A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.
Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, The Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.
Four witnesses described in graphic detail seeing women raped and killed at two different places along Route 232, the same highway where Ms. Abdush’s half-naked body was found sprawled on the road at a third location.
And The Times interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics who together described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and in two kibbutzim in a similar state as Ms. Abdush’s — legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.
I haven’t read anything about what hamas thought would happen after the October 7th attack. Did they think Israel would do nothing because hamas had hostages?
Or were they trying to prompt a huge response? Certainly the abhorrent despicable acts perpetrated against women that were detailed in the article are something no one would ignore. Similar to Bucha in Ukraine, the horror won’t make people surrender, just the opposite.
They certainly wanted to provoke a huge reaction – starting a war and derailing normalization of relations with other states in the ME. They were probably a bit like the dog that caught the car. It’s doubtful they thought they would be as successful as they were. They were likely hoping the hostages would temper Israel’s response. They probably didn’t anticipate the success and brutality of the attack making the hostages less of a factor in Israel’s decision-making.
One clear thing about this entire catastrophe is that both Hamas and the IDF are absolutely uncaring about the fate of the Palestinian people.
I am convinced the goal was to provoke a strong response from Israel. The reason is they knew the strong response from Israel would be disproportional and would damage relations between Israel and the rest of the ME.
Israel was approaching normalized relations with most of the major Arab nations around it, most importantly SA. Normalized relations with Israel would likely mean significantly less political and economical support coming to Hamas. Without outside resources Hamas is neutered.
So, seeing the real possibility of a large reduction in their economic and political power in the horizon they took desperate action to stop it, knowing full well the outcome.
Obvious answer is they wanted Israel to invade Gaza.
They had no significant chance of beating them so why push for an invasion?
Propaganda, division and pulling other arab countries into a larger war.
Basically they Hamas wanted their own people to suffer…crazy
Don’t forget that the Hamas leaders are living in luxury as billionaires in Qatar. If the Israeli response kills a few thousand Palestinians, then Hamas’ leaders will shrug their shoulders and say “sounds like good PR” while lounging in a hot tub.
Their whole goal was got get Israel to look bad for killing people, it’s also why they don’t make efforts to separate the civilians from their militants.
I haven’t been able to find a good answer to that either.
One of the speculations that I’ve heard kicked around is that they were trying to do something that would light a fuse, but there was no follow up. Hamas isn’t a bunch of student rebels out of Les Miserables, throwing caution to the wind but not having done the actual groundwork. It was a small attack that happened to have what I suspect was a far larger impact than they imagined. They obviously were doing prep work for the attack itself, if the stories we’re reading are to be believed, but it was a modest-sized incursion without coordination with either the West Bank or Lebanon assets. I think it was a terrorist attack - and I am not someone who throws that word around lightly - but I don’t think that they thought it was going to be this big of a hit.
I think it’s analogous to 9/11 where OBL wasn’t expecting the whole towers falling thing, and while trying to provoke a response, the US over-response exceeded his expectations. I don’t know if Hamas will survive this as an organization, but it’s really affected the global perception of Israel.
No it was not a small attack. It was light infantry against a full miltary but not small. It was planned and they stockpiled weapons and material to last months. What they were not expecting was to walk over the IDF military on the border (none of the videos released by the IDF show Hamas doing this). They were not expecting to get throught the defences so easily to get to the settlements. Remember most of the population of Gaza was ethnically cleansed from the land that these settlements are built on.
They are still fighting. The IDF is using tanks in urban warfare (this is a big tactical no no), so Hamas have the IDF where they want them. Even 2 months into the fighting we still see daily videos of IDF tanks (USD 3 million) being destroyed by rocket launchers (USD 200).
Strategically the Palestinians were being thrown under a bus by the rest of the Arabs so this attack put Hamas in control. It also destroyed the image of Israeli comptence which is a huge propaganda win.
If you look at the prisoner exchanges and the interviews afterwards you see the Israeli prisoners were treated well in captivity and the release was well managed and competent. This especially does not align with the story in the NY Times here. The release of the Palestinian prisoners was chaotic (tear gas was used in some places) and the prsioners were tortured and released with broken bones in some cases.
Although some of those kidnapped from Israel were given adequate food, clothing, bedding, and other necessities (what I assume you mean by “treated well”), others were subjected to psychological torture, denied lifesaving medicine and basic medical treatment, and assaulted, including children.
All of them were taken from their homes at gunpoint, some of them pulled from under the bodies of their murdered families, some of them non-fatally shot or seriously injured. Some of them have no homes or families to return to. The hostage release appeared orderly because Hamas threatened to harm their other family still held hostage if they said anything bad, and because Israel and Egypt worked together from Oct. 8 to carefully plan the safe and orderly transfer. Hamas in the West Bank and the PA had basically no plan to receive the released Palestinian prisoners, so there was chaos.
The whole “hostages were treated well” is such a weird talking point to me.
Weren’t some hostages also drugged so they’d be “happy and smiling” for the cameras when released? I heard that, but don’t know the authenticity.
Edit: I found many news sources that said they were. I know some folks don’t trust anything Israel says so take reports like this with a grain of salt. Still, it’s been confirmed that many of the hostages were drugged while in captivity. Especially the kids - to keep them quiet. (Anyone with little kids knows they can be loud while scared and this must have been extremely scary. As a father, the reaction of “drug the little kids” makes me angry.)