Melanie Phillips: The barbaric war against Israel

Behind the Hamas onslaught is Iran. But the west has this blood on its hands too

I am in Jerusalem. At around a quarter past eight this morning, as observant Jews were celebrating the Sabbath and the holiday of Simchat Torah, an air raid siren started its wail, followed in short order by the boom of missiles being intercepted over the city. Many more sirens wailed for several hours. We watched the sky over the city fill with traces left by the missile defence system, Iron Dome. We held our breath in case Iron Dome failed.

And what was unfolding elsewhere was infinitely worse, a sickening disaster without parallel in Israel’s history.

Hundreds of Hamas gunmen had infiltrated into the south of the country, brazenly using jeeps and paragliders to overwhelm the border fence and Israel’s supposedly sophisticated border defences.

These Hamas forces attacked some 22 villages, towns and kibbutzim along the southern border, murdering civilians and soldiers while thousands of rockets were fired across the south and centre of the country.

The Hamas gunmen killed more than 250 Israeli civilians, in a toll that will surely rise yet further, and left more than 1,450 injured.

They murdered Israelis at bus stops, in their cars and in their homes. The gunmen went from house to house, killing them and burning down their houses. Dozens of young Israelis were slaughtered at an all-night nature party. An undisclosed number have been held hostage for hours inside the dining hall at Kibbutz Be’eri.

More sickeningly still, dozens of Israelis including elderly people, women and small children were abducted from their homes or dragged out of cars, forced into Hamas vehicles and are now being held as hostages in Gaza. This is unthinkable and unspeakable.

Social media has shown videos of Hamas gunmen parading what appeared to be stolen Israeli military vehicles, including a tank, through the streets; and at least one dead Israeli soldier within Gaza was shown being dragged and trampled by a crowd screaming “God is great”.

The hostages mean that the Israel Defence Forces will now have to go into Gaza with a major ground operation, with all the awful consequences that follow.

There are also fears that Hezbollah may now unleash its 150,000 missiles from Lebanon which are targeted at the whole of Israel.

This is the stuff of Israel's nightmares, and will almost certainly get worse. It is wrong to call this terrorism. It is all-out war against Israel. And all over this barbaric onslaught are the fingerprints of Hamas's genocidal paymasters, Iran.

Enough. Time to take out not just Hamas but the head of the snake, the regime in Tehran.

It is fifty years almost to the day since Israel was taken by surprise when Egypt and Syria attacked it on the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur. That intelligence failure cost thousands of Israelis soldiers’ lives and created an enduring national trauma.

What happened today was far worse. This was not a war between armies, or a conflict between terrorists and soldiers. This was a lethal and overwhelming onslaught aimed at Israeli civilians. Every one of those attacks was therefore a war crime.

How could this possibly have happened? Clearly, there has been a massive Israeli intelligence failure. It’s hard not to see a connection with the enormous anti-government protests over the past nine months, which saw Israelis trying to undermine the economy and even refusing to do army reservists’ duty.

Such a paralysing internal battle may have taken official eyes off the security ball. What’s undeniable is that the ferocity and length of these internal convulsions sent a signal that Israel was weakened. Many Israelis have been wondering over these past difficult months just when Israel’s mortal enemies would seize this opportunity to take advantage of this weakness. Now we have the dreadful answer.

And this barbarism has been paid for by the US and EU. What did they think all the money they were channelling into Gaza for “humanitarian” purposes would actually be used for? Now we have the answer.

What did the Biden administration think would be the result of appeasing, grovelling to and funding Iran, the paymasters of Hamas and Hezbollah? Now it has its answer.

America, the EU and Britain have consistently undermined Israel’s attempt to defend itself against attack. For the past century, the west has incentivised exterminatory Palestinian Arab terror against Israel by rewarding it with the promise of statehood — which the Palestinians always made plain they wanted only as a staging post towards Israel’s destruction — and punishing Israel for objecting to this existential threat.

For decades, the US, EU and UK have forced Israel to fight Palestinian Arab aggression with one hand tied behind its back. Time and again, they have pressured Israel to pull its forces back before they have been able to wipe out the infrastructure of terrorism. Even as the Biden administration now mouths its pious platitudes about standing with Israel in its defence against “terror”, the State Department has said:

We urged all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing.

All sides? Does the US believe therefore that Israel and Hamas are morally equivalent? So Israel must “refrain” from destroying the forces which have murdered hundreds of civilians in one day — which the US disapprovingly says would be a “retaliatory attack”? Should America have refrained from attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11 because this was likewise a “retaliatory attack”?

Whenever Israel has launched military operations in Gaza — which it does only when attacks from there have become intolerable — western “progressives” complain that its response is “disproportionate”. What they mean, in their disgusting way, is that not enough Israelis have been killed.

So will today’s horrific toll now give them pause? Don’t hold your breath. If Israel goes in hard into Gaza — which it must, as a moral imperative — the usual suspects in the media and “progressive” classes will be screaming “disproportionate” before you can say “keffiyeh”.

That’s because the Palestinian agenda is the cause of causes for western “progressives”. Supporting the Palestinians is the default position for all liberals.

So these are the people they have been supporting (warning: these videos are deeply upsetting):

people who parade and desecrate the bodies of those they’ve killed;

people who kidnapped a teenage Israeli girl into Gaza and paraded her around the streets;

people who murdered an Israeli woman, loaded her onto a van and stripped and humiliated her;

children in Gaza tormenting an Israeli child kidnapped today.

A very great evil was done in Israel today. It was perpetrated by the Palestinian Arabs and their Iranian backers. But the US, EU and UK have this blood on their hands too.

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author - you can follow her work on her website HERE.