1,400 people, and kidnapping over 200 more, “did not happen in a vacuum”.
“The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing”, Guterres said in a Security Council meeting on the war.
Anti-Semite notoriety spreads like wildfire
According to Honest Reporting, Yara Jamal, a production assistant and writer for CTV News Atlantic, helped organize an October 21 anti-Israel rally in Halifax. At the rally, she told Saltwire News that “Jews can continue to exist, the Zionist ideology cannot”.
“Pressed for whether by ‘Zionist ideology’, she meant Israel, she said ‘The state, no, cannot exist’”, the article read.
In an October 19 column in Le Devoir, author Emilie Nicolas accuses Israel of committing war crimes in the Gaza Strip, including bombing a hospital in Gaza City, which has been proven to have been caused by a rocket emanating from inside Gaza. Not only are such accusations devoid of credibility, they ultimately make a false and grotesque moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas.
Meanwhile, according to World Israel News, the University of California Berkeley is under fire after the school approved an instructor’s plan to offer extra credit to students who participate in an anti-Israel march or watch an anti-Israel documentary.
Graduate student Victoria Huynh, who is pursuing her Ph.D. in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, sent an email to students enrolled in her course, “Asian American Communities and Race Relations”, about the anti-Israel extra-credit options.
The email promoted an event called the “National walkout against genocide, settler-colonialism, and the siege of Gaza”, and informed students that they had the option to participate in the national student walkout or watch a short documentary on Palestine and contact their local California representatives.
In another report WIN said, 57.5 percent of American Muslims believe, “Hamas was at least somewhat justified in slaughtering Israelis ‘as part of their struggle for a Palestinian state’”.
Jerusalem Post in a report said, Turkey’s notorious pro-Caliphate fascist Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a statement said, “Hamas is not a terrorist organization, it is a liberation group, mujahideen waging a battle to protect its lands and people”.
According to MEMRI, terming beheading as “Islamic obligation”, Fathi Hamad, Hamas political bureau member and former Hamas interior minister in Gaza, said in a public address that aired on Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV on July 12, 2019: “We will not die of starvation. If we die, it will be while we are killing you and cutting off your heads, Allah willing. […] There are Jews everywhere! We must attack every Jew on Planet Earth – we must slaughter and kill them, with Allah’s help […] If we die, we die – but we will die with honor, while attacking, and not while retreating! We will die while exploding andcutting the necks and legs of the Jews! We will lacerate them and tear them to pieces, Allah willing”.
It may be mentioned here that during October 7 Hamas pogrom in Israel these terrorists along with its Gazan cohorts committed numerous forms of extreme cruelty which included beheading of adults and children. Confronted with harsh reactions to their atrocities, the Hamas leadership denied that the perpetrators were the organization’s own men whom they had proudly sent on a mission to kill Jews. They claimed that Hamas never does such things, and that the atrocities were committed by Gazan mobsters who had followed Hamas units into Israel.
