The Blood of Innocents

By Haley Strack

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

 

Horrific reports out of Israel, where Hamas terrorists launched a surprise invasion on the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, confirm that Hamas’s is the most brutal attack against Jews since the Holocaust. Terrorists have killed an estimated 900 Israelis, wounded thousands, and taken countless hostages. Pro-Palestinian organizations like to claim that Hamas murders or takes as prisoners only members of the Israeli military. Photos and videos prove otherwise.

 

Reports of the final death toll will come later, but this much is clear: Hamas targeted, and seemed to prioritize, women, children, and the elderly. Shockingly accessible footage of these attacks exists, probably because Palestinian propagandists proud of Hamas’s brutality are taking videos of their atrocities.

 

The Supernova music festival was one of Hamas’s first targets, early on Saturday morning. Festival-goers didn’t hear gunfire until a voice cut through rave music on the speakers: “Red alert.” Terrorists opened fire as confused people ran for shelter. But Hamas waited for escapees at vehicle blockades masquerading as security checkpoints, and terrorists executed those who tried to flee by car. Israeli military counted 260 deaths. They don’t know yet how many hostages Hamas took.

 

But the fates of those hostages appear dour. Shani Louk, a 30-year-old German-Israeli citizen, was a festival attendee. Terrorists filmed her naked and apparently unconscious or dead body being paraded around in the back of a pick-up truck. Shani’s parents recognized her body in the now-viral footage — they said the woman in the truck had the same leg tattoos as their daughter’s.

 

“She was going to her car, and they had military people standing by the cars and were shooting so people couldn’t reach their cars, even to go away. And that’s when they took her,” Shani’s mother, Ricarda Louk, told CNN. “It looks very bad, but I still have hope. I hope that they don’t take bodies for negotiations. I hope that she’s still alive somewhere. We don’t have anything else to hope for, so I try to believe.”

 

May Hayat was also at the festival; she smeared herself with blood from nearby bodies and pretended to be dead for hours until Israeli soldiers rescued her. Noa Argamani, also at the festival, pleaded, “Don’t kill me,” as she was dragged away from her boyfriend by two terrorists on the back of a motorcycle. A survivor of the massacre said that women were “raped next to the dead bodies of their friends,” and that many of the rape victims were later butchered or dragged to Gaza.

 

Terrorists have since gone from home to home, executing entire families, raping more women, and burning people alive. An Israeli citizen, Yoni Asher, last pinged his wife and their two daughters, ages three and five, at Khan Younis in Gaza. Later, Asher recognized his family in a video of Hamas loading hostages into a truck. Israeli Noam Sagi spotted the house of his 74-year-old mother in a Palestinian broadcast; when the Israeli army investigated her house, they found only blood stains. Sagi suspects that his mother was abducted.

 

Jewish women were reportedly raped and dragged through the streets of Sderot. Hamas murdered nine people, many of them elderly, at a Sderot bus stop. An Israeli mother and her two babies were kidnapped in Gaza. Palestinian Telegram channels show worse scenes: an Israeli girl set on fire as jeering Palestinians look on; a “neutralized” Israeli soldier stomped on; an Israeli woman with shorts, bloodstained at the crotch, tossed in the back of a car.

 

Itai and Hadas Berdichevsky were killed protecting their ten-month-old twins, who lay alone next to their dead parents for hours before being discovered. The Berdichevsky’s gut-wrenching deaths make a final point: Israel shields its innocents while Hamas uses innocents as human shields.

 

Hamas sympathizers say that terrorism is justified retaliation: Forced to live in an “open-air prison,” Palestinians had to resist oppression with brutality. Anyone who believes that lie need only consider the rules of war that Hamas defies, the citizens they defile, the naked, battered, dead women they march through streets, while screaming “Allahu akbar” triumphantly. Hamas’s barbarism rises out of custom, not necessity.

 

Hamas announced Monday that it would air the execution of civilian hostages on live television. This isn’t a diversion from the terrorist group’s usual methods. Its aggression has always been conducted with cruelty and aimed at Israelis. Innocents be damned.

 

Charles Krauthammer wrote satirically about the old rule “Women and children first.” He chalks the theory up as a “raging” anachronism and asks why, in such liberated societies, our news headlines still emphasize the deaths of women and children, and why self-respecting modern communities don’t find it patronizing to prioritize women and children.

 

The instinct to protect women and children is universal. Injustice against the innocent violates the shared standards of humanity in all civilized nations.

 

Perhaps that’s the point. Israel wasn’t attacked by a civilized people, or by a regime that displays mercy. As Israel conducts its counteroffensive, images of dead Palestinian women and children will surface. When that happens, don’t conflate defense with senseless murder. Hamas weaponizes innocents — including their own — for sport. We’ll soon be able to watch their cruel game play out live.

 

Hamas invaded Israel, to execute civilians. Hamas paraded through Gaza, carting raped, desecrated, and murdered women and children behind them. Hamas wiped out villages, burned down houses, and sprayed bullets at any civilians they could find. Hamas has forced Israel to protect its innocent. And protect she shall.

 

Terrorists will relish the slaughter of Israeli captives, if the time comes. Maybe Hamas will broadcast the death of an Israeli military leader first. But the murder of somebody’s wife or young child is just as plausible.