The Israel-Palestine Conflict has been going on for 75 years

What do Gazans think about the 1948 Hamas attacks? The impact of the October 7 attacks on the state of play in the Gazan-Jewish conflict

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Any kind of shared future may be a long way off now than it was a month ago. But Palestinians already knew that. I wonder if the day before Hamas attacks was considered peace? Maybe for Israelis it was, but not for Palestinians.

The “right of return” — the right of Palestinians and their descendants to return to villages they were ethnically cleansed from during the 1948 war — is central to many Palestinians’ political perspective because so many are still, legally, refugees. The majority of the population in Gaza is made up of refugees. Every aspect of a person’s life is dictated by their status; from where they live to what school they attend to what doctors they see.

The state of play was disrupted by the Oct. 7 attacks. The occupation’s unsustainable nature was laid bare for all to see, as was the impossibility of governing two peoples but privileging one of them over the other.

There have been periods of increased cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians over the past 75 years. But these were usually preceded by times of increased conflict, such as the first and second intifadas, or popular uprisings. The intifadas, in which Palestinians participated in large-scale resistance, sometimes civil and sometimes violent, are often presented by Western media as random or indiscriminate bursts of murderous savagery — as has been the case with the Oct. 7 attacks. The violence happened in a bigger way.

Many Gazans have parents and grandparents who are forbidden to enter areas where they grew up, so they don’t have to visit. When they were younger, they would walk through groves of lemons or olives in the Qumya area, which was soon transformed into a kibbutz.

Meanwhile, a settlement council has been distributing hundreds of assault rifles to civilian squads in settlements in the northern West Bank part of a larger effort by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is a settler himself, to arm civilian groups in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks. 10,000 assault rifles have been purchased for such teams by the ministry. It’s part of the atmosphere of escalating violence that has killed more than 130 Palestinians living in the West Bank since Oct. 7.

Omri Miran and Lishay Lavi, the Heartbroken Families in Ramallah, Israel, Celebrated by the Dawn of the Dawn

Normally life in Ramallah is not adversely affected for the past month, but due to unforeseen circumstances.

Omri Miran and Lishay Lavi met in March 2020; their love bloomed when the world froze amid a global pandemic. Two years after they built the home in Nahal Oz, they got married and had two girls: Roni, who is 2 and a half years old, and Alma, who is 7 months old. Omri worked at a massage parlor in kibbutz and led educational programs that helped integrate Muslim Bedouin Israelis into the higher education system in the Gaza envelope. Spiritual lovers of nature and mankind, they were optimistic about their future together until the sun rose on Oct. 7, a sunrise that shone on the deadliest morning in the history of the state of Israel.

Addressing the plight of hostages is not a diversion from the broader political and military issues at the heart of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Our commitment to human rights, justice and compassion will be affirmed by freedom for Omri. Please help us, the heartbroken families, to bring them home.