Sunday, January 4, 2009

Pictorial Review of Israel's Young Victims in Gaza

Death and destruction continued to rain on Gazans as Israel began its ground assault. Here are a few of the horrifying images of the brutality the Jewish state is committing against the innocent Palestinian children:

PNN -Israeli forces killed two girls in an air attack on Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip early Tuesday. Local sources report that a missile destroyed a house belonging to Talal Hamdan in Beit Hanoun, killing his two daughters of 12 and 4 years old. A son is reported seriously injured. Yesterday Israeli forces killed four sisters and a four year old boy.


Samera Baalusha (34) carries her surviving child Mohamad (15 months) while she waits to see the body of her daughter Jawaher Baalusha (aged 4) during the funeral held for her and four of her sisters who were killed in an Israeli missile strike, on December 29, 2008 in the Jebaliya refugee camp, in the northern Gaza Strip


A Palestinian security force officer carries a wounded girl into the emergency room at Shifa hospital in Gaza City , Saturday, Dec. 27, 2008.











Shifa hospital ICU: a six year old with down syndrome suffers brain trauma after Israeli attack.




These pictures clearly debunk the Israeli claim that only the Hamas fighter are being targeted. "About 30 percent of our cases are children" says Dr. Fawzi Nablusi, one of al-Shifa's hospital emergency room doctors. A paramedic working for an Oxfam-funded organization was killed today after an ambulance was hit by an Israeli-fired shell, according to British charity Oxfam.

Israel is not enhancing its security by lengthening the list of war crimes committed by Israeli military and government against the Arab population since its founding. In fact, if Lebanon is any guide, the Jewish state is making itself less safe with every innocent casualty it causes in Gaza. It is strengthening Hamas rather than weakening it by its dastardly behavior in Gaza.

Here's a brief but shocking video of Israeli carnage of Gazans:



Please review and sign this online petition to the US Foreign Relations Committee to exert Congressional influence on Israel to end atrocities on Gazans.

Help Gazans by donating money through UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

International Day of Dignity in Support of Gaza is planned for Friday January 9, 2008. There will be an Open Friday Prayer in the San Francisco Civic Center at noon on January 9 to pray and express our solidarity with Gazans. Please check to find out the nearest location to you to express your support for the Gazans under vicious Israeli assault. Please click here if you are on Facebook.


UPDATE: A video presentation by Miko Peled, author of the General's Son:


Here's an Australian TV documentary on how Israelis govt tortures Palestinian children:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL048x4msM


 
Related Links:

The Neighborhood Bully Strikes Again

Echoes of Lebanon in Gaza

Al-Nakbah

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

The only befitting caption to those pictures:

“I feel like dancing and singing this day” and “I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing”.


Or is this one better:

“I still curse the killers, their accomplices, the indifferent spectators who knew and kept silent, and Creation itself, Creation and those who perverted and distorted it. I feel like screaming, howling like a madman so that that world, the world of the murderers, might know it will never be forgiven.”


http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/12/gaza-assault-pretext-for-pop-transfer.html


Zahir Ebrahim
Project Humanbeingsfirst.org

Atif Siddiqui said...

Its not the bad israel.. it is due to bad Muslims and their rulers who dont have the courage to speak against israel.

May ALLAH show us the correct path and the courage to stop evil by force.

Saadia said...

God! Why is the world so selective in its responses? Israel ought to be cursed.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Riaz for your courage. These are indeed virtual shoes being thrown at the face of the pseudo liberals, democrats, civilized world.

Anonymous said...

Its unfair to blame IAF for it. Which civilized country keeps rocket caches and mortars under basement of where civilians live?..cowards.. Hamas,Hezbollah..al-qaeda. Israelis value life of their citizens, so too bad for Palestinians. Riaz you are doing great work by doing al-qaeda media work. This is exactly what they want.Fire rockets against their (israeli) population and provoke Israelis,then when they hit ammunition dumps...dead children...Great content for al-jazeera. More suicide bombers..Good Ones. I thought by the speeches given (lately) by Benazir(PBO Her),Gilani and Zardari, Pak have enough of them. But your contribution is invaluable. Good luck with that.

Riaz Haq said...

Jadev,
I am disappointed but not surprised to see that nothing will shock your conscience when it comes to defending the brutal actions of India-Israel-US axis against innocent populations, even women and children. While I have often observed the label "anti-Semitic" applied to critics of Israel, you have chosen to go far beyond that usual fare by using "al-Qaida" label against those who expose and criticize Israel's war crimes against humanity. Shame on you!

Anonymous said...

Jaydev defines the cold blooded Mumbabi terrorist who then turn around for more blood by blaming others. He is the RSS/Modi/Thakery face of shining India.

Riaz Haq said...

By Robert Fisk of Independent says "The Rotten State of Egypt is too Powerless and Corrupt to Act"

January 04, 2009 "The Independent" -- There was a day when we worried about the "Arab masses" – the millions of "ordinary" Arabs on the streets of Cairo, Kuwait, Amman, Beirut – and their reaction to the constant bloodbaths in the Middle East. Could Anwar Sadat restrain the anger of his people? And now – after three decades of Hosni Mubarak – can Mubarak (or "La Vache Qui Rit", as he is still called in Cairo) restrain the anger of his people? The answer, of course, is that Egyptians and Kuwaitis and Jordanians will be allowed to shout in the streets of their capitals – but then they will be shut down, with the help of the tens of thousands of secret policemen and government militiamen who serve the princes and kings and elderly rulers of the Arab world.

Egyptians demand that Mubarak open the Rafah crossing-point into Gaza, break off diplomatic relations with Israel, even send weapons to Hamas. And there is a kind of perverse beauty in listening to the response of the Egyptian government: why not complain about the three gates which the Israelis refuse to open? And anyway, the Rafah crossing-point is politically controlled by the four powers that produced the "road map" for peace, including Britain and the US. Why blame Mubarak?

To admit that Egypt can't even open its sovereign border without permission from Washington tells you all you need to know about the powerlessness of the satraps that run the Middle East for us.

Open the Rafah gate – or break off relations with Israel – and Egypt's economic foundations crumble. Any Arab leader who took that kind of step will find that the West's economic and military support is withdrawn. Without subventions, Egypt is bankrupt. Of course, it works both ways. Individual Arab leaders are no longer going to make emotional gestures for anyone. When Sadat flew to Jerusalem – "I am tired of the dwarves," he said of his fellow Arab leaders – he paid the price with his own blood at the Cairo reviewing-stand where one of his own soldiers called him a "Pharaoh" before shooting him dead.

The true disgrace of Egypt, however, is not in its response to the slaughter in Gaza. It is the corruption that has become embedded in an Egyptian society where the idea of service – health, education, genuine security for ordinary people – has simply ceased to exist. It's a land where the first duty of the police is to protect the regime, where protesters are beaten up by the security police, where young women objecting to Mubarak's endless regime – likely to be passed on caliph-like to his son Gamal, whatever we may be told – are sexually molested by plain-clothes agents, where prisoners in the Tora-Tora complex are forced to rape each other by their guards.

There has developed in Egypt a kind of religious facade in which the meaning of Islam has become effaced by its physical representation. Egyptian civil "servants" and government officials are often scrupulous in their religious observances – yet they tolerate and connive in rigged elections, violations of the law and prison torture. A young American doctor described to me recently how in a Cairo hospital busy doctors merely blocked doors with plastic chairs to prevent access to patients. In November, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry al-Youm reported how doctors abandoned their patients to attend prayers during Ramadan.

And amid all this, Egyptians have to live amid daily slaughter by their own shabby infrastructure. Alaa al-Aswani wrote eloquently in the Cairo paper Al-Dastour that the regime's "martyrs" outnumber all the dead of Egypt's wars against Israel – victims of railway accidents, ferry sinkings, the collapse of city buildings, sickness, cancers and pesticide poisonings – all victims, as Aswani says, "of the corruption and abuse of power". Opening the Rafah border-crossing for wounded Palestinians – the Palestinian medical staff being pushed back into their Gaza prison once the bloodied survivors of air raids have been dumped on Egyptian territory – is not going to change the midden in which Egyptians themselves live.

Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah secretary general in Lebanon, felt able to call on Egyptians to "rise in their millions" to open the border with Gaza, but they will not do so. Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the feeble Egyptian Foreign Minister, could only taunt the Hizbollah leaders by accusing them of trying to provoke "an anarchy similar to the one they created in their own country."

But he is well-protected. So is President Mubarak.

Egypt's malaise is in many ways as dark as that of the Palestinians. Its impotence in the face of Gaza's suffering is a symbol of its own political sickness.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-rotten-state-of-egypt-is-too-powerless-and-corrupt-to-act-1220048.html

Anonymous said...

these pictures have not shocked your conscience? A war in the middle of civilian settlement,what do u expect? I didn't accused u of anti-Semitic or something..of course selective empathy(and helping al-qaeda propaganda).The thing is Gaza is a closed military zone, so the main guys who takes these photos are Hamas psy-ops.The important point is what was Hamas thinking when they fired rockets at Israeli civilian settlements? What do you realistically expect Israelis to do when that happens..negotiate with terror?..shooting down each rocket to eternity? The policy of firing rockets or suicide bombing civilians for political objective is called terror as an instrument of state policy or holding gun to your head(or family) and force u to negotiate.Israelis gave land for peace by painfully evacuating Gaza..what did they get.. (democratically elected ;-))Hamas.Egypt rightly closed Gaza border so as not to give strategic depth to Hamas and give leadership to disorganized sleeper cells(brotherhood) in Egypt. My deduction of Arab world is.. they need guys like Mubarak or Saddam Hussein to keep them productive and stop killing each other.I no longer wonder after Shia-Sunni bloodbath in Iraq why US dont want democracy in important places like Arabia al Saud,Egypt,Pakistan or Qatar.The "green-tinted" guys/gals commenting on ur blog have termed me RSS(which i am not..though not becoz of same reason as u ppl) and when I criticized ur posting dead Palestinian children or supported Israel.Check out:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashtriya_Swayamsevak_Sangh
It has whopping 4.5 million active members and 60,000 units all across India..If it was a terror organization like u ppl claim it to be..India would be hell of place 2 live in. Hey..who will speak for RSS or Jews here except for me(when ur sources are ahmed quraeshi + alex jones + a roy +guardian.uk)..i think riaz gives right kinda balance with Al-Qaeda views and RSS-Zionist Axis for World domination,greedy,misomuslim,bigot ppl(like me) and I appreciate that..:-)

Unknown said...

Before we all get our knickers in a twist just have a look at the photographs on the link below.

http://www.balochvoice.com/Army_Operation/Children_Killed_28.12.05.html

Just substitute Palestinians with Baloch and IAF with PAF and you'd be hard pressed to spot the difference.And these were not enemy aircraft but the country's own. Is there a justification for this? Wake up!

Anonymous said...

nice. Nip the suicide bombers in the bud.

Anonymous said...

you mean nipping Kurkure in the bud or nipping Thakrey/Ashish in the bud...or nipping Gandhi/Roy in the bud....

Riaz Haq said...

Here's a recent piece by Eric Walberg in Countercurrents:

A vital playing field in today’s Great Game is Palestine/Israel, where again there is a tentative meeting of political minds between Russia and Turkey. In defiance of the US and much of Europe, both endorsed the Goldstone report into atrocities committed during Israel's invasion of Gaza in December 2008, where 100 Palestinians died for every Israeli casualty. Neither government is captive to Israel in the way European and US governments are, though they both have important economic relations with Israel.

Israeli dissident writer Israel Shamir commended the Turkish leaders at a conference in Ankara in December: "Your president, Mr Gul, said a few days ago to our president, Mr Peres, that he will not visit Israel while the siege of Gaza continues. Turkey is no longer an American colony. You stopped joint air force exercises with Israel and the US. You expressed your clear anger over the horrors of Gaza. Now you pay more attention to the area where you live; you play an important role already and are destined to play an even greater role. So much depends on you! We feel it every day in Palestine."

He called on Turkey, as inheritor of the Ottoman-era responsibility for Palestine, to follow the lead of the Spanish and British judges who issued arrest warrants for Chilean General Pinochet and Israeli prime minister Tzipi Livni for murder, and issue an arrest warrant for the infamous Captain R, accused of murdering a Palestinian child Iman Al-Hams, but feted in Israel as a hero. "A Turkish warrant for his arrest should await him wherever he goes," just as "according to Israeli law, if a Turk does wrong to a Jew in Turkey, he may be snatched, arrested, tried and punished in Israel. Turkey should introduce a symmetrical law, covering offences against Palestinians who otherwise are not protected by law."

Though unlikely, this would be wildly popular in Turkey. Similarly, unlike brainwashed Westerners fed daily doses of pro-Israeli media, Turks and most Russians have no use for the Zionist project. True, over one million Russians took up the tantalising offer of instant Israeli citizenship in search of a better life, qualifying as Jewish merely via marriage or with as little as one grandparent racially Jewish. But, despite the chauvinism of the Russian-Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, many of these Russian Israelis, too, have no use for the Zionist project, with its innate racism, some even marrying Palestinians. Many are returning to Russia, bitter at the way they are treated by sabra (Jews born in Israel). The natural sympathy of these and non-Jewish Russians is for the Palestinians.

Riaz Haq said...

Here's an OpEd by Yosi Sarid in Haaretz about Israeli settlers campaign of terror in occupied Palestine:

Bullets are fired, trees are chopped down, fields are set ablaze, window panes are shattered and houses are subject to pogroms while the representatives of law and order keep themselves safe and at a distance.
By Yossi Sarid

It's impossible to ignore any longer the calming presence of the Shin Bet security service in our lives - from the hummus in Gaza to Noam Chomsky in Bir Zeit.

This hyperactivity demands an explanation: How can we explain that one arm is long and powerful, when it comes to those who wish to destroy us, whereas the other arm is short and delicate, when it comes to those exacting a "price tag."

At the beginning of the week, Aysar Zaban from a village near Ramallah was shot in the back and killed. He was 15 years old and will no longer throw stones at cars. They're looking for the gunman, and there's no chance they will find him.

How do I know? Very simple: Not a single settler has ever been caught. There have been hundreds of "terror-settler" events and all the avengers are still walking about free. There is evidence and there are traces, but there is no justice.

Bullets are fired, trees are chopped down, fields are set ablaze, window panes are shattered and houses are subject to pogroms while the representatives of law and order keep themselves safe and at a distance. Soldiers and policemen already understand the principle; the spirit of the commanders explained it to them.

How does a person dare make such accusations, just after Yaakov (Jack ) Teitel was finally caught? For 12 years he murdered Palestinians and planted explosive devices, and had he not made the foolish mistake of harming Jews as well - even though they were leftists - he would never have been found.

Now it has been ruled that his mental state makes him unfit to stand trial - as if Teitel has suddenly fallen ill with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The right to go mad like a cow is reserved for Jewish terrorists only.

And if he's so crazy, how was he so cunning as well, managing to deceive the Shin Bet with such sophistication for so long?

Riaz Haq said...

Egypt is easing Gaza restrictions, according to a report in The Independent:

A declaration by Egypt that it will permanently open its crossing into Gaza to ease the blockade on the territory has fuelled concerns in Israel about the future direction of Cairo's foreign policy.

Nabil al-Araby, Egypt's foreign minister, told Al-Jazeera that his country would take "important steps to help ease the blockade on Gaza in the few days to come", and described Cairo's previous decision to seal the border as "shameful".

Egypt has already eased restrictions on movement across the Gaza border since the fall of the Mubarak regime. But free passage of goods and people into Gaza would be seen as a major security threat by Israel, which has argued that even with Egyptian co-operation on blocking arms shipments, Hamas was able to import weaponry into the territory and would do more without it.

It is not clear how comprehensive the opening of the crossing at Rafah will be, but Mr al-Araby's remarks follow a spate of others indicating a potential shift in foreign policy which is being closely watched in Israel.

A senior Israeli official told The Independent yesterday that the government had raised concerns with Egypt about a series of indications from Cairo that it was softening the more hostile policy maintained by the former president Hosni Mubarak towards Iran and Hamas. Both are seen by Israel as enemies.

The official said that Egypt, which on Wednesday said it had brokered a draft accord between the Palestinian party Fatah and its rival Hamas, had tended to respond by taking "account of public opinion now and some of that opinion is opposed to you [Israel]".

The Israeli official cited a more emollient tone in Egypt's pronouncements about Iran and a new "lenience" towards Hamas, exemplified in part by its apparent unconcern about Hamas prisoners who escaped from Egyptian jails during the uprising in February.

Although a recent poll indicated opposition to the 1979 peace treaty with Israel among a majority of Egyptians there have been no moves to annul it. But Egyptian analysts and officials say that the country is reassuming the pivotal role it once performed in the Arab world which had been hampered by the country's close diplomatic ties to Israel. "We are opening a new page," Menha Bakhoum, a spokeswoman for the foreign ministry told The New York Times. "Egypt is resuming its role that was once abdicated."

Riaz Haq said...

Israelis claim the right to defend themselves against Palestinian attacks. But Prof Noam Chomsky, as quoted by Occupy New Hampshire, disagrees and says as follows:

"When Israelis in the occupied territories claim they have to defend themselves, they are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population they are crushing..You can't defend yourself when you are militarily occupying someone else's land. That's not defense. Call it what you like, it's not defense."

http://www.facebook.com/OccupyNH

Riaz Haq said...

Here's an excerpt from Mother Jones on Israeli documentary "The Gatekeepers":

The Oscar-nominated documentary, directed by Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh, uses interviews with all six living ex-directors of the Shin Bet to paint a stark portrait of the agency and how it figures into the Jewish state's past, present, and future. For those who haven't heard of this security service, here are a couple lines from my crib sheet: Imagine the FBI, only tremendously more efficient, brutal, and terrifying. Now, imagine if the war on terror were half a century old, and if we had drone strikes and black sites in Florida and Montana.

That's what the Shin Bet is like for Israelis.

It's a juggernaut of counterterrorism and intel gathering. Shin Bet directors answer directly to the prime minister. The agency's greatest blunder was their failure to protect Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli leader who came closest to making peace with the Palestinians, from being murdered by a right-wing Israeli terrorist.
----------
Here are six examples of things said in the film that could get you pilloried in American politics:

1. "Talk to everyone, even if they answer rudely. So that includes even Ahmadinejad, [Islamic Jihad, Hamas], whoever. I'm always for it. In the State of Israel, it's too great a luxury not to speak with our enemies…Even if [the] response is insolent, I'm in favor of continuing. There is no alternative. It's in the nature of the professional intelligence man to talk to everyone. That's how you get to the bottom of things. I find out that he doesn't eat glass and he sees that I don't drink oil."—Avraham Shalom (1980-86), on negotiating with the enemy.

2. "We are making the lives of millions [of Palestinians] unbearable, into prolonged human suffering, [and] it kills me."—Carmi Gillon (1994-96).

3. "We've become cruel. To ourselves as well, but mainly to the occupied population." Our army has become "a brutal occupation force, similar to the Germans in World War II. Similar, not identical."—Shalom, who clarifies that he is referring to the Nazis' persecution of non-Jewish minorities.

4. "We don't realize that we face a frustrating situation in which we win every battle, but we lose the war."—Ami Ayalon (1996–2000), regarding the wisdom of Israel's counterterrorism measures.

5. "To them, I was the terrorist.… One man's terrorist is another man freedom fighter."—Yuval Diskin (2005-11), candidly discussing the very first time he considered his profession from a Palestinian perspective.

6. "We are taking very sure and measured steps to a point where the State of Israel will not be a democracy or a home for the Jewish people."—Ayalon

But the film's contribution to any political discussion on the topic goes way beyond its quotable shock value. It's the culmination of a personal saga for these six warriors, packaged in one raw, brilliantly paced film with stunning visuals. "After retiring from this job, you become a bit of a leftist," Yaakov Peri, who ran the Shin Bet during the First Intifada, says with a sad smirk. The narrative unfolds as a modern tragedy where the characters' career highs are forever marred by a sense that they've retired only to become Cassandras. And for all their tactical successes on the battlefield, they see an Israel poised to lose the war if it continues to give up on peace.


http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2013/02/film-review-gatekeepers-documentary-israel-shin-bet-palestine

Riaz Haq said...

Story of #Israel's West Bank’s Settlements ‘Wildest, Most Violent’ Young Radical #Jews Preying on #Palestininans

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/world/middleeast/a-window-into-west-banks-wildest-most-violent-areas.html

YISHUV HADAAT, West Bank — With shoulder-length hair tumbling from beneath his knit skullcap, Hanamel Dorfman, a radical young Israeli settler, explains matter-of-factly on camera how hilltop settlement outposts like his own will continue to proliferate across the West Bank. From there, he says bluntly, Israelis will cross the Jordan River and start building on the other side.

Reminded that beyond the river there is another sovereign nation, Jordan, Mr. Dorfman says with an unwavering gaze, “Everything is temporary.”

The stunning statement comes in one of the final scenes of “The Settlers,” a documentary by an Israeli-American filmmaker, Shimon Dotan, that opens a rare window into the reclusive and politically explosive “hilltop youth” movement.

The film, which had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January and was shown for the first time in Israel on Monday evening, suggests that the fringe group of religious hippies is underestimated in its ability to influence Israeli politics and thwart any possibility of peace with the Palestinians.

---
Mr. Dorfman, now 21, told me that Israel’s government was illegitimate because it did not rule based on the laws of the Torah. “It stays in its place in a pathetic attempt at survival,” he said.

Mr. Dorfman said he had been arrested numerous times, but not for any major attacks on Palestinians. Still, his ideology echoes a manifesto of a new group of extremist Jewish settler youth that Israeli security officials revealed last year.

Mr. Dotan’s film chronicles the germination of the early settler movement after Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in 1967, including the ideas and religious zeal that fueled it, and explores its latest extreme element: the hilltop youth.

They are but a tiny fraction of the more than 400,000 Israeli Jews living in the occupied West Bank, but the object of mounting concern as they are blamed for extreme violence there, like the arson last summer that killed a toddler and his parents in the village of Duma.

“The Settlers” is one of the first close-up views of the motives and personalities in a group that rarely opens up to outsiders. Though mainstream settler leaders denounce violence and try to distance themselves from the radical youth in the hills, Mr. Dotan sees the hilltop dwellers as a natural outgrowth of the original movement.


“Those who push it forward today are the hilltop youth,” he said. “And it seems to me a very dangerous direction.”

Often depicted as uneducated hooligans, the youth in the film come off as raw but canny — an American like me might call them street smart — using acts of defiance and violence to achieve their aims. There is also an aura of romance: Mr. Dorfman, with his long sidelocks, wispy beard and rimless glasses, seems more like a hard-eyed John Lennon than a backwoods militant.

At one point in the film, a settler with a guitar sings Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” in a mixture of English and Hebrew while sitting at a fire. But there are also expressions of virulent racism, a glorification of violence and a desire to replace the modern state of Israel with a full-scale biblical kingdom that would extend as far as Iraq.

In one scene at Esh Kodesh, Pinhasi Bar-On, 25, speaks playfully with several young children about his legal troubles, asking them if they will come along on his escapades when they get older.

“What will you do with me?” Mr. Bar-On asks, as if teaching a preschool class.

“Beat up Arabs,” one child says.

“Yes,” Mr. Bar-On says approvingly.

Riaz Haq said...

An Israeli minister (Gila Gamliel) reveals one rationale for destroying so much of Gaza. By rendering large parts of it inhabitable, Israel can "promote the voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons, outside of the Strip."


https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-773713


One of the issues on which my office has been working diligently is how to proceed the day after Hamas has been defeated and annihilated.

Albert Einstein was quoted as saying: “In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity.”

The State of Israel is in the midst of one of its greatest crises, certainly for at least two generations.
More than 1,200 of our people were viciously murdered, 239 brutally kidnapped, thousands more injured, and 240,000 made homeless by the Nazi-like regime in Gaza.
Women were raped. The elderly were abused and taken hostage. Children were beheaded. Families were tortured in front of each other for the entertainment of their captors before being burned alive while bound to each other.These inhuman atrocities changed everything.

It is clear that much has to change, as many conceptions were proven wrong on the day of the pogrom on October 7.

What should be just as clear is that many more conceptions must be addressed, challenged, and possibly destroyed in the weeks and months ahead.
One of the issues on which my office has been working diligently is how to proceed the day after Hamas has been defeated and annihilated.
We will still have around two million people in Gaza, many of whom voted for Hamas and celebrated the massacre of innocent men, women, and children.

Gaza is a breeding ground for extremism. It is a small area, by no means the most populated on earth, but one where for too long, its rulers have prioritized war against the Jews over a better life for their people.
It is a place devoid of hope, stolen by the genocidal terrorists of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups.
This situation has already led to a large exodus of youths from Gaza. It has been estimated that since Hamas violently took over the Strip in 2007, between 250,000 and 350,000 mostly young adults have left Gaza to make a new life abroad.

As we consider our options for the day after, the international community appears to be pushing to bring the Palestinian Authority back to rule Gaza. This has obvious structural flaws, as it was tried in 2005 after the disaster of the Disengagement when all 8,600 Jewish residents were forcibly evicted from the Gaza Strip. It took only two years for Hamas to seize power, largely by throwing PA leaders off high roofs.
Furthermore, as we are witnessing at this very moment, the PA does not have a markedly different ideology from Hamas. Recently, for example, the PA Ministry of Religious Affairs distributed instructions to preachers in mosques throughout Judea and Samaria to deliver a teaching about the requirement to kill Jews and the wider goal to exterminate all Jews.
So, this option – bringing the PA back to rule Gaza – has failed in the past and will fail again. It is an option that is seen as illegitimate by the Israeli public and one that would put us back to square one within a short amount of time.

Other options for Gaza's future
ANOTHER OPTION is to promote the voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons, outside of the Strip.

It is important that those who seek a life elsewhere be provided with that opportunity. Some world leaders are already discussing a worldwide refugee resettlement scheme and saying they would welcome Gazans to their countries. This could be supported by many nations around the world, especially those that claim to be friends of the Palestinians.
This is an opportunity for those who say they support the Palestinian people to show these are not just empty words.