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How The West Aided And Abetted The Oct. 7 Attack On Israel

Is Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks disproportionate? Not if you know what really happened.

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GAZA, FEBRUARY 2026 — It’s late afternoon. The sun in the western sky silhouettes Deir al-Balah on the distant horizon. With an M16 in my lap, we bounce along a dirt road pitted by tanks and Humvees in a compact car of dubious quality. Mikaela, a 25-year-old member of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), sits confidently at the wheel, the Gaza border fence her objective. The car and the M16 are hers. The reason for this brief sortie is entirely mine. In the backseat, and also armed, is my IDF Special Forces guide, Doron.

Doron and I, having made it as far as this IDF checkpoint, inquired if we could continue to the border fence a few hundred meters on. Discovering my journalistic intentions, Mikaela, the only English-speaker of the two IDF guards, gave me a mischievous look that said, If you’re game, I’m game. Moments later, we were on our way. Driving through one of the battlefields of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Doron provides a running commentary:

It was here that this unit engaged Hamas terrorists in a lengthy firefight…

It was in those mobile bomb shelters that [Israeli] families huddled for safety, not knowing it just made them easier to slaughter…

My unit came through there and saw…

It’s a depressing narrative. Mikaela, visiting family in Canada at the time of the attack, listens as intently as I do. She came home when two of her friends were murdered, one of whom was raped prior to her execution. Mikaela impresses me as soberminded, undoubtedly courageous, but somehow remarkably absent the jaded, cynical edge one might have expected of someone touched by this war. She’s friendly, chatty, open.

“I don’t want to kill anyone in Gaza,” she says. “But we must defend our people, and Gazans are taught, from birth, to hate Jews.”

Doron, who maintains American in addition to Israeli citizenship, is a convert to Judaism. I have met many converts to Christianity, a few to Islam, and still others who de-converted from both. But before Doron, I had never met a convert to Judaism. Sporting a beard, a baseball cap, a 9mm pistol in his waistband, and not a hint of a Hebrew accent, he’s American straight through. Indeed, he’s almost a redneck. My two hosts, unknown to each other until this moment, are representative of that demographic that makes Israel a Western nation culturally if not geographically.

We drive along the fence road, “Burma” as it is known in IDF code, a dust cloud trailing behind us. Mikaela points out surveillance towers that Hamas knocked out with drones as the dawn attack began. At my request, she stops to let me take a closer look. IDF patrols are seen intermittently, but not frequently. The territory they are here to defend feels vast, vulnerable. I am reminded of Fredrick the Great’s maxim: “He who defends all, defends nothing, because defense lines cover more ground than available troops can defend.” Available troops were an issue on Oct. 7.

A Ford F-350 passes us headed in the opposite direction, the IDF driver studies us closely. Mikaela, wearing a generic hoodie over her olive drab military issue shirt, only looks half IDF. “We need to go,” she commands. Our proximity to the fence, she says, risks confusing IDF watchers. As if to give that sentence the force of an expletive, an IDF artillery round strikes the earth perhaps a mile away, a plume of smoke rising high in the sky. You don’t want to be confused with Hamas.

I have visited many border walls, both ancient and modern: the Berlin Wall; a ROKA tour of the tense 38th Parallel; the remains of Hadrian’s Wall and, just north of it, the shoddy Antonine Wall; and I’ve even unhappily rappelled off the Great Wall of China. While serving similar and different functions, none of these fortifications were wholly effective. Yet in December 2021, after three years of construction and $1.1 billion along a 40-mile frontier, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz declared this one a “wall of iron.”

“The barrier is reality-changing,” said IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi at the same ceremony. “What happened in the past won’t happen again.” Israel, they said, was safe, and Hamas completely encircled.

Less than two years later, thousands of Hamas terrorists broke through the “wall of iron” in over a hundred places by land, sea, and air. Many of them were Hamas’s elite Nukhba fighters, soldiers trained to not simply shoot up a place à la Charlie Hebdo or Bondi Beach, but to capture and hold a position in a protracted offensive. They came by car, truck, motorcycle, boat, motorized paraglider, and golf cart. Armed with AK-47s, grenades, .50 caliber machine guns mounted on pickup trucks, RPGs, rockets, anti-tank missiles, drones, and mines, they were prepared to take on the IDF itself. Slicing 20 kilometers into Israel, the battlefield encompassed 600 square kilometers, fifty battle sites, and lasted fifty hours. When the smoke cleared, 1,200 Israelis were dead; 251 had been taken hostage, disappearing into Gaza’s 350 miles of tunnels; and thousands of others were injured physically and psychologically.

Hamas terrorists were encouraged to kill Jews – old men and women, babies, mothers taking their children to school, partygoers – and to rape and mutilate them. In a BBC interview, one young woman recalled witnessing an assault:

“She was alive…. bleeding from her back. They sliced her breast [off] and threw it on the street…. They were playing with it.” The victim was passed from one terrorist to another: “[One man] penetrated her and shot her in the head before he finished. He didn’t even pick up his pants; he shoots and ejaculates.”

“She was alive…. bleeding from her back. They sliced her breast [off] and threw it on the street…. They were playing with it.”

The victim was passed from one terrorist to another: “[One man] penetrated her and shot her in the head before he finished. He didn’t even pick up his pants; he shoots and ejaculates.”

Scenes like this would be repeated throughout the day. It wasn’t isolated or random, it was systemic and part of a strategy. Israelis were shot, burned, and decapitated. According to the testimony of one Hamas terrorist, they even raped the corpse of an adolescent girl. They smeared blood on the walls and carried Qurans to reassure themselves this was all in keeping with Allah’s will.

Western media typically portrays Oct. 7 as an isolated terrorist attack on an outdoor music festival. Awful, yes, but limited in scope, perpetrated by lunatics acting independently, and just one of those terrible things that is an unfortunate part of life in the Middle East. Thus, Israel’s response, a ground war in Gaza, is disproportionate, resulting in a “genocide” of innocents. That narrative has provoked “Free Palestine” and anti-Israel protests from Hollywood celebrities to students on high school and college campuses across the Western world.

But this narrative is false.

Oct. 7 was years in the making and could not have been successfully executed without the aid and discretion of the people of Gaza. Moreover, it involved the assistance of numerous foreign players: China supplied the vehicles which were smuggled across the Egypt-Gaza border through tunnels; North Korea supplied weapons; Iran supplied weapons, technology, and training; and Qatar supplied money to build homemade weapons and to pay terrorists and the Gazans who worked for them.

In other words, Oct. 7 was an act of war.

It was planned with the precision of a Pearl Harbor. And like Pearl Harbor, the attack caught the enemy off-guard and flatfooted. There were indicators an attack might be coming: Israeli SIM cards, thousands of them, lighting up all over Gaza the night before the attack; Hamas carrying out military exercises openly; reports that key Hamas leaders were going to ground; laborers from Gaza with Israeli work visas caught smuggling weapons into........

© The Federalist