there was a music festival in an isolated location.
All evidence points to Hamas not being aware there was a music festival going on. Their original targets were police stations, barracks, and potentially the kibbutz.
It’s been suggested that September 11 was related to a battle of the crusades that marked the end of Islamic military supremacy, but I don’t think that’s ever been confirmed or directly referenced by bin Laden or Al Qaeda.
That’s some numerology bullshit. It was the 11th because that day’s skies were clear and they saw an opportunity to get through Logan security then.
People try and seek reason in the universe for comfort… did you know that 10/7 is actually 1.4285 that’s because for each 1 (one) member of hamas killed they can expect 42 virgins in heaven and in 1985 Isreal signed an expansive trade agreement with the US.
… that’s obviously bullshit that I assembled with five minutes on Wikipedia.
Numerology is fucking bullshit because it’s really easy to find weird coincidences (especially if you’re only looking at two or three digit numbers and date of year is a three digit number between 1 and 365). Shit just happens when it happens and the universe is a lot more arbitrary than most people are comfortable with - lots of shit happens for no reason at all, good people get cancer, awful people live for 80+ years - the universe is brutal and our brains have trouble dealing with it. Sorry to get, uh, nihilistic - there’s a lot of life to enjoy… but tragedies like this are arbitrary and senseless in who they affect.
That’s what you heard from like 5-year-olds, right? It’s very much something a child would say, and even they would get laughed at for it. The scary thing is that there are people old enough to be here on lemmy that somehow believe it, apparently.
It was Simchat Torah, which is a festival day in Israel so their guard may have been expected to be lower, it was a weekend, so more soldiers would be home with their families and fewer people would be at work. Some people have suggested that the timing was related to normalization talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia (basically peace talks between nations that are not actively fighting each other).
Hamas is closely aligned with Iran, and Israel and Saudi Arabia are its two most powerful regional rivals. Cooperation between them is a threat to Iran’s dominance. The same goes for the Houthi group in Yemen and Hezbollah group in Lebanon.
In terms of the reasons why they chose to attack, these are the three main reasons. Which you can find more about in the three different analysis articles below. In terms of the exact date, I’d say it was due to the shift in IDF forces in the region at that time.
First, the policies of the far-right Israeli government enabling settler violence in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem led to a sense of desperation among Palestinians and growing demands for a reaction. At the same time, the rising tensions in the West Bank caused by these policies necessitated the shift of Israeli forces away from the south and into the north to guard the settlements. This gave Hamas both a justification and an opportunity to attack.
Second, the Hamas leadership felt compelled to act due to the acceleration of Arab-Israeli normalisation. In recent years, this process further diminished the significance of the Palestinian issue for Arab leaders who became less keen on pressuring Israel on this matter.
Third, Hamas was emboldened after it managed to repair its ties with Iran. In recent years, the movement had to reconsider the political position it assumed in the wake of the Arab Spring in 2011, in opposition to Iran and its ally, the Syrian regime.
Before October 7, the group not only limited its own rocket attacks on Israel but also publicly punished those who instigated attacks within Gaza to break the fragile ceasefires. Hamas has let the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fight Israel alone, not joining the fray between Israel and the PIJ in August 2022 or in May 2023.
At the same time, there was incendiary far-right political rhetoric and rising levels of violence against Palestinians. Both 2021 and 2022 set records as the deadliest years for Palestinians, as the Netanyahu government green-lit the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and settlers themselves conducted pogroms against Palestinians.
Israel’s focus on the West Bank may also have created an operational opportunity for Hamas. According to Uzi Ben Yitzhak, a retired Israeli general, the Israeli government has deployed most of the regular IDF forces to the West Bank to manage the situation there, leaving only a skeleton force at the Gaza border. The effort to secure permanent Israeli control over the West Bank, in this assessment, created conditions where a Hamas surprise attack could actually succeed.
Thank you for the write up…no sarcasm. I was just kind of wondering was it a significant date or something or as you described a perfect storm that was bound to happen?
Considering the reality of the Apartheid and Occupation, I’d say some kind of violent retaliation was bound to happen. I don’t think the date itself is of any significance, more about the circumstances and opportunity. Although, you could also look into the how the security failure came to be to better understand why it happened then.
The only way I see this conflict ending, after reading the works of Ilan Pappe and other Historians, is a Secular One-State solution where both Israelis and Palestinians have equal rights and Right of Return in the whole of Historical Palestine. That’s what I advocate for, at least
Putin’s birthday. Attacking like they did when they did was likely part of Iran’s agreed upon support for Russia in Ukraine. The point being split US weapons shipments and focus away from Ukraine before Russia’s next major offensive.
Attacking the festival grounds while they were in use was a deliberate choice, not just to seize hostages, but specifically to crush the illusion of freedom those grounds represented to Gazans since they’d use them too for music and art that Hamas had deemed Haram.