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.
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.