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<h1 class="gmail-single_title">'We will come to you in a roaring flood’: The untold story of the 7 October attacks</h1>
<div class="gmail-article-author"><h3>By <a href="https://english.palinfo.com/?p=250012"> Ramzy Baroud </a></h3></div>
<p class="gmail-single_date">Wednesday 27-December-2023</p><p class="gmail-single_date"><font size="1"><a href="https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/we-will-come-to-you-in-a-roaring-flood-the-untold-story-of-the-7-october-attacks/">https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/we-will-come-to-you-in-a-roaring-flood-the-untold-story-of-the-7-october-attacks/</a></font></p>
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<p>The dramatic, earth-shattering events in Palestine starting on 7
October have taken many people by surprise. However, attentive observers
are not.</p>
<p>Few expected that Palestinian fighters would be parachuting into
southern Israel on 7 October; that instead of capturing a single Israeli
soldier – as done in 2006 – hundreds of Israelis, including many
soldiers and civilians, would find themselves captive in besieged Gaza.</p>
<p>The reason behind the ‘surprise’, however, is the same reason that
Israel is still reeling under collective shock, which is the tendency to
pay close attention to political discourses and intelligence analyses
of Israel and its supporters – while largely neglecting the Palestinian
discourse.</p>
<p>For better comprehension, let us go back to the start.</p>
<p><strong>The spark<br></strong>We entered 2023 with some depressing data and dark predictions about what was awaiting Palestinians in the new year.</p>
<p>Just before the year commenced, the United Nations Mideast envoy Tor
Wennesland said that 2022 was the most violent year since 2005. “Too
many people, overwhelmingly Palestinian, have been killed and injured,”
Wennesland told the UN Security Council.</p>
<p>This figure – 171 killed and hundreds wounded in the West Bank alone –
did not receive much coverage in Western media. The mounting
Palestinian victims, however, registered among Palestinians and their
resistance movements.</p>
<p>As anger and calls for revenge grew among ordinary Palestinians,
their leadership continued to play its same traditional role – of
pacifying Palestinian calls for resistance, while continuing with its
‘security coordination’ with Israel.</p>
<p>Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, 88, carried on
rehashing the old language about a two-state solution and the ‘peace
process’, while cracking down on Palestinians who dared protest his
ineffectual leadership.</p>
<p>Defenseless in the face of a far-right Israeli government with an
open agenda to crush Palestinians, to expand illegal settlements and to
prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, Palestinians were
forced to develop their own defensive strategies.</p>
<p>The Lions’ Den – a multi-factional resistance group which first
appeared in the city of Nablus in August 2022 – grew in power and
appeal. Other groups, old and new, emerged on the scene throughout the
northern West Bank, with the single objective of uniting Palestinians
around a non-factional agenda and, ultimately, producing a new
Palestinian leadership in the West Bank.</p>
<p>These developments sounded alarm bells in Israel. The Israeli
occupation army moved quickly to crush the new armed rebellion, raiding
Palestinian towns and refugee camps one after the other, with the hope
of turning this nascent revolution into another failed attempt to
challenge the status quo in occupied Palestine.</p>
<p>The bloodiest of the Israeli incursions occurred in Nablus on 23
February, Jericho on 15 August and, most importantly, in the Jenin
refugee camp.</p>
<p>The 3 July Israeli invasion of Jenin was reminiscent, in terms of
casualties and degree of destruction, to the Israeli invasion of that
very camp in April 2002.</p>
<p>The outcome, however, was not the same. Back then, Israel had invaded
Jenin, along with other Palestinian towns and refugee camps, and
succeeded in crushing armed resistance for years to come.</p>
<p>This time around, the Israeli invasion merely ignited a wider
rebellion in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, creating a further
schism in the already deteriorating relationship between Palestinians,
on the one hand, and Abbas and his PA, on the other.</p>
<p>Indeed, just days after Israel concluded its attack on the camp,
Abbas emerged with thousands of his soldiers to warn the bereaved
refugees that “the hand that will break the unity of the people .. will
be cut off from its arm”.</p>
<p>Yet, as the popular rebellion continued to build momentum in the West
Bank, Israeli intelligence reports started talking about a plan
composed by the deputy head of Hamas’ political bureau, Saleh Arouri, to
ignite an armed Intifada.</p>
<p>The solution, according to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, citing official Israeli sources, was to kill Arouri.</p>
<p>Indeed, Israel’s attention and counterstrategy was focused intently
on the West Bank, as Hamas, in Gaza at the time, in Israel’s viewpoint,
seemed disinterested in an all-out confrontation.</p>
<p>But why did Israel reach such a conclusion?</p>
<p><strong>Miscalculation<br></strong>Several major events, the kind
that would have pushed Hamas to retaliate, have taken place without any
serious armed response by the resistance in Gaza.</p>
<p>Last December, Israel had sworn in its most right-wing government in
history. Far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich
arrived on the political scene with the declared objectives of annexing
the West Bank, imposing military control over Al-Aqsa Mosque and other
Palestinian Muslim and Christian holy sites and, in the case of
Smotrich, denying the very existence of the Palestinian people.</p>
<p>Their pledges were quickly translated into action under the
leadership of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ben-Gvir was
keen on sending a message to his constituency that the seizure of
Al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel had become imminent.</p>
<p>He repeatedly raided or ordered raids on Al-Aqsa at an unprecedented
frequency. The most violent and humiliating of these raids occurred on 4
April, when worshippers were beaten up by soldiers while praying inside
the mosque during the holy month of Ramadan.</p>
<p>Resistance groups in Gaza threatened retaliation. In fact, several
rockets were fired from Gaza toward Israel, merely serving as a symbolic
reminder that Palestinians are united, regardless of where they are in
the geographic map of historic Palestine.</p>
<p>Israel, however, ignored the message, and used the Palestinian
threats of retaliation, and the occasional ‘lone-wolf attacks’ – like
that of Muhannad Al-Mazaraa at the illegal Maale Adumim settlement – as
political capital to ignite the religious fervor of Israeli society.</p>
<p>Not even the death of Palestinian political prisoner, Khader Adnan,
on 2 May seemed to have shifted Hamas’ position. Some even suggested
that there is a rift between Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad
following Adnan’s death as a result of hunger strike in the Ramleh
Prison.</p>
<p>On the same day, the PIJ fired rockets into Israel, as Adnan was one
of its most prominent members. Israel answered by attacking hundreds of
targets inside Gaza, mostly civilian homes and infrastructure, which
resulted in the death of 33 Palestinians and the wounding of 147 more.</p>
<p>A truce was declared on 13 May, again with no direct Hamas
participation, giving further reassurance to Israel that its bloody
onslaught on the Strip had achieved more than a military purpose – often
referred to as ‘mowing the lawn’ – but a political one, as well.</p>
<p>Israel’s strategic estimation, however, proved to be wrong, as
attested by Hamas’ well-coordinated 7 October attacks in southern
Israel, targeting numerous military bases, settlements and other
strategic positions.</p>
<p>But was Hamas being deceptive? Hiding its actual strategic objectives in anticipation of that major event?</p>
<p><strong>‘Roaring flood’<br></strong>A quick examination of Hamas’
recent statements and political discourse demonstrate that the
Palestinian group was hardly secretive about its future action.</p>
<p>Two weeks before 2023 commenced, at a Gaza rally on 14 December,
Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, had a message for Israel: “We will
come to you in a roaring flood. We will come to you with endless
rockets; we will come to you in a limitless flood of soldiers … like the
repeating tide.”</p>
<p>The immediate response to the Hamas’ attack was the predictable
US-Western solidarity with Israel, calls for revenge, the complete
destruction and annihilation of Gaza and the revitalized plans of
displacing Palestinians out of Gaza into Egypt – in fact, out of the
West Bank as well, into Jordan.</p>
<p>The Israeli war on the Strip, also starting on 7 October, has
resulted in unprecedented casualties compared to all Israeli wars on
Gaza, in fact, on Palestinians during any time in modern history.</p>
<p>Quickly, the term ‘genocide’ was being used, initially by
intellectuals and activists, and eventually by international law
experts.</p>
<p>“Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and
unashamed,” associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at
Stockton University, Raz Segal, wrote on 13 October in an article
entitled ‘A Textbook Case of Genocide’.</p>
<p>Despite this, the UN could do nothing. Secretary-General Antonio
Guterres said on 8 November that the UN has “neither money nor power” to
prevent a potential genocide on Gaza.</p>
<p>In essence, this effectively meant the disabling of the international
legal and political systems, as every attempt by the Security Council
to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire has been blocked by the
US and Israel’s other Western allies.</p>
<p>As the death toll mounted among a starving population in Gaza – all
food deprived per the 28 November estimation of the World Food Program –
Palestinians resisted throughout the Gaza Strip.</p>
<p>Their resistance was not only confined to attacking or ambushing
invading Israeli soldiers but was, in fact, predicated on a legendary
steadfastness of a population that refused to be weakened or displaced.</p>
<p><strong>Sumud</strong><br>This sumud continued, even when Israel
began to systematically attack hospitals, schools and every place that,
in times of war, are seen as ‘safe places’ for a beleaguered civilian
population.</p>
<p>Indeed, on 3 December, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk said that
“there is no safe place in Gaza”. This phrase was repeated often by
other UN officials, along with other phrases such as “Gaza has become a
graveyard for children” as first noted by UNICEF Spokesperson James
Elder on 31 October. This left Guterres with no other option but to, on 6
December, invoke article 99, which allows the Secretary-General to
“bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his
opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and
security.”</p>
<p>Israeli violence and Palestinian sumud also extended to the West Bank
as well. Aware of the potential for armed resistance in the West Bank,
the Israeli army quickly launched major, deadly raids on countless
Palestinian towns, villages and refugee camps, killing hundreds,
injuring thousands and arresting thousands more.</p>
<p>But Gaza remained the epicenter of the Israeli genocide. Aside from a
brief humanitarian truce from 24-30 November, coupled with few prisoner
exchanges, the battle for Gaza – in fact, for the future of Palestine
and the Palestinian people – continues, at an unparalleled price of
death and destruction.</p>
<p>Palestinians know full well that the current fight will either mean a
new Nakba, like the ethnic cleansing of 1948, or the beginning of the
reversal of that very Nakba – as in the process of liberating the
Palestinian people from the yoke of Israeli colonialism.</p>
<p>While Israel is determined to end Palestinian resistance once and for
all, it is obvious that the Palestinian people’s determination to win
their freedom in coming years is far greater.</p>
<p><em>-Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine
Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is ‘These Chains
Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli
Prisons’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center
for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East
Center (AMEC).</em></p>
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