At least 600 Israelis have been killed and around 100 taken hostage in the deadliest attack in the country’s history
Steve Markachenko, a 25-year-old from Carmel, in northern Israel, had been looking forward to attending the Nova music festival on a desert kibbutz this weekend. He and his girlfriend, Elisa Levin, 34, drove four hours south on Friday night for the event celebrating the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot.
But at 6.30am on Saturday, they were among thousands of young partygoers enjoying the sunrise but unaware that their lives were about to change for ever. At first, the air raid sirens seemed as if they were part of the trance music, survivors said. Then rocket vapour trails began appearing in the sky above: people began panicking about being caught in the open and rushed to their cars. And then the gunfire began.
About 200 people are believed to have been killed at the all-night festival, and dozens more are still missing, believed to have been taken to the Gaza Strip as hostages. The attack was one of the worst single incidents during the Palestinian militant group Hamas’ surprise offensive Operation al-Aqsa Flood – a day that will go down in history as Israel’s 9/11.
Some attenders watched their friends die in front of them; others played dead for hours until they heard voices speaking in Hebrew and knew help had arrived. Videos from the scene showed lifeless bodies on the ground, a shot-up van, and men and women being dragged away by armed militants. Screams fill the air.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The attack was one of the worst single incidents during the Palestinian militant group Hamas’ surprise offensive Operation al-Aqsa Flood – a day that will go down in history as Israel’s 9/11.
In what is usually a deeply divided society, Israelis of all backgrounds – secular, ultra-Orthodox, nationalist-religious types, Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Palestinian citizens of Israel – milled around the building, united in worry and grief.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were slow to respond; fighting continued overnight and into Saturday evening as the army still struggled to neutralise gunmen in different locations; by sundown, at least three villages and kibbutzim appeared to be going back and forth between Israeli and Hamas control.
As the war lurched into a second day on Sunday, sirens continued to blare across southern and central Israel as volleys of rockets launched from Gaza hit the same areas that suffered Saturday’s violence; the IDF is evacuating Israelis from a buffer zone around the strip, making a ground offensive more likely.
Near the city of Ashkelon, highways heading north were packed, but empty in the other direction, other than army vehicles and a handful of civilian cars blasting music to raise troops’ morale.
On Ha-Tamar Street, in the small town of Ofakim, nearly every house was covered in bullet holes, every car shot up, and traditional Sukkot tents for eating outside during the holiday ripped and torn.
The original article contains 1,394 words, the summary contains 231 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I feel like I’m hearing a lot of terrible things from both sides , but I am kind of ignorant to alot of this stuff . Is there a side that is in the right at this point ? Looking for serious unbiased information.
Edit : thanks for all the replies I’m going to continue to not support either side for now .
Looking for serious unbiased information.
That’s the problem, there is no unbiased information when it comes to this part of the world.
There’s no such thing unbiased information. The term doesn’t even make sense. Bias is a statistical concept that has to do with incident rate. If I throw 800 darts and they statistically tend towards the number 20 on the dart board, I am throwing with a bias for 20. If I have 20000 interactions with humans and have more negative emotional responses when talking to black people, I have a bias in my behaviors for negative reactions to black people.
Information is just information. It tells you what it tells you. The problem is that it’s always telling what it’s telling you and that’s not useful. You also need to know what it’s not telling you, and for that, you need more information.
A source can be biased in that they tell you things and don’t tell you other things in a way that exhibits with statistical patterns. For example a news source can tell you all the bad things Hamas does and not tell you any of the bad things Israel does. That source is biased. But the information itself is not biased.
There is no solution to biased sources. All sources exhibit bias. If they didn’t, they would be one of two other types of sources: with either they would tell you every thing it was possible to tell you, which is useless, or it would omit things entirely randomly and exhibit no bias, which is also useless.
Therefore, you as a learning organism must soure information as best you can and you must get better at it over time. You will always exhibit a statistical bias in what behaviors you choose and how those behaviors lead to information gathering, filtering, and organizing.
So, do your best, chase down and resolve contradictions, be willing to be wrong, and be willing to be very very very wrong so long as it means you will learn from it and get better at gathering information.
On the one hand, Israel is guilty of multiple abuses. Illegal construction of settlements, a low degree of care whether civilians are near military targets when bombing, even a history of individual Israeli soldiers engaging in brutality.
But on the other hand, Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization.
There isn’t any comparison. Does the government of Israel smell like roses? No, but Hamas is an open sewer.
Israel is the country engaged in genocide. They are the one that has structurally established themselves as an ethno state and created conditions of mass displacement, mass death, and mass collective punishment.
Ok tankie
Try measuring population growth and explain how genocide works.
Ok tankie
Both sides have done horrible things but in my opinion hamas is much worse for what they have done in this conflict.
Just this conflict? What about last Thursday?
Objectively I have a tendency to side with Israel. Their a few steps short of a fascist dictatorship but their not a literal terrorist organisation pretending to be a peoples government so theirs that.
That’s not objective at all. What the fuck do you think ovjectivity even means?
So kinda a Saudi vs Afghanistan deal?
