A grim anniversary

Today marks the first anniversary of the Hamas surprise attack on Israel and the deadly massacre of the largest number of Jewish civilians in a single day since the Holocaust. The mere mention of the date “Oct. 7” has taken on a grim meaning of its own after the manner of other catastrophic surprise attacks, such as how “Sept. 11” recalls the worst terrorist attack in American history in 2001 and “Dec. 7” still stands for the infamy of Imperial Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

To remember Oct. 7 is to bear witness to the nearly 1,200 Israelis murdered by terrorists that day and the additional 251 Israelis and foreigners taken hostage. Behind these numbers are countless acts of ghoulish barbarity that still shock the conscience: rape, torture, parents mutilated in front of their children. Hamas’ orgy of violence was the embodiment of evil and anti-Semitism in its most base and brutal form.

Now, one year later, Hamas continues to hold captive close to 100 of those hostages in Gaza, their fates in many cases unknown. Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza—a just act of self-defense—continues, though its operational tempo has slowed somewhat. Israel’s military and intelligence services in the past year have achieved many operational successes in the difficult and bloody fighting. Thousands of Hamas terrorists have been killed, along with many in leadership. Hamas as an organization and militant force has been degraded substantially.

Israel’s progress in the war has lamentably included many Palestinian civilian deaths, widespread refugee displacements, and the destruction of much of Gaza. The moral responsibility for these deaths, it must be added, lies almost entirely with Hamas. The terrorist organization’s contempt for human life extends to innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza, whom Hamas cynically uses as human shields as it deliberately interweaves itself among the civilian population and leaves Israeli forces almost no choice. Sadistic Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has made explicit his goal of provoking as many Palestinian civilian deaths as possible as a way to divert global opprobrium toward Israel and pressure Jerusalem into a cease-fire that leaves Hamas intact. It is a perverse strategy—yet it has worked at least in part given the growing international ostracism of Israel.

For much of the past year, the conflict stayed largely confined to Gaza, with the rest of the Middle East on (but not yet over) the edge of war. That may be no more. Attentive readers know that of late a new front has opened in Israel’s north. The Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, which like Hamas is a proxy of Iran, for the past year has been staging regular rocket attacks on northern Israel, causing tens of thousands of Israelis to flee their homes. What seemed to be an unsustainable situation proved to be just that. For the past few weeks, Israel has been escalating its retaliations, including extensive sabotage of Hezbollah’s communications, assassinations of its leaders, and now, in the past week, a military ground incursion into southern Lebanon. Similarly, Israel has increased its strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen, yet another Iranian proxy group that targets Israel at Tehran’s behest.

Now Iran has decided to join its vassals in a direct attack on the Jewish state. Last week, Iran launched around 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, most of them aimed at the population center of Tel Aviv. With important assistance from U.S. forces, Israel neutralized most of the Iranian missiles and suffered little loss.

Yet, in its direct targeting of a large civilian area like Tel Aviv for the first time (instead of military targets, as Iran did in April), Tehran crossed an ominous threshold. Israel seems resolved to mount a forceful response against Iran. As one former senior Israeli national security official told The New York Times, “We have a consensus in Israel—among the military, the defense experts, analysts and politicians—that Israel should respond in force to Iran’s attack.” As of this writing, what that response will entail remains to be seen, but Israel is resolved to punish Iran in a sufficiently forceful way that deters the Islamic Republic from further aggression.

What happens in Gaza does not stay in Gaza. As a former senior Mossad official said recently, “This is part of the miscalculation of all our enemies around. They don’t understand what Oct. 7 has done to the Israeli people, to their willingness to take much more risks.”

One year after Oct. 7, Israel has reluctantly but understandably decided that its only sustainable defense is a strong offense. Such is the case when the very survival of the Jewish state is at stake—and it is.