One year ago today, Iran-backed Hamas terrorists snuck into Israel. These goblins committed the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. They raped and murdered; they killed infants and children, they killed the young, they killed the elderly, and they acted as utter savages in what may well be the most atrocious (in the original sense of the word) attack on a civilian population in recent history. Some of their actions would have made Vladimir Tepes - also known as "Vlad the Impaler" - succumb to the dry-heaves, and yet Hamas and their Iran-backed allies Hezbollah are still carrying out attacks on Israel a year later.
One year ago today, a day that will live in infamy, and Israel is still standing, still fighting. On this day, before we look ahead, it's important to look back, to remember the victims of Hamas's barbarity.
Israeli Shari Mendes is a member of a small unit of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), an all-female unit intended to take care of the bodies of IDF and Israeli women killed in conflict; traditionally, care of dead women is done by women in Israel. Shari Mendes has shared some of her experiences of that day, and they are difficult to read.
The women were shot many times in the head. “Why? Why? We saw that these women were shot to be killed, maybe in the heart, in the head, but then they were shot many times in the face, and it looked like systematic mutilation because it seemed like they wanted to ruin these women’s faces. A lot of them were young soldier women, and a lot of them had been very beautiful. The first few we saw weren’t too bad because they might have been caught in their sleep and Hamas just shot them. But, after a while, we got women who had clearly been awake when they were murdered and these women came in and their mouths, their teeth were in grimaces and their hands were clenched, if they had hands.
“We got notified that a woman’s coming in and she has no legs, so the terrorist cut off her legs. There was clearly immense sadistic violence.” A lot of the women had bloody, stained underwear, Shari says, some had no underwear at all. “People were shot in the breast, they were shot in the crotch, and that was not done to kill them.” She is a calm, thoughtful person, but her voice is stiff with anger now.
There was more to it than the murders - Hamas took hostages, vanishing with them into the massive tunnel system under Gaza, warrens dug into the stony desert soil, with headquarters and logistical bases located underneath hospitals, schools, nurseries, and apartment buildings. One of them was young Alon Ohel, whose family has not seen him since that horrible day. His mother, Idit Ohel, tells us:
On the morning of October 7, 2023, my son was at the Nova Music Festival. When Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, he hid in a bomb shelter with 27 people. Sixteen of them were murdered. Seven survived after hiding for six hours under a pile of bodies. Four were taken hostage: Or Levy, Eliya Cohen, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, and my son, Alon Ohel.
Alon had gone to the festival with four friends, arriving at 5:30 in the morning. He had barely spent half an hour there when the sirens began.
Nobody knows whether Alon Ohel is alive today or not.
These people - and I use the term "people" in the broadest possible sense - who carried out these acts of barbarity, of savagery, of utter depravity, have to be dealt with. Justice must be done. Evil must be answered for. And Israel is doing so, taking on these Iranian proxy groups in what can only be described as some brilliant operations combining intelligence coups with tactical and strategic operations.
See Related: Evil Lives: One Year Later, and Hamas Still Holds 93 Hostages
Is Iran Becoming Desperate? Former Central Command General Thinks So.
One year ago, thanks in no small part to the Abraham Accords, the Middle East looked like it may well have been on the road to historic stability. But 10/7 ended all that, with the next major player expected to join the accords - Saudi Arabia - backing out after the attack, adding an insistence on a separate Palestinian state to their joining the deal. It's worth pointing out that the "Palestinian" people have had their own state - Gaza - and have used it as a springboard for terror. But the Saudis' conditions remain in place.
In late September, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had told Fox News that “We’re getting closer to peace every day.” In early October, an Israeli government minister had been photographed celebrating the Jewish holiday of Sukkot in Riyadh.
It was all too threatening for Iran and its terror proxies. The normalization process had to be stopped if Israel was ever going to be eliminated.
After the attack:
Among the casualties was the agreement with Saudi Arabia. Soon after Oct. 7, the crown prince put the talks on hold and insisted any deal must include a pathway to a separate Palestinian state.
Israel is still in the fight, and they have done amazing work in eroding Hamas and Hezbollah. But Iran is still in the game, despite economic problems, despite a major demographic crisis; a nation-state ruled by an apocalyptic death cult will not be easily deterred. Iran is still bankrolling and supplying Hamas and Hezbollah and now has attacked Israel directly. This is fundamentally an Israel-Iran war, with Iran largely acting through their proxies.
One year later, the fight goes on - and it's unlikely to be restricted to the Middle East forever. Here in the United States, largely due to weak and ineffective leadership in Washington, our borders have been wide open for years now. Millions have entered illegally - unscreened, unvetted, unknown. We don't know where many of the young, single, military-aged men we see in still images and videos come from. We don't know where they intend to go. We don't know what they intend to do when they get there. But we may very well have a hostile foreign army already present within our border. If we accept the minimal figure of 11 million in the country illegally, and if we estimate that one percent of them are hostile operatives, that is an army of 110,000 in our country now, today - and I for one think that numbers in our nation illegally are far higher than that 11 million estimate.
It's going to happen here. It's just a matter of time. My Townhall colleague Kurt Schlichter has already told us how it is liable to happen. I spoke with Kurt about this work not long after I read it for the first time and told him, "You scared the kapok out of me."
His reply? "Good. I intended to." Kurt's work is horrifying because, after 10/7, we can see, all too plainly, how it could happen here. And if you haven't read Kurt's book, do so.
Sooner or later, Iran will have to be dealt with - hopefully by the Iranian people. In the meantime, in the ongoing reply to that horrible event one year ago today, Israel will no doubt continue hunting down Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists like the rabid animals they are. And that's an unalloyed good thing.
Justice must be done. Evil must be answered for.
