(Ha'aretz) Amir Tibon - One month ago, Oct. 7, as the sun was rising over my home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, I had to tell my two daughters - 3-years-old and 20-months-old - that they must remain completely silent. Five men soon began firing bullets into our home through the living room window. They tried to break through our locked door with their guns. They sprayed our two cars with bullets. One of them held a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Another threw a grenade toward our neighbors' home. These men were Hamas terrorists, armed from head to toe, on a mission to get in and kill us. They deliberately chose to enter civilian communities and the homes of families, to murder innocent people. In my community, they shot to death a teenage girl who worked in our kindergarten. They kidnapped two sisters, ages 14 and 8, after murdering their father. Had they managed to break into the room where we silently barricaded ourselves, we all would be dead now. We survived, but many didn't. We lost 14 people on Oct. 7, while five others were taken to Gaza. Had the military arrived 20 minutes later, the death toll would have doubled. Hamas chose to start a war after many years in which successive Israeli governments looked for new ways to improve the economic reality in Gaza. In my own community, we were proud to employ workers from there, paying them 10 times the average wage inside the Strip. The Gazans who came to work in our community were able to build homes for their families and finance an education for their children. In a shocking act of betrayal, some of them provided intelligence to Hamas that helped it plan its deadly attack on our kibbutz. No Israeli will ever want to employ workers from Gaza in the near future. No country in the world would have accepted what happened to my family on that awful morning - and you must multiply that by many hundreds of families. A country that doesn't kill the people who tried to murder my daughters, and those who sent them, has lost its right to exist. Israel must first of all defeat Hamas. This organization can't remain an active force in Gaza. This isn't genocide or ethnic cleansing. It's a terrible war. It's a war for our very ability to keep living in this land and raising our children here. The writer is Ha'aretz's diplomatic correspondent.
2023-11-08 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive