One Year After Oct. 7, Palestinians and Israelis Remain Hamas’ Hostages | Opinion

As October 7 unfolded one year ago, I watched along with the rest of the world, devastated, as the terrorist cult that had brutally ruled my home for 17 years unleashed its savagery on Israel. Hamas claimed the atrocities of October 7 were part of their “resistance” against Israeli occupation and aggression. One year later, I hope it is clear for all to see that Hamas’s attack was not an act of resistance but one of a nihilistic terrorism.

Though Hamas’s brutality was not new to me, though I myself was tortured by Hamas militants for the crime of dissent, I still had never witnessed the level of viciousness and cruelty that was unleashed on October 7—women raped, towns burned, innocent people and entire families killed in their homes and at a music festival. Over 200 people were taken hostage by Hamas and violently carried back to Gaza, where they were paraded around the streets and jeered at by the crowds. It was the single bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust, carried out by Hamas terrorists.

This was not resistance or a fight against occupation for freedom; it was a series of brutal acts that served to further solidify the cycle of violence in the region.

Although that day was a nightmare for Israeli society, Gaza also paid a heavy price for October 7 throughout the following year in the form of the high number of civilian casualties, the widespread destruction, and the cruel conditions Gazans still endure.

Hamas is a death cult that regularly tortures and kills and ruthlessly controls the people of Gaza; its primary goal is to eradicate Israel and install an Islamist caliphate where they can control people’s lives with Sharia law. The terror group does not care for the well-being of civilians in the Strip, because they believe in “martyring” and sacrificing as many people as possible in their pursuit of the destruction of Israel.

Hamas is still holding over 100 Israelis hostage—but the civilian population in the Gaza Strip is also being held hostage by Hamas, bearing the crushing weight of this war with nowhere to go.

This war was was an attack on the Jews and the State of Israel, but it was also a full-frontal war on the Gazan people as well, inevitably leading to their devastation and destruction.

There is no set of moral values or ethics that can justify this sort of barbarity.

What I found even more disturbing than the bloodshed and misery that unfolded since that fateful day was the fact that many of the Arab states, including those with cold peace treaties with Israel, stayed silence in the face of Hamas’s atrocities. Not only did they remain silent, but they promoted the ideology of “martyrdom”—a.k.a. terrorism—through their state-controlled media. Outlets like Aljazeera among others failed to report on the Hamas attacks on southern Israel, creating the illusion in the Arab world that Israel had needlessly started attacking the Gaza Strip totally unprovoked.

The outrage across the Arab world that followed was like a powder keg deepening the divides in the region and harming the people of Gaza. And the outrage of the Arab world spread throughout the West as well. The explosion of “solidarity” movements and “pro-resistance” activists in the Arab world and the West was and continues to be deeply disturbing. I was outraged that the suffering of my family and friends in Gaza was being met by rhetoric supporting Hamas and “the resistance” across college campuses and western cities.

Meanwhile, Hamas’s actions, including the kidnapping of Israeli children, the elderly, and women as hostages and using them as bargaining chips, has resulted in diminished optimism in Israel for peace, moving Israeli society further toward its extreme right wing. For the nascent peace movement in Israel, the execution of Israeli peace activists like Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was and is still an inspiration to me, and Yocheved Lifshitz, who, along with her husband assisted Gazans in getting to Israeli hospitals for medical care, makes it that much harder for Israelis to chart a path of peace and reconciliation.

Hamas continues to hold more than 100 Israeli hostages in inhumane conditions. The death and destruction that has been wreaked upon the people of Gaza is almost inconceivable; tens of thousands of Gazans have been killed since Israel began its retaliatory war on Hamas. It will take generations for Israeli society to recover from the wounds inflicted by the October 7 attack and generations for Palestinians to overcome the loss and sheer devastation that was inflicted upon them due to Hamas’s actions.

It is not quite possible to explain the extent of the horror experienced by Gazans this past year as they watched their homes, entire cities, be destroyed; the nightmare of leaving your home at midnight after receiving an evacuation order with no idea where to go or if you’d ever return; the misery of living in tents, exposed with no means of privacy, safety, or basic human needs. These are things no human should have to go through.

This war must serve as a wake-up call to all people in the region and in the West to end their blind support of extremists. We must learn from the mistakes that have contributed to the decimation of the Israeli Left and crushed the hopes of the people in Gaza.

No matter your opinion on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, we must still reject the “narrative of armed resistance” offered by these terrorists.

Palestinians must also dedicate themselves to building the next generation of Palestinian leadership, made up of people committed to building their own society instead of having dreams about destroying Israel. They must be committed to reconciliation, mutual safety with Israel, and true liberation for the Palestinian people through a democratic, Palestinian state.

Hamas has a long, cruel history, and its very existence has been dedicated to undermining any resolution that would lead to the establishment of a Jewish state living safely next to a Palestinian state. The Islamist terror group uses every opportunity to hijack the Palestinian cause to their radical agenda. Hamas has consistently chosen terror over dialogue; this cannot be allowed to continue.

Israeli hostages remain in Hamas’s captivity, but there are also 2 million Palestinians held captive by Hamas. Nearly 80 years of bloodshed, hate, and terrorism are enough. It is time for Palestinian, Arab, and Muslims leaders and communities to unequivocally reject the “armed resistance narrative.”

Hamza Howidy is a Palestinian from Gaza City. He is an accountant and a peace advocate.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.