The rockets began around 6:30 a.m., Tal Gibly told CNN. Thirty minutes later, she and hundreds of others attending a music festival were running as Gaza militants fired at them.
The outdoor event in a rural farmland area near the Gaza-Israel border was supposed to be an all-night dance party, celebrating the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. But as dawn broke, Gibly said they began hearing sirens and rockets.
“We didn’t even have any place to hide because we were at [an] open space,” she told CNN. “Everyone got so panicked and started to take their stuff.”
Explosions can be heard in video taken by Gibly of her and friends walking through the quickly emptying concert grounds, roughly two miles from the border.
“Ima’le,” someone is heard saying, a common Israeli expression of fear or feeling startled.
Gibly and the others didn’t know it, but less than two miles away, Gaza militants had also begun attacking Israeli tanks and soldiers.
Is it common to have music festivals near the Gaza border?
Thank you for asking this question. Because this seems like a horrible idea for that part of the world.
If you want to make sure they hear you having fun while they’re starving, it’s the perfect place.
Apparently it actually is, the Gaza music scene apparently does a lot of their concerts out there too.
There have been concerts in war zones before(like ‘Screeam for me, Sarajevo’). And a small dance festival near an almost ‘peaceful’ border does not sound that bad.
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The loss of life is awful but this whole thing was and is preventable. Israel could end the conflict by giving the Palestinians their land back, letting them rule themselves without a boot to their neck, and all around just leaving them alone.
NOT that I support everything the Israeli government has done, and honestly the whole thing is a clusterfuck of epic proportions if we’re being honest. But, there’s a reason Israel has the area blockaded and controlled in the first place (or as you put it, has a boot on their neck) - Hamas’ goal is the eradication of the Jewish state and Jewish life and culture in the region. They hate Jews, pure and simple. At best, any Jews they might allow to stay if they had their way, would live under strict Islamic control like in other parts of the middle east. If I lived in Israel, I could be the most left-wing person you’d meet and I still wouldn’t advocate for the suicide of my people, because I’m not insane.
Hamas does not share western leftist’s and liberal’s sense of justice or fairness. They are a militant Islamist terror organization. “Leaving them alone” and hoping they chill is a fantasy.
Insane how many commies there are in here that are praising a terrorist attack on civilians all because Israel bad. Israel isn’t perfect but they sure as hell are a lot better than a bunch of wack ass Muslim extremist terrorists.
Plenty of commies are anti-semites like the Soviets They support the destruction of Israel and the eradication of Jews like plenty of Muslims do. They often believe in the international Jewish conspiracy.
While I agree that there is no practical solution that’s just “Israel leaves” at this point, it also must be remembered that Hamas was funded by Israel in part because Fatah in the 90s had made too much progress in peace negotiations and appearing to be reasonably representative of the Palestinian people.
It’s all kinds of fucked.
It’s all kinds of fucked.
Best and most accurate summary of the situation I’ve yet read
The whole notion of a “Jewish state” is theocratic, thus it should be eliminated. There is literally no reason for it to exist. It’s controlled by right-wing religious extremists who only care about spreading their silly, little fairy tale as much as possible instead of letting it die out like it is elsewhere.
Fuck off.
There is no such thing as “their land” in that portion of the world. The little chunk of land has changed hands, extremely violently, hundreds of times. And Palestine was never a country to begin with. It was part of the Ottoman Empire for a few hundred years before the Brits took it after WWI and ruled it under mandate from the League of Nations.
The ottomans took it from the Mamluk Sultanate, who took it from the Ayyubid Dynasty, who took it from the Kingdom of Jerusalem, who took it from the Arabs in the first crusade, who took it from the Byzantine empire in the Muslim conquest, who took it from the Roman Empire, who took it from the Greeks, who took it from the Macedonians and Alexander the Great, who took it from the Persian Empire, who took it from the Babylonians, who took it from the Jews under the Kingdom of Judah, who was ruled by the Assyrians as a vassal state. With about 1000 different wars in between those where it changed hands.
The entire Levant has been conquered, divided up, split apart, conquered again, been part of empires where the entire levant was one region, and changed hands over and over and over again violently. Israel and Palestine have been part of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Arabia over the years.
There’s no such thing as “giving them back their land”. Because there’s never really been an independent state there to begin with. Everyone that’s ever lived there took it by killing the people that lived there before them.
This is such a bad faith argument. We’re not talking about historical geopolitics, we’re talking about people recently being kicked out of their land and cornered onto an increasingly smaller chunk of land. I mean there are Israeli settlers living in homes whose owners are Palestinian and still around.
Violence is tragic, but if you literally keep backing people into a corner, some of them are going to get pissed off and stop caring if they die or not because their life doesn’t seem like it can get any worse anyway.
There is also a huge asymmetry in coverage for violent events in the region. I was reading a book sometime back that was a collection of interviews with Israeli and Palestinian writers, and they were almost physically unable to get into the west bank to interview people because of Israeli border controls worried someone might say something positive about Palestine. I also know people who did humanitarian trips into Gaza and the west bank, and literally they couldn’t even have anything with the Palestinian flag on them or they would get subjected to all sorts of searches and screenings.
This is hardly a humane way to treat people. Military conquest isn’t how modern countries make claims on land in the 21st century.
Maybe India should just come in and be like “okay, NONE of you can have it! This is Shiva land now!”
Everyone that’s ever lived there took it by killing the people that lived there before them.
False. But to entertain your claim, who did the Palestinians expel?
The ottomans took it from the Mamluk Sultanate, who took it from the Ayyubid Dynasty, who took it from the Kingdom of Jerusalem, who took it from the Arabs in the first crusade, who took it from the Byzantine empire in the Muslim conquest, who took it from the Roman Empire
These transfers of power weren’t accompanied by mass expulsions and settlement of new peoples except during the Crusades and modern Zionism
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I think most of the gunmen expected to die.
But you are properly referring to the hundreds of civilians that will be killed in retaliation right?
And rightfully so.
