Israel was taken by surprise by the most ambitious operation Hamas has ever launched from Gaza.
The scale of what’s been happening is unprecedented. Hamas breached the wire that separates Gaza from Israel in multiple places in the most serious cross-border attack Israel has faced in more than a generation.
It came a day after the 50th anniversary of the surprise attack by Egypt and Syria in 1973 that started a major Middle East war. The significance of the date will not have been lost on the Hamas leadership.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says his country is at war and will exact a heavy price from its enemies.
Videos and photos of dead Israelis, civilians as well as soldiers, are all over social media.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Other videos of armed men from Hamas hauling soldiers and civilians into captivity in Gaza have enraged and alarmed Israelis.
Israelis and Palestinians have been focusing on the West Bank, the territory between Jerusalem and the Jordanian border that Israel has occupied since 1967, where there has been almost continuous confrontation and violence throughout the year.
Armed Palestinians, especially those operating out of the West Bank towns of Jenin and Nablus, have attacked Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers.
Extreme religious nationalists inside Israel’s right-wing government have repeated their claim that the occupied territories, in their entirety, are Jewish land.
During the last week, some Jews have prayed inside the Aqsa Mosque compound, the third holiest place for Muslims after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.
At the heart of the trouble is the intractable and unresolved century-long conflict between Arabs and Jews for control of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the river Jordan.
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