One week ago, on the holy Jewish Sabbath and the holiday of Simchat Torah, thousands of barbaric Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel under the cover of 3,600 rockets launched indiscriminately at Israeli civilians.
These Hamas death squads exterminated whole families like insects. They murdered children in front of their parents. They beheaded babies. They killed elderly civilians, including Holocaust survivors, in their homes. They burned people alive. Terrorists on paragliders armed with automatic machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades butchered young people at an outdoor music festival. They decimated villages and cities. They kidnapped as many as 200 civilians, taking them hostage to an uncertain fate in Gaza.
These filthy animals did not stop there: They recorded their crimes and published them on social media. There are videos of torture. Of raped women being paraded through the streets of the Gaza Strip to cheering crowds. Of terrified children crying for their parents as they are being loaded onto trucks.
Hamas, whose charter calls for the murder of all Jews, committed unprecedented savagery reminiscent of the Nazis. More than 1,400 Israelis have been slaughtered. Proportionality, this is equivalent to more than 48,000 Americans. It is unfathomable.
This is our 9/11, and it continues to get worse.
Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. When Hamas took power in 2007, the international community thought that economic incentives could change its genocidal ideology.
They did not.
The international community thought Hamas cares about the people of Gaza.
It does not.
Just like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, you cannot change a genocidal, jihadi, Islamist organization. You have to totally obliterate its terrorist infrastructure. Otherwise, the terror attacks that occurred in Israel will happen again elsewhere.
ISIS stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Hamas is the Islamic State of Gaza.
Israel is at the forefront of the global war on terror. While America’s adversaries are 7,000 miles away, ours are less than 7,000 feet away. This is a battle between civilization and barbaric terrorists who want to fundamentally change the way we live. If Israel does not succeed, the whole world will be forced to suffer the consequences because terror organizations across the globe will be emboldened and inspired. The free world must unequivocally support Israel just as it is united in the fight against Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Just like Al-Qaeda and ISIS, Hamas must be obliterated.
Currently, these barbarians feel emboldened by their “success.” Their physical aim was to kill as many Jews as possible and inflict as much pain on the Jewish state. But that was half their strategy.
The other half was to exploit international bodies to pressure Israel into limiting its ability to defend itself.
It is already happening in the United Nations. The empty calls for calm and restraint “from both sides” after 1,400 Israelis were massacred, and the hallow, false, immoral comparisons between Israel, a law-abiding democracy, and Hamas, an internationally designated terror group, only incentivize terrorists to continue their Nazi-like atrocities.
These officials do not pay attention to the cheering crowds in Gaza who voted for Hamas. They have not condemned the Palestinian Authority leadership for its deafening silence. Instead, they preach to Israel how it should act when it is facing a serious, strategic threat that has already cost so many lives.
Here is the reality: Whoever pressures Israel to stop before it has eradicated Hamas, even without intention, is part of the terror war machine.
When the State of Israel was established in 1948, the Jewish people swore that, never again, would we be helpless to defend ourselves.
The paradigm will be shattered; the equation will be changed. The days and weeks ahead will be difficult but Israel will utilize every means at her disposal to protect her citizens.
Our enemy underestimated our resilience. The Jewish people around the world stand united as one.
We will prevail.
Am Yisrael Chai. “The People of Israel live.”