Hamas’ Mission Impossible

 By Ochereome Nnanna

On October 7, 2023, the Jewish State of Israel suffered the most painful, unprovoked terrorist assault on its innocent citizens who were holidaying. What an irony that they were attacked while celebrating the Festival of Sukkot, marking God’s protection of their Biblical ancestors in the desert on their epic journey from the land of enslavement, Egypt, to the Promised Land! It fell on a Sabbath Day, and people relaxed at home, while some youngsters attended a music festival at Kibbutz Re’im in Southern Israel.

It was on such a day that Hamas invaded Israel by land and air. They breached the border fences and flew paragliders through the Israeli airspace. They attacked unsuspecting, innocent and unarmed soldiers and civilians, massacred, slaughtered, raped, tortured and dehumanised Israeli citizens. The details of their atrocities are available in cybersphere for those who have the stomach to view them.

The death toll has been put at 1,400, with over 240 hostages seized from their homes and taken into captivity in Gaza Strip. Israel has tagged this historic tragedy as their own copy of “9/11”, the day America was attacked by Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001.

I am still shocked in three ways. How could Israel, one of the most powerful nations in the world, with its dreaded MOSSAD and Shin Bet intelligence services respected all over the world, sit on its bum and allow itself to be surprised by its sworn enemy next door? I am really disappointed. When the war is over, those who failed to protect the people must explain themselves.

The second shock is that Hamas, which has been pummelled in three previous wars since 2008 when they seized power in Gaza Strip, dared to attack Israel, knowing what was in store, not just for them and the innocent Palestinian population, but also for the physical landscape of their country. They obviously put too much trust in their so-called 500-kilometre tunnels, Iran-made rockets and the expected buy-in of Hezbollah and the Islamic world in their mission impossible to “wipe Israel off the map”.

The third shock is not really a shock, looking at this phenomenon beyond the ordinary rule of logic. Ordinarily, the world should be full of condemnations for Hamas’ unprovoked attack on Israel while calling for humanitarian assistance for the displaced Palestinians. But the pro-Palestinian protests sweeping many parts of the world have little or no word for the attack on Israel, the Israelis massacred and their hostages taken, who include babies and very old people that survived the Holocaust.

Those who think that the ubiquitous belligerency between Israel and their Muslim neighbours has nothing to do with spiritualism are jokers. There is hardly anything happening today that was not foretold in the Bible. Even in the parts of the Koran taken from the Old Testament, you will find them. The central question of who owns the land is fully addressed.

Under the Christian, Judaic and Muslim scriptures, the land named Palestine by the Romans, belongs to the Jews. The Bible predicted their scattering all over the world and eventual return to repossess their land. But, of course, by the time they re-established the State of Israel in 1948, there were other people from all sorts of places who had settled there among the original natives.

You now have a situation where the original owners and the new owners are pitted against each other. The best solution to this dilemma is cohabitation. Find space for both sides to live in self-determination, security and development. Extremism has no place as a solution in this sort of situation. This is what the series of United Nations Resolutions and the Oslo Accords I and II, have sought to achieve. 

In 1993, the then Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzak Rabin, signed a pact of cohabitation with the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, PLO, Yasser Arafat. It was for this that a Jewish extremist, Yigal Amir, assassinated Rabin in 1995.

*Nnanna is a commentator on public issues