What did Hamas want to gain by attacking Israel?
Gaza’s Troubled History: When Israel Becomes More Determined to Break the Walls, How Many Americans Will Be In Gaza?
The embassy is trying to get about 400 to 600 Americans out of Gaza, a senior US official told NPR.
There is no electricity. Families are using generators sparingly if they have fuel left — Abuzayda says she can only charge her phone for several hours at a time every few days. The sporadic access to communication means they could lose their connection to the outside world at any moment.
Many of the fighters who breached those walls are probably just a few years older than Ali; many of them were born during the second intifada. Their entire experience has been Israeli military occupation, siege and devastating military assault upon assault in an enclave of 140 square miles, with unemployment and poverty rates of approximately 50 percent. These are the conditions that shaped Gaza, not a reason for it. Israel helped create these fighters by starving them of hope, dignity and a future.
Hundreds of people have been killed in the Gaza Strip as a result of the large-scale attacks by Israel. It’s likely to continue and intensify.
There are no humanitarian corridors to bring badly needed aid inside and no open border crossings. At least three times, the passage into Egypt has been struck. Even aid workers haven’t been spared. The United Nations Palestinian refugee agency says 11 of its staff members were killed, some in their homes with their families. Eighteen of their facilities have been damaged, including schools where many of the more than 330,000 people that are displaced are sheltering.
The Biden administration has made it known that it wants humanitarian supplies into Gaza. It’s also trying to secure the release of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas, which include an unknown number of Americans.
The 30-year-old grew up in Gaza, but hadn’t been back since moving to the U.S. seven years ago. Abuzayda and her husband, who is American, had gone back and forth about when exactly to visit.
She said that they had changed their tickets several times before coming to Gaza. We just took a short vacation and it turned into a nightmare.
Abuzayda, her husband Abood and their one-and-a-half year old son Yousef traveled from Massachusetts for what was supposed to be a two-week trip. They don’t know when they’ll be able to go home — and not for lack of trying.
Abuzayda said she called the U.S. embassy multiple times a day for help after the attack. But they told her repeatedly that they didn’t have any updates. Then she tried the embassy in Cairo, to no avail.
“We tell them we’re running out of milk, diapers, we’re not safe, we’re citizens — they’re not doing anything,” she said. They keep posting stuff about the U.S. citizens in Israel. Every five minutes, they remind the people in Israel to leave.
And there are many others struggling to leave, since major U.S. airlines have halted flights in and out of the country. There are a lot of people trying to get home from Israel.
The U.S. increased the travel advisory for Israel and the West Bank on Wednesday to level three, or “reconsider travel.” The advisory for Gaza is at level four and does not recommend travel.
Abuzayda said that her sister-in-law and her three kids were trying to cross the border when it came under an Israeli airstrike.
How a family can live inside a small world, and how to keep it safe in the marketplace: The example of an American family trapped in Gaza
She said it’s not safe inside or outside. The markets themselves are running low on supplies. She’s trying to take advantage of the milk and diapers that she has left so that yousef is safe and in good spirits.
“The hardest feeling ever is to hide your fear and show the opposite, just to keep my son positive,” she said. He doesn’t comprehend, he thinks it’s fireworks. And every time I tell him, while I’m crying, ‘okay mommy, clap clap this is a fireworks, it’s nothing.’ He will sometimes jump and be afraid if I’m not next to him.
The Attack on the Israeli Embassy on Oct. 7: “Measure the Palestinians and the Israelis in the West Bank,” Israel’s Attorney General Benjamin Barakeh told NPR
She said to save us. “Please. I got my one-and-a-half year old son after six times of in-house fertilization. We’ve been trying to reach the embassy since Saturday. Nobody’s helping, nobody’s getting back to us. Please save us.”
Ali Barakeh, a senior Hamas official in Lebanon, told NPR that the Oct. 7 attack was in response to Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank. He said it was meant to free thousands of prisoners in Israel.
It is considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the U.S. and a number of other Western countries. Speaking at a press conference in Israel on Thursday, Antony Blinken said that Hamas has a single plan to destroy Israel and kill Jews.
The military wing is currently overseen by Marwan Issa, reportedly born in a Gaza Strip refugee camp, and Mohammed Deif, who is said to be the mastermind of the latest assault on Israel. The country tried to kill Deif before.
Before the attack on Israel, Hamas said it wanted to seek revenge for the raid on Al-Aqsa Mosque, and resist Israeli occupation. Conditions in the Gaza Strip have worsened since the blockade was imposed in 2007. Gazans depend on aid and live in poverty. The unemployment rate is high.
The Israelis had all their eyes on what was going on in the West Bank because they were not worried about what Hamas was going to do.
The strike by Hamas could also serve as a touchstone for others who want to fight against Israel, says C. Ross Anthony, a senior economist at Rand Corp. and co-author of Alternatives in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. “They were able to capture people and kill Israelis in a way they never had before,” he says. “So that will inspire people in the Middle East, unfortunately, and probably some of the people on the West Bank.”
Bilal Saab, a former Pentagon official who is now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, says he doesn’t think Hamas expected the attack to lead to an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank or other territorial concessions. Instead, the hostages Hamas seized during the operation are a means to an end, he says, giving the extremist group “bargaining space with the Israelis” for the release of some or all of the thousands of Palestinians in Israeli jails.
Dennis Jett, a retired U.S. ambassador and professor of international affairs at Pennsylvania State University, says Hamas learned an important lesson after abducting Israeli Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006. Shalit was turned over in exchange for more than 1,000 prisoners held by Israel.
In the poll, 53% of the 1,200 Palestinians surveyed said they believed Hamas is “most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people.” By contrast, just 14% said the same of Fatah.
Some Israelis think that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies have weakened the Palestinian Authority, and that they are partly to blame for emboldening Hamas.
After the conflict, Israel thought it had denuded Hamas and limited its potential for continued violence, Panikoff says. He says Israel had a policy of mowing the grass. Going after Hamas, getting a lot of the rockets, [going after] their militant leaders, either killing them or capturing them.”
Takeyh states that “Israelhoped that by giving Hamas more work permits, it would encourage it to stop its militancy and allow the Gazans to come back and forth for work.”
“This battle was very secretive; the planning and execution were kept secret,” Hamas representative Barakeh tells NPR. No one outside of Hamas knew about the zero hour.
Jett of Pennsylvania State University says in addition to turning its attention away from Gaza and toward the West Bank, Israel was also overly confident of the defenses it had put in place against a Hamas attack.
The wall, which was built with an expensive missile system, failed because they concentrated a lot of effort in suppressing people in the West Bank. The Iron Dome was overwhelmed.
Hamas and Gaza: Israel, Gaza, Persecuted, and Suspected by a Cold Dark Matter: An Open-World Perspective
Iran has denied direct involvement in the Hamas attack. Barakeh told NPR that “Iran knows that Hamas fights Israel and offers us support which we do not deny.” We don’t accept orders from anyone. We were the ones who planned and determined the zero hour and after the operation began we immediately informed our allies and friends. There was no prior coordination regarding this operation.”
It’s unclear whether Iran would have aided with the specific planning of the operation.
Barakeh, an official from Hamas, tellsNPR that there are promises from the group’s allies, but that they don’t need to give more information at the moment because the enemy won’t know.
Thousands more Gazans will be lost their lives and their homes, as Israel seems to be preparing for a ground attack, according to Takeyh.
“Then the question is who governs Gaza? What happens to it? Because I think they would want to dislodge Hamas, but not necessarily to govern Gaza themselves,” he says.
Since 2008, the infrastructure has been weakened by four wars and a 16-year blockade. It’s something Palestinians say they’ve never seen before.
He was stuck in the dark outside of the main hospital. It was too dark for anyone to move, and the fuel was running out.
“We are trying to survive,” he said. There are no safe places to hide or to escape from the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Abu Zarafeh said that it was too dangerous to return to the area. He’s lost touch with some of his children because communications were cut off.
The conflict is between Israel and Hamas. So why is Israel destroying our homes? It is destroying whole neighborhoods?” The man told Abu Zarafeh. “This is punishment.”
The story of every family in Gaza right now is his. They flee one bombarded area only to find the airstrikes following them to the next neighborhood and then the next.
“I took them from the house, and I started to just think, where am I going to take them? Where am I going to hide them? Is there any safe place in Gaza?” He spoke over the phone line.
“Everybody is thinking about how to stay alive,” he said. “We are human, we are part of this world. We are a part of this civilization. Don’t forget us.”
Israel warns more than 1 million people to evacuate northern Gaza: a warning warning to avoid forcible relocating to its own land
TEL AVIV, Israel — The fighting between Israel and Hamas entered a seventh day on Friday with fears of a ground offensive growing stronger following an Israeli order to evacuate the northern region of the Gaza Strip.
The UN was told late Thursday that all of the population of Gaza needs to leave, a spokesman said. Almost half of the population of Gaza were ordered to leave by the Israeli order. The UN staff and their dependents were affected by the Israeli order.
Within hours of the order, Israel faced opposition, both from Hamas and on the international stage. “It is impossible to have a movement without devastating humanitarian consequences,” the U.N. said.
Human Rights Watch said the roads are rubble, fuel is scarce, and the main hospital is in the evacuation zone, making it difficult for people to leave and head south.
Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said the Israeli military demanding that over 1 million civilians in northern Gaza relocate to its south, “absent of any guarantees of safety or return, would amount to the war crime of forcible transfer.”
Meanwhile, the Hamas leadership called on Palestinians to ignore the Israeli order. Hamas told the citizens of northern Gaza and Gaza City to remain steadfast in their homes because Israel wanted to “displace us once again from our land”.
Source: Israel warns more than 1 million people to evacuate northern Gaza
UNRWA in Gaza and the Israel-Jordanian Interaction Following the Gaza Hamas Attacks, and the Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Israel
UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinians, said early Friday that it had relocated its operations center to the southern part of Gaza.
It remains unclear how hospitals and clinics in northern Gaza, treating the a stream of wounded victims from near-constant bombings, could be evacuated. Hospitals are already at full capacity across Gaza.
The order also comes as the U.S. ramps up its diplomatic and military support for Israel in the wake of the unprecedented attacks by Hamas that killed at least 1,300 people over the weekend.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel on Thursday, but Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is expected to arrive on Friday. Earlier Friday, Blinken met with King Abdullah II in Amman, Jordan, and was meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the Jordanian capital. Blinken is visiting five Arab states over the next few days, as he tries to contain the conflict in Gaza.
The U.S. diplomatic efforts come as concerns are growing the chaos — the worst outbreak of violence in Israel and Gaza in recent memory — could spread to the occupied West Bank and different countries across the Middle East.
At least 27 US citizens were killed in the Hamas attacks, and at least 15 others are still missing, a White House spokesman said Thursday. Friday is when charter flights to bring Americans out of Israel will begin. Other countries, such as China, France and the United Kingdom, have also reported citizens killed or missing in the conflict.
