Hamas Struck Israel to Spark a Wider Conflict. A Year Later, It’s Got One
The Oct. 7 attack was among the most potent acts of political violence in decades. It’s still reverberating across the globe.
Memorials at the site of the Supernova music festival near Kibbutz Re'im in September.
Photographer: Kobi Wolf for Bloomberg BusinessweekAs missiles filled the dawn skies of southern Israel that Saturday and thousands of armed Palestinians cut through the border fence on a mission of murder and abduction, a prerecorded speech played over regional airwaves. This human flood from Gaza, the speaker said, was the launch of a revolution that required all of Hamas’ Muslim allies to join “in Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Iraq and Syria.” History, he said, is opening “its clearest, most noble and brightest pages.”
The speaker, Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, is dead, killed in an Israeli airstrike. His co-conspirator, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, hasn’t been heard from in weeks and may be injured or dead as well. Much of their coastal strip has been ground to rubble in a punishing war, many of the Palestinians living there relegated to refugee tents, haunted by disease and hunger. The death toll is more than 41,000, according to Hamas authorities.