「Why Israel is unpopular」　Professor Danny Orbach, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Saturday morning, October 7, 2023, should have been a festive day in Israel. The end of the Jewish high holidays is usually marked by prayers, joy, and dancing with Torah scrolls. Many Israeli youngsters preferred to celebrate the holiday by having a nature party near the border between Israel and Gaza. However, we all woke up to shocking news instead. More than 1,500 militants from the Hamas terrorist group invaded Israel and occupied dozens of military bases, villages, and other rural communities. They stormed the nature party and invaded several larger towns. What happened was far from being a terror attack; it was, in fact, a genocide in the making.

Aside from taking more than 100 hostages, Hamas terrorists systematically exterminated all Jews and Arabs they encountered, civilians and soldiers alike. As now confirmed by official Israeli and US sources, there were horrific acts such as beheading of little babies, burning villagers alive, murdering of wives in front of their husbands, and vice versa, after torture. Elderly Holocaust survivors were shot in their beds, and one Hamas militant shot 40 bullets into a young Bedouin girl. Loyal family dogs, which tried to protect their owners, were shot in cold blood. There are also reports and testimonies of rape. In some villages like Be'eri and Kfar Aza, as well as the unfortunate nature party in the forest, people were forced into ditches and mowed down, reminiscent of the Holocaust – the extermination of the Jewish people by Nazi Germany.

For Israel, this is not just a struggle against a terrorist organization but rather against a group similar to ISIS. Japanese readers may remember the brutal murder of Gotō Kenji by the Islamic State: a similar tragedy happened in southern Israel last Saturday, multiplied 1,200 times.