For Israelis, This Wasn’t 9/11, It Was Worse

The country will never be the same.

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Firefighters work to put out a fire in an open field, following a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, near a hospital in Ashkelon, southern Israel, October 7, 2023.

Amir Cohen/Reuters

Ra’anana, Israel — We were awoken at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday — the Sabbath, as well as the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah — by the all-too-familiar blare of the air-raid siren. Dutifully entering the bomb shelter in our house, we assumed the alert was a mistake, as it sometimes is. Little did we realize our country’s nightmare was only beginning.

Under cover of a massive rocket barrage — more than 2,000 projectiles in less than an hour — Hamas, the genocidal terror group running the Gaza Strip, breached the border wall and dispatched hundreds of fighters to the small Israeli communities near the coastal enclave. Over the course of the next several hours, the highly trained Hamas militants slaughtered more than 800 Israelis, wounded another 2,500, and took more than 100 hostage — almost all of them civilians.

Michael M. Rosen

About the Author

Michael M. Rosen

Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Like Silicon from Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI.

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