In the early hours of October 7 (Saturday) morning, while the rest of the world was still sleeping and Israel was celebrating Simchat Torah, the day when Jews finish the yearly cycle of reading the Torah scroll, Palestine’s Islamist terrorist outfit Hamas struck Israel in multiple locations and by a number of different means, completely taking it by surprise.
The Hamas terrorists infiltrated the Israeli territory from the Gaza Strip. Additionally, Palestinian terrorists also launched massive rocket barrages at southern and central Israel from the Gaza Strip prompting it to declare a ‘state of war’.
In the dastardly attack, which was completely unprovoked, hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians and defence personnel have been brutally massacred while several have been left severely injured. Umpteen have been taken hostage by the Hamas terrorists and driven off back into the Gaza Strip.
Social media is replete with videos of Hamas terrorists parading what appeared to be stolen Israeli military vehicles, including a tank, through the streets and at least one dead Israeli soldier within Gaza being dragged and trampled by an angry crowd of Palestinians. In some videos doing rounds on the internet, uniformed Hamas terrorists are seen capturing and torturing Israeli citizens and defence personnel while in others the terrorists in vehicles are seen parading naked bodies of Israeli citizens on the streets while shouting provocative slogans.
As Israeli forces continue to counterattack and battle to retake regions that the Hamas terrorists have taken over and the situation in the war-torn nation remains serious, here is an interesting piece of trivia about the Gaza Strip from where the Hamas terrorists launched the recent attacks against Israel.
Did you know that the Gaza Strip, which Palestine’s Islamist terrorist group Hamas has turned into a centre of terrorism, was once under Israeli control? Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister at the time, made the decision to unilaterally withdraw from the region and give it to the Palestinians as a gesture of peace. But rather than promoting peace, Hamas transformed it into a hub for terrorism.
Gaza Strip is a 41km-long and 6-12 km-wide territory between Israel, Egypt, and the Mediterranean Sea. It has one of the highest population densities in the world with a population of about 2.3 million people. In the current scenario, Israel exercises control over the airspace above Gaza and its coastline, regulating the entry and exit of people and goods through its border crossings. Likewise, Egypt governs the passage of individuals into and out of Gaza through its border. However, things were different earlier.
Israel had full control over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank since it won the territory during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, also known as the Six-Day War. However, in 2005, as a gesture of peace, Israel withdrew from the territory, gifting it to the Palestinians.
In the year 2005, a disengagement plan was put forward by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The purpose of the plan was to improve Israel’s security and international status in the absence of peace negotiations with the Palestinians. Sharon hoped that the plan would reduce friction with the growing Palestinian population in the Strip.
To secure peace for the Palestinians, the Israel Defense Forces evicted Israeli citizens, demolished Israeli-owned buildings and evacuated security personnel. Thousands of Jewish settlers from dozens of settlements in the Gaza Strip were relocated. According to figures available on the internet, approximately 8,500 civilians from 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip, and 500 more from four small settlements in the northern part of the West Bank – about 2% of the total number of Israeli settlers in the Palestinian territories were evicted.
By September 12, 2005, the last Jew had left the Gaza Strip and the eviction of the four settlements in Samaria was completed.
Immediately following Israel’s withdrawal, Palestinian crowds entered the settlements waving Hamas flags, firing gunshots into the air, ransacking homes, desecrating, looting and destroying a few remaining synagogues.
Palestinian Authority security forces refused to intervene. The remaining settlements’ greenhouses, which would have been vital in agricultural developments, were looted. Banners proclaimed: “Four years of resistance beat ten years of negotiations.”
Palestinian authorities fired their first round of rockets at Israel on September 23, 2005. In 2007, the rocket attacks persisted. When bombs were dropped on its citizens, Israel reacted as any other country would and launched defensive airstrikes.
In June 2007 Hamas took over the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority. Since the takeover, the Hamas terrorists also carried out several unprecedented and unprovoked attacks on innocent Israelis by land, sea, and air. Thousands of rockets and mortar shells have been fired from the Gaza Strip onto southern Israeli towns and villages, terrorizing and destabilizing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens.
In 2005, Israel took a bold step to evacuate its own people to secure peace with the Palestinians. Several anti-disengagement protesters, mainly jews, took to the streets to protest against the Israeli government’s plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank, however, for the sake of peace, the Israeli government went ahead with its plan to pullout from the territory and gift it to the Palestines. But sadly, the Palestine-backed Islamist terrorists have since then converted the entire Gaza Strip into a hub of terrorism.
How Gaza is used as a terror launch pad against Israel
Although the most recent attack on Israel is thought to be the worst by Hamas in the past 50 years, the Islamist terrorists have been using the Gaza Strip, which Israel gave them as a gift as a gesture of peace, to launch thousands of rocket and mortar attacks on Israel. After the takeover, the region was reduced to a terrorist hub that the Palestinian terrorists have been utilizing as a launching pad for attacks against Israel. There has been a lingering fear of the next war left behind from each Hamas attack in 2008–2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021.
One of the most infamous incidents occurred in 2006 when they kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. In exchange for Shalit’s release, Israel released more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, including Sinwar.
In 2008, the Palestianian Islamist terrorists launched an unprovoked attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip. The Gaza War, also known as Operation Cast Lead was a three-week armed conflict between Gaza Strip Palestinian paramilitary groups and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that began on 27 December 2008 and ended on 18 January 2009 with a unilateral ceasefire. In 2008, a total of 3,107 rockets and mortars were fired at Israel.
Similarly in 2014, Hamas kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenagers, prompting the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to initiate Operation Brother’s Keeper, in which some 350 Palestinians, including nearly all of the active Hamas terrorists in the West Bank, were arrested. Hamas subsequently fired a greater number of rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip, triggering a seven-week-long conflict between the two sides. It was one of the deadliest outbreaks of open conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in decades. The combination of Palestinian rocket attacks and Israeli airstrikes resulted in thousands of casualties.
The same year on March 5, the Israeli Navy intercepted a ship containing dozens of long-range rockets being smuggled from Iran to the Gaza Strip. On 10 March, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist terrorists unveiled a monument to its rocket attacks on Israeli cities and towns, a life-sized model of an M-75 rocket in Gaza City. On 8 July, Operation Protective Edge commenced in response to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, ending on 26 August. In this time period, between 2500 and 3000 rockets were launched.
Again, hundreds of rockets were fired at Israel during the Gaza-Israel clashes of November 2018.
Similarly, on the evening between 23 and 24 April 2021 36 rockets were fired towards Israel from Gaza, six of which were intercepted by the Israel Defense Forces’ Iron Dome defense system. Although there were no injuries, property was damaged in several communities in Israel. The Israeli military responded with military strikes in Gaza. On 10 May 2021 Hamas took credit for firing 7 rockets at Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh from Gaza, in what Hamas said was a response to injuries of over 300 Arabs in clashes with Israeli police outside al Aqsa mosque.
Last year, an estimated 1,100 rockets were launched from Gaza by the Palestinian Islamist terrorists. At least 200 malfunctioned and exploded within the Gaza Strip, and the Iron Dome intercepted 380.
In may this year, the IDF reported that 1,468 rockets were launched into Israel during Operation Shield and Arrow; 291 fell in Gaza; and 437 were intercepted by Iron Dome. Two rockets aimed at Tel Aviv were shot down by David’s Sling, and most of the rest landed in open areas without causing damage. One Israeli was killed when a rocket hit an apartment in Rehovot. A Palestinian laborer from Gaza working in Israel also died in a rocket strike.
Hamas carries out recurrent terror attacks on Israel
Hamas has been firing a spree of rockets and mortars into Israel after it took over Gaza. Iranian security officials admitted that Tehran provided some of these weapons. However, after getting training from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and proxies, Hamas has been building its own missiles as well.
Additionally, Hamas has been dropping hundreds of balloons laden with inflammatory substances and explosives, along with rockets on Israeli territories causing indiscriminate death and destruction to civilians. Israel has responded fiercely and unsparingly against the continued provocation, with persistent airstrikes and tank fires on locations described by it as Gaza’s military infrastructure installations.
