Across Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, divided communities have been watching scenes from the militant group Hamas’ unprecedented attack unfold with disbelief.
Until this morning, footage of Palestinian gunmen tearing down the walls and fences that have hemmed in the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million people for the last 16 years was unthinkable – as were video and images of dazed Israeli civilians bundled into safe rooms or stolen Israel Defence Forces (IDF) vehicles, hands tied behind their backs with zip ties, and driven into Gaza to be used as bargaining chips.
“If you asked any Palestinian what the best case scenario would be to end the occupation, they would never say something like this,” said Khaled al-Taweel, a 49-year-old from the central Gaza town of Khan Yunis. “And if you asked an Israeli what the worst case scenario would be, they would never say something like this. It feels like a movie. At the Erez crossing [between Gaza and Israel], that’s where we stand to get searched, not the other way around.”
“We have entered a tunnel. But we don’t know what will be at the end of it.”
Hamas operatives hang gliding into Israel, a Gaza journalist making his way into Israel to deliver a report for Palestinian television, an elderly Israeli woman, clearly confused, being driven around Gaza’s streets in a golf buggy – for everyone, the day felt surreal.
Israelis have been glued to their television screens as civilians across the south of the country, locked in their panic rooms from sunrise until sunset, pleaded for help.
“I am asking for the army to be here, people are begging for forces to be here,” Daniel Rahamim, 68, from the border town of Nahal Oz, told Channel 13. “People are in need and asking, ‘Where is the army?’”
Dozens of Israeli civilians are still reported to be held hostage inside their homes, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad, a smaller faction also active in the strip, have claimed that 57 Israelis – both alive and dead – have been taken into the Mediterranean enclave.
In an unverified video, a woman clinging to her two small children screamed as she resisted attempts by masked gunmen to take them from her arms. In another, a young woman is pulled by the hair as she is forced into the backseat of a stolen IDF Jeep. Hundreds of partygoers attending a rave were filmed fleeing across the fields as booms and thuds could be heard in the background.
Hours after the first reports that Hamas operatives had managed to infiltrate Gaza – an attack without recent parallel – residents of Israel’s south told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that gun battles were still raging in the streets of towns and kibbutzim.
The slow response of the army and police has shocked, and angered, Israelis. “We are being slaughtered,” one Israeli in a southern kibbutz told Haaretz. “There is no army. It has been hours. People are begging for their lives.”
