Residents of the Gaza envelope, as they call the roughly fifty communities encompassing 70,000 people living in towns and villages on the Israeli side of the Gaza–Israel border, are used to middle-of-the-night sirens alerting them to Hamas-launched Qassam rockets. They have a well-established routine. If there’s time, they go to their secure room. If not, they await impact, hoping the rockets won’t hit their homes.
On the morning of October 7, close friends of mine were holed up in their secure room. While they normally wait for the rockets to land before resuming their routines, this time they heard a terrifyingly unfamiliar sound: militants, who they rightly assumed were Hamas, roaming outside their front door. While the Israeli military and police would take many hours to arrive, their own kibbutz volunteer readiness force engaged the militants in a firefight. Soon, the two Hamas operatives lay dead on the sidewalk in front of their house, in the exact spot where I have stood many times. My friends narrowly escaped being murdered, burned alive, or taken hostage. Another friend of mine, Canadian-Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver, who lives in nearby Kibbutz Be’eri, wasn’t so lucky. Abducted by Hamas operatives, Vivian now sits in captivity in Gaza along with over 240 other hostages, a number that includes at least thirty children. As of this writing, Hamas has released four hostages; another one, a soldier, was rescued.
