Was the attack by Hamas militants on Israel last Saturday terrorism, or was it an act of war? More than 1,300 Israeli citizens were killed in the Hamas attack. By far the majority of those killed were civilians, including babies, young children, women and the elderly. Using the yardstick of who was killed alone, the Hamas attack was outside the rules of war. Under international treaties, targeting civilians is a war crime. Looked at from here, or from Israel, or from any nation that considers itself a part of the civilized world, the Hamas attack was terrorism, pure and simple.
The attack differed from what we think of as terrorism only in scale — by the number of Hamas militants engaged in the attack, how well they were organized, and how many were killed. President Biden and others have said that the Hamas attack was the bloodiest single day for Jews since the Holocaust, and that appears to be true. But thousands of Israelis have been killed in terrorist attacks over the last 50 years. I couldn’t find a figure for the total number of Israelis killed by terrorists, but a story in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency estimated that more than 1,000 Israelis were killed in the Second Intifada alone, which lasted from late 2000 to mid-2005.
