The Essential Guidebook to October 7 and its Aftermath

Key Findings:

This guidebook seeks to help Jews and non-Jews, in Israel and worldwide, understand the events that have unfolded since October 7 in historical and ideological context.

Chapter 1: What happened on October 7?

On Saturday, October 7, 2023, over 3,000 Hamas terrorists invaded Israel from Gaza in what they called “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.” Thousands of other Gazans followed — some had worked with the Israelis they assaulted. The Palestinian marauders killed at least 1,139 Israelis and 71 foreigners, including citizens from 30 nations, wounding 4,834, and kidnapping 253 men, women, and children – some dead, most alive. 

Hezbollah, a Lebanese terrorist army and political party, started firing rockets from southern Lebanon to help Hamas. Within days, over 150,000 Israelis were displaced from their homes, north and south. On October 17, exploiting the chaos, Iran unleashed its proxies, especially Yemen-based Houthis, targeting international shipping lanes and the bases America established against Islamists in Iraq, eastern Syria, and northern Jordan. Israel launched a full-scale war against Hamas in Gaza, while skirmishing with Hezbollah. 

Chapter 2: Why did Hamas attack? 

Hamas is an antisemitic jihadist movement, which vows in its charter to “obliterate” Israel, seeking one Jew-free state of Palestine, “from the River to the Sea” – from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 – the Disengagement – uprooting 8,500 Israelis. By 2007, Hamas had seized power in a coup. Since then, Palestinians resented Israel’s defensive blockade, while Israelis resented the ongoing rocket fire from Gaza, which Israel’s disengagement didn’t stop. Pressured by the international community, Israeli leaders started acting on the assumption that Hamas was turning pragmatic, and preferred governing Gaza to destroying Israel. Yet Article 25 of Hamas’s charter endorses “armed resistance” with “all means and methods.” That concept – Conceptzia in Hebrew – lulled Israelis into a false sense of security, which collapsed on October 7. 

3. Why did Israel launch a war that killed and displaced so many civilians? 

International law justifies fighting back when a hostile neighbor invades. The war began on Israel’s side as a counterattack to repel the invaders. In the first three days, during the initial attack and counter-attack, 382 Israeli soldiers were killed, along with 59 police officers, 13 medics, and dozens of civilians who also mobilized instantly. Israel then vowed to degrade Hamas’s military capabilities and defeat it politically, to avoid a recurrence. Hamas had spent years hiding its weapons and headquarters in hospitals, kindergartens, mosques, apartment buildings, and hundreds of miles of tunnels, some seven stories deep. In this small, fortified territory, with Hamas fighters hiding behind civilians, many Gazans were caught in the crossfire. Israel’s unprecedented efforts to protect civilians kept the ratio of civilians killed to each terrorist killed far lower than America’s ratios of 4 to 1 or more, in Iraq and Afghanistan - even with many tragic misfires. Every life is sacred. Many Israelis regretted the hard choices their soldiers were making – and the high cost the Hamas invasion imposed on both sides. 

4. Why did events in Israel disrupt so many lives thousands of miles away? 

October 7 was cataclysmic. Israel suffered the highest per capita loss of any country ever from a terrorist attack. The scale of the murders; the viciousness of the rapes and maimings; the assaults on the elderly, pregnant women, little girls, baby boys, commanded attention worldwide. Many Palestinian terrorists recorded their crimes, broadcasting footage on social media. Such a well-publicized, catastrophic Islamist assault anywhere would have commanded attention. But Israel is often in the news, and a well-funded network of pro-Palestinian activists obsessively targets Israel. Even before Israel counterattacked, these protesters accused Israel of genocide and unleashed waves of antisemitic assaults that continue. 

Israel’s just war to degrade Hamas’s military power in Gaza slogs on. The threats from Hezbollah to Israel’s north, and from the Houthis to the international shipping community, intensify – Hezbollah rockets have destroyed over 500 Israeli homes. Iran’s nefarious influence on these events becomes clearer daily. And, globally, the assault on Israel, Zionism, and Jews keeps disrupting campuses, legislatures, and public squares.

5. Why did Iran attack Israel on April 13? 

Iran’s leaders justified their missile barrage of 320 rockets against Israel by pointing to the killing in Syria of eleven Iranians, including two leading generals. But Iran’s Islamic Republic is obsessed with destroying the Jewish State. Israel and the Iranian regime have skirmished in the shadows for decades. Through the services of one of the dead generals, Mohammed Zahedi, Iran helped orchestrate Hamas’s assault on October 7, and greenlighted the subsequent attacks against Israel launched by Hezbollah, the Houthis and others in the “Axis of Resistance.” The remarkable success of Israel and the coalition of allies in downing most of the missiles neither diminishes the scale of the attack nor does it excuse its lethal intentions.