Mourning the Past, Securing the Future

"Today when we talk about what happened on October 7, we talk about 'never again', but for the past 80 years we've been talking about 'never again'."

"And yet ... 'never again' is today."

"People are denying what was recorded live by Hamas, live-streamed to the victims' friends and family on Facebook -- it was all there live and yet the denial is still there."

Geoff Winston, Israeli, born of Holocaust-survival parents

 

"In accordance with the approval of the political echelon, the IDF calls on the population, which is under the control of Hamas, to temporarily evacuate from the eastern neighbourhoods of Rafah to the expanded humanitarian zone."

Israel Defense Forces

Destroyed houses are seen in Kibbutz Kfar Aza following Hamas's Oct. 7 massacre. Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Air raid sirens sounded across Israel for the purpose of commemorating Yom HaShoah -- an annual event to remember Holocaust Remembrance Day. On that day, when the sirens sound, everything in the country comes to a complete stop. It lasts but two minutes. Two minutes of silence, of contemplation, of pain and sorrow, never to be forgotten. Never to forget that Nazi Germany set out to destroy Europe's Jews and managed through efficient, industrialization of murder to annihilate fully half of the Jews in the world during World War II. Jews MUST remember; the world does not.

 

On that day people stop whatever it is they happen to be doing. Traffic on highways and roads comes to a stop. Just a kilometre from Gaza close to the Israeli city of Sderot in southern Israel, a barrage of artillery and heavy guns accompanied the sirens. A warning to suppress potential Hamas rocket attacks in the familiar knowledge of Hamas using such occasions to carry out attacks. Just the day previous a Hamas rocket attack at the border crossing at Kerem Shalom killed four Israel soldiers.

 

Typical of Hamas that it would fire off rockets at the very crossing that is used to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians. The lives of Palestinians in Gaza are as dispensable to Hamas as fodder in their intent to destroy Israel as are the lives of Jews. Withholding or interrupting humanitarian aid meant for people under military siege in the IDF's mission to dismantle Hamas's military-terrorist infrastructure and shatter its battalions of operatives to ensure no repeats of October 7 re-occur, is typical of a group that boasts of its reputation as a death cult.

The lethal rocket fire from adjacent Rafah, where four Hamas battalions are known to have dug in amidst the huge numbers of conflict-displaced Palestinians that the Hamas leadership had ordered to move to Rafah to act as martyrdom shields for their fighters were being warned by the IDF to leave the proximate vicinity for safer areas to bring them out of the line of impending conflict. The IDF working in direct contradiction to Hamas's efforts to bring the civilians to danger; predictable and typical.

Kfar Aza, a Gaza-adjacent kibbutz was one of the communities hardest hit during the terrorist attack on October 7. Now deserted, burned out, bullet-riddled homes remain as they were on that fateful day, telling their story of horror and death when Hamas terrorists along with Palestinian Gazan civilians and members of the terrorist groups Islamic Jihad and the PFLP, broke through the barrier fence between Israel and Gaza to embark on their killing, raping, mutilation, kidnapping spree, leaving the towns and villages steeped in gore.

When the terrorists entered KfarAza through the community's security fence they knew which direction to take to bring them to the community's civil security offices. Among them with the inside knowledge were Palestinians who had sought and been given employment in the community as farm workers who were intimately acquainted with the layout of the border communities. They had broken bread familiarly with the Kibbutz members.

After the security officers were murdered, the terrorists spread out, an estimated 3000 in number, going house to house, setting homes ablaze as families cowered in their safe rooms, only to be burned to death; infants, teens, parents, whose corpses were so scorched they were unidentifiable. In the wake of the attack and its horrors that saw 1,200 mostly civilian Israelis slaughtered, with 252 children, the elderly and others taken captive, with 132 remaining hostages yet to be freed, there are commemorative holidays to be faced.

First, Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance. Next will be Yom HaZikaron, remembering the country's fallen soldiers. Following that, Yom Ha'atzmaut, in honour of Israel's Independence Day.

On Monday, as Jews marked Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, the day commemorating the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, pro-Hamas activists taunted Jews at the 36^th International March of the Living at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland.  Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images