The children of October 7

When she first picked up the phone, Linoy Al-Ezra could not believe what she was hearing. “Yes, we are children, but both our parents have just died,” a small voice said. “What about your parents?” the disbelieving dispatcher asked. “They died,” came the answer. “When did they die?” she asked. “Now,” the child answered.

It was 7:07 AM on October 7, 2023, and an Israeli police dispatcher was hearing the first news of the terrorist massacre in Kfar Aza, near the Gaza border. She struggled to understand what the call meant. “Are you calling…Are you making prank calls to the police?” she asked. “Are you lying?”

“No, we’re not lying! We’re not lying!” A girl’s voice piped up in the background: “Tell her it’s true!”

“How did your parents die?”

“Here, at home.”

The dispatchers asked for more details. Then: “How old are you, sweeties?”

“I’m nine, and she’s six…Someone came into the house and shot Mom, and then…” The girl encouraged her brother: “Okay, tell her.”

“He didn’t get to us. He shot our mom,” the boy said. “Then our dad went outside with us. Then another soldier shot him, and we ran back into the house.” The little girl chimed in: “Yes, and maybe our sister died with Dad, too.” The children were 9-year-old Michael Idan and his 6-year-old sister Amalia. Their mother, Smadar, was killed first.

Their father Roee ran into the house, picked up 3-year-old Avigail, and raced outside with Michael and Amalia. A terrorist killed him with his daughter in his arms, and the two older children fled back into the saferoom, where they remained for 14 hours. Even when soldiers came, they would not open the door. It remained locked until their uncle called them through the door. Avigail was kidnapped into Gaza, and released on November 26. While imprisoned as a hostage, she turned four years old.

Despite relentless global attention on the Israel-Gaza War, the actual details of what happened on October 7 have vanished in a roar of equivocation and anti-Jewish conspiracy. But what has unfolded over the past three years cannot be understood without returning to the orgy of murder, rape, sadism, and torture perpetrated by Hamas militants and celebrated by cheering mobs in Gaza, who bayed with joy at the sight of civilian captives being carried back across the border and dead girls on the back of pickup trucks.

The assault from Gaza began at 6:29 AM with a massive rocket barrage and terrorists breaching the border fences with explosives, bulldozers, and vehicles; others came by sea or descended via paraglider. Attacks began in border communities, including Kfar Aza, Be’eri, Nir Oz, and Nahal Oz. By 7 AM, terrorists entered Sderot, and videos of gunmen in vehicles spread across the country. The massacre began at the Nova music festival, where 379 were murdered and about 40 kidnapped. The terrorists perpetrated grotesque acts of sexual torture. To violate Israeli women and girls was part of the plan.

Early reports of the casualty count were confused. We now know about 1,200 people were killed; about 800 of those were civilians. The terrorists took 251 hostages, including 36 under the age of 18, 15 boys and 21 girls. One of the hostages was two; four were three years old; three were just four years old. The Bibas boys, aged 9 months and 4 years, were murdered in captivity. The scenes that unfolded across Israel—often livestreamed by the terrorists themselves from the phones of their victims—are a nightmare.

One video has stuck in my mind. Two parents—the father bloodied—hunch over their sobbing children, covering them with their own bodies as terrorists go through their house. “Daddy, why are your hands full of blood?” the little boy asks. The blood on Tsachi Idan’s hands was from his 18-year-old daughter, who had been shot dead through the door of their saferoom as they tried to hold the door. The terrorists livestreamed the cowering family for twenty minutes, and took Tsachi to Gaza. His body was returned on February 26, 2025.

The war against Hamas began inside Israel as the IDF, security forces, and ordinary Israelis fought to regain control of their country and stop the bloodshed. Israeli ground operations in Gaza would not begin in earnest until October 26. That date is significant, because the narrative three years later is that massive anti-Israeli protests began rocking Western cities in protest of the “disproportionate” response of the Israeli military to the massacres of October 7. But the first rally in support of Hamas was scheduled to take place in Times Square on October 7, but was delayed until October 8. Signs accused Israel of “genocide,” stated that “Resistance is Justified!” and called on people to “Stand with Palestinian Resistance.”

A thousand protestors turned up in front of the Sydney Opera House in Australia on October 9 chanting “Resistance is justified when Palestine is occupied!” and, at one point, “Gas the Jews!” At this point, the only horrifying visuals people were seeing were from inside Israel, where weeping children could be seen hunched over the bloody corpses of their family members. On October 21—five days before the IDF began raids into the Gaza Strip—100,000 participated in a “National March for Palestine” in London, with signs once again accusing Israel of “genocide.” The first more formal allegation that Israel was engaged in a “genocide” was made on October 13, 2023. Six days after October 7, Raz Segal claimed that Israel’s response was “A Textbook Case of Genocide.”

Accusations of genocide were leveled by hundreds of academics before October ended. The narrative was set from the beginning. The genocidal war crimes of October 7 were essentially dismissed. The fact that the Hamas Charter explicitly calls for the total destruction of the Jewish state “from the river to the sea”—that is, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean—was either ignored or deliberately covered up. In fact, legions of protestors claiming to be agitating against a genocide have joined Hamas in this genocidal chant. Many have openly celebrated or justified October 7 and the crimes against men, women, and children–from the verybeginning.

The “genocide” libel began before the Israelis even went into Gaza to destroy Hamas and recover the men, women, and children who had been taken hostage. After that, everything that unfolded in the hellish warzone was evidence for a foregone conclusion. Detailed rebuttals from war scholars like John Spencer were dismissed. You’ve likely seen an endless scroll of social media accusations; you probably haven’t seen comprehensive rebuttals like that published by George Mason University, which observed:

Israel’s documented efforts to mitigate civilian harm—including evacuation warnings, humanitarian corridors, pauses in fighting, legal review of military strikes, and cooperation with an extensive vaccination campaign—however imperfectly implemented, make genocidal intent not merely something other than the ‘only reasonable inference,’ but difficult to regard as a reasonable inference at all.

War is horrifying. Wars for existential survival—and the Hamas Charter and their stated aims when they invaded Israel makes that clear—are often particularly brutal. But the term “genocide” was first used just days after the Palestinian invasion of Israel not against the genocidal Palestinian terrorists, but against Israel. After that, everything was claimed as evidence. Torquing all of this are insidious and wicked statements by Netanyahu ministers who want an isolated Israel as badly as Tucker Carlson does (if you are interested in the politics of this, Haviv Gur and Andrew Fox do a good job explaining).

But they were going to accuse Israel of “genocide” from the very beginning, no matter what happened. It was always part of the plan, despite one unavoidable fact: If Palestinians had not invaded Israel on October 7, not one building in Gaza would have been leveled.

I was in Israel recently working on a documentary on Israel’s Christian communities, and spent hours talking with our liberal Israeli videographers. None of them liked Benjamin Netanyahu, but all had been drastically changed by October 7. One volunteered for a group providing medical care to Palestinians, and was shocked when a Palestinian father informed the doctor that although he was grateful for the help provided to his daughter, he would strike Israel if he got the chance. Another said that he and many of his leftwing friends had reached the grim conclusion that Hamas did not want peace. They wanted to destroy Israel—their families, their friends.

One of the Israelis shared the exact moment his politics changed. It was watching a story from Sderot. When the barrage from Gaza began, Dolev and Odaya Swissa took their six-year-old Romi and three-year-old Lia and fled in their car. Dolev got out with Lia to look for a shelter, and was shot and killed. The little girl made it back to the car, and an Israeli Bedouin Arab, Amer Abu Sabila, offered to help them get to the police station. As the car arrived, terrorists opened fire, and both Sabila and Odaya were killed. The two girls hid, crouched in the back seat.

When Israeli police finally got close to the bullet-ridden vehicle as a firefight raged around them, Romi did not know who was approaching. The terrified six-year-old called out: “Are you with Israel?”

When she understood that they were, she begged: “Take us. I am here with a baby.”

Here, the Israeli broke down as he recalled watching the video. That, he said, crystallized his nation’s struggle for survival, and helped him understand it. Are you with Israel? He, like so many other Israelis, saw marches in support of the enemy who murdered innocent men, women, and children in their homes and on the streets and at a concert just days after the attacks, before the dead were counted and identified. He saw legions chanting “From the river to the sea!” and knew what that meant, because that is where he lives. He saw the fervent “anti-Zionism” that would deny the Jews a state just as the world shows them once again how essential it is that they have one.

“Are you with Israel?” Romi asked. My answer: Yes. I am.