Britain must stand up against those who support Hamas

It was 7 a.m. when the ‘peace rave’ outside of Re’im was reaching its peak. Outside the kibbutz, five miles from the Gaza border, the participants of the dance festival were ‘coming up’ at just the moment that the terrorists of Hamas started to come down.

They arrived on motorised paragliders, with machine-guns in position, like something from Mad Max. They came by motorbike and in trucks bearing the marks of Hamas. Rockets had already started firing across Israel from Gaza, but here the twenty- and thirty-something rave attendees were soon running in every direction across the Negev desert – hunted down. At the time of writing, 260 bodies have been recovered from the site. This is just one of the many simultaneous massacres across Israel in the areas nearest to Gaza. It is Israel’s worst security breach for 50 years, and the biggest hit to the perception of Israeli invulnerability in two generations.

Before looking at cause and consequence, we should dwell on what actually happened to those hundreds of young Israelis. Some who survived have described the scene first-hand. The terrorists seemed to make a special target of the young women. One witness said that women were raped on the site of the rave next to their friends’ dead bodies. In a scene that no Israeli in a generation could have believed possible, some of the women were kidnapped and driven into Gaza. Many seemed to have been murdered already, others were only just alive. Videos online show Hamas parading some of these women through the streets of Gaza, blood visibly trailing from between their legs. The naked and desecrated bodies of others are spat on by the Gazans.