The Volokh Conspiracy
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Revisiting Hamas's Barbaric Attack on Southern Israel: Guest Post by Adam Mossoff
Note from DB: I was going to post something about my visit to the South during the lawprof fact-finding mission I attended, by my colleague Adam Mossoff posted an incredibly thoughtful and well-written account of that day on Facebook that sums up what I wanted to say and more. With his permission, it's reprinted below. If want to see the original public post on Facebook with the devastating accompanying photos, click this link.
Day 2 (July 10) of the law professor mission to Israel was incredibly difficult, as we went south to the Gaza Envelope to visit the sites of the October 7 massacres and atrocities: Kibbutz Nir Oz, the Nova festival grounds, the IDF base Nahal Oz, and the car cemetery at Tekuma. We had guides or speakers at each place, and the stories and information they conveyed made the destruction and death of that day that much more real. It is impossible to convey fully in words or pictures the full sense of destruction of homes and cars—the burned-out husks of homes, the bullet holes, the utterly destroyed vehicles. The stories of sadism committed by the Hamas soldiers and even civilian Palestinians who killed Jews with nihilistic glee – babies, children, adults of every age from 18 years old to the elderly. It was psychologically devastating and emotionally draining to see and hear of pure, unadulterated evil. The only thing worse was the 45-minute film of GoPro videos by the Hamas soldiers we watched the following morning.
As I mentioned in my first post on the first day, the World Jewish Congress did another incredible job with the logistics, including bookending this difficult day with two positive events. First, we began the day early with a stop in Ashkelon, a city of 200,000 people that is only 8 miles from Gaza. It has borne the brunt of the rocket attacks by Hamas for many, many years, and its hospital has been hit many times. But we were in Ashkelon on Wednesday morning to visit the School for the Gifted that was founded and run by Elina Lustov and to learn about the Atlas Juniors program run by Elina and Boaz Arad. The Atlas Junior program provides teenagers the specific knowledge and skills to succeed in high-tech and biotech careers, such as at startups, large companies, or as entrepreneurs themselves. We learned about their studies and the students each did short presentations on their internships at companies and the cutting-edge tech or biotech projects they worked on. It was an inspiring vision of the virtues of Israeli society that promotes education and the application of science and technology in a civil society through commercial development and the free market. The students in the Atlas Juniors are all from Ashkelon or from surrounding communities and kibbutzim that were attacked on October 7, and so we also spoke with them a bit about this. These teenagers are all still deeply affected by that horrible day, but their focus on the future, their intelligence, and their aspirations are both palpable and inspirational.
It was then on to the Gaza Envelope – the area of Israel that is within 4.3 miles (7 km) of the border of Gaza – and one of the most difficult 12-hour days I have ever had in my life.
Our first stop was at the car cemetery near Tekuma. This was not originally intended to become a memorial, as it was setup by the IDF in the days following October 7 for the purpose of collecting the literal ashes and other small body parts from cars that were either burned down to their metal frames or riddled with bullets – or oftentimes both. There are 1,650 cars at the car cemetery. We listened to a presentation by IDF Captain Adam Ittah, who explained what happened on October 7 and gave us the backstories to some of the vehicles, such as an ambulance from the Nova festival that is utterly destroyed – it's nothing but a fire-scarred metal frame riddle with bullet holes (see picture below). During the October 7 attack at the Nova festival, many people, many of whom already wounded, had taken refuge in this ambulance. Hamas soldiers attacked the ambulance (a war crime), riddling it with bullets, throwing hand grenades inside, and then shooting it with an RPG to set it on fire. Ultimately, there was nothing left inside but ashes, from which scientists identified 18 different people. Captain Ittah explained how everything that Hamas soldiers did that day was planned in advance. They brough zip ties for raping and taking hostages, and they brought accelerants with them to set fire to cars and houses so that the fires burned hotter and more intensely. Why bring accelerants?
Their purpose was to reduce their victims to ashes – literally. Judaism has very strong rules and norms about preserving for proper burial any bodies or human remains, and Hamas knew about these norms. So, many Israelis spent weeks and months carefully sweeping up ashes from utterly devastated car husks and from homes, periodically finding small body parts like a finger. They would then send these ashes or remains to laboratories for identification and proper burial. In some cases, officials had to exhume ashes already buried to test them again, because they had uncovered new evidence that the ashes were the remains of two or more people. In some cases, they heartbreakingly discovered this had in fact happened. All of this was confirmation of one of the purposes of the October 7 attacks by Hamas, as Captain Ittah carefully laid out the evidence for the case he was making to us. Hamas did not just want to kill as many Jews as possible, as well as kill others who support Jews by being in Israel, like the Thais, Druze, and Bedouins also slaughtered by Hamas. Hamas deliberately sought to humiliate and denigrate everyone they attacked on October 7 – rape, torture, murder, and then make it next to impossible even for loved ones to identify and bury the victims of these heinous war crimes.
For those of you who may know, one of the victims at the Nova festival was a disabled, wheelchair-bound 16-year-old girl (Rute Peretz). Her remains were found and identified in early November – almost a month after the attack – underneath the destroyed ambulance that I described above. It was utterly heartbreaking to hear Captain Ittah recount this story, among many other details of the October 7 attacks.
We next went to Kibbutz Nir Oz, which is only one mile from the Gaza border, and where 46 people were murdered, including several children as young as 5 years old, and 78 hostages were taken, accounting for almost 1/3 of the total hostages taken by Hamas and Gaza civilians on October 7. Whole families were murdered, along with young children, and elderly were burned alive in their beds. For those of you who have been following the continuing war-crime saga of the hostages, 9-month-old baby Kfir Bibas and his 4-year-old brother were taken hostage from Nir Oz, along with both his parents.
This visit to Nir Oz was a harrowing visit to a place of destruction and death. Although there are some places of peace and normality in the kibbutz, such as in the central yard of the kibbutz where the kibbutz's peacock still roams around, Nir Oz otherwise looks like a scene from a war with burned-out homes and buildings riddled with bullet holes. In southern Israel, homes are made of concrete, and some homes had nothing left inside of them, as even metal kitchen appliances melted from the fires set by Hamas soldiers (using accelerants to make them burn hotter, as I explained above). In other homes, the destruction seemed arbitrary or perhaps just incomplete, such as a kitchen table left perfectly untouched next to an utterly destroyed bedroom and kitchen. One destroyed home had Arabic graffiti written on the wall (see picture below).
The pictures don't convey the full sense of the war crime that occurred at Nir Oz. It has been 9 months since the attack on October 7. When we arrived, our guide took us first to the dining hall and it still has the overwhelming stench of death to this day – if you've ever smelled it, you never forget it. The smell is the result of the 46 bodies of young children, elderly, and adults who were placed in the kibbutz refrigerator right after October 7 because the residents had no other place else to put all of them. The bodies are long-since gone, but the smell remains. The kitchen in the dining hall building was burned and destroyed by Hamas and the doors were riddled with bullet holes (see pictures below).
Our guide for the kibbutz was one of the residents, Sharon Lifshitz. Sharon explained that it was clear that Hamas had advance intelligence about the kibbutz before the attack; in all the kibbutzim Hamas attacked that day, Hamas soldiers first went to the home or office of the kibbutz security officer to murder him, preventing the kibbutz from defending itself. These homes and offices are not identified on the homes or buildings themselves and so Hamas had to have had intel about these places. The sources for this intel were the many Gazans who were hired to work in these kibbutzim or were otherwise invited into them every week by the residents. Kibbutzim are socialist-style communes, and the people who live in them, including at Nir Oz, are leftists and peaceniks. Many of the kibbutz residents were activists working for the cause of the Palestinians in Gaza; at Nir Oz, there was a poster still hanging on the wall outside of the dining hall advertising a peace demonstration for the *evening of October 7* sponsored by the "Israeli/Palestinian Bereaved Families for Peace." The father of our guide at Nir Oz was prominently known to the Gazans, as he had permission to use the kibbutz's car every week to drive Gazans to hospitals in Israel for medical treatment. Her father and mother were in their shelter in their house when they were taken hostage, and their home was then destroyed. Given his prominence, it's hard not to think that her father was specifically targeted by Hamas.
Sharon further explained that there were three waves of attacks on October 7: (1) elite Hamas commandos, (2) regular Hamas soldiers, and (3) Gazan civilians who came to loot, pillage, murder, and take more hostages. She remarked that, of the three waves of attacks, they feared most the Gaza civilians. We heard from others that Hamas soldiers sometimes protected hostages from being brutally beaten or outright murdered by the Gazans. Approximately 3,000 Hamas soldiers participated in the attack on October 7, but untold thousands more Gazans followed these Hamas soldiers in the hours afterward to further pillage, murder, or take more hostages.
Our visit to Nir Oz also confirmed again what we learned from Captain Ittah about how the purpose of Hamas on October 7 was to denigrate and metaphorically spit in the faces of the Israelis whom we heard the Hamas soldiers in the film of the GoPro cameras we watched the next day repeatedly call "dogs." At Nir Oz, Hamas deliberately sought to murder and kidnap the very Jews (and their children and babies) who explicitly supported the Gazan Palestinians in their claims about "injustice" and "occupation" by Israel. The intent and clearly conveyed message of October 7 is unmistakable: it was pure genocidal nihilism.
Our visit to the Nova festival grounds was next. The area of the festival is beautiful. It's a grove of trees that were planted by Israelis and kept alive in the desert by an underground irrigation system. It's an example of the value-orientation and productive work of Israeli society that has literally turned a desert wasteland into a country of orchards, farmland, and forests.
The small field where the main stage was at the Nova festival is now filled with memorial posts with the photos of each of the murdered attendees. About 370 people at the festival were massacred on October 7. We learned that Hamas had probably not originally planned to attack the Nova festival, but when the Hamas paragliders saw it in the first wave of attacks, they radioed back to the Hamas soldiers, who then implemented a "pincer strategy" tactic in attacking the festival. The result is that when the young people ran from the Hamas soldiers in the opposite direction, they unknowingly ran to their deaths because they ran right into Hamas soldiers attacking from the opposite direction.
Much of our time at the Nova festival grounds was spent listening to the harrowing story of Bar Hinitz, a young, 23-year-old man who was lucky enough to survive the attack. He explained how he survived only by accident, because he was in a group of cars that drove away from the festival after the large rocket barrage flew overhead that was the start of the Hamas attack from Gaza. In driving away, Bar accidentally turned left and went south on the main road instead of turning right to go north. The cars that went north drove into an ambush setup by Hamas soldiers, who slaughtered hundreds of people stuck inside their cars with nowhere else to go. By the time Bar and his friends realized their mistake and turned around to go north, local police were already directing cars to get off the road and drive east across the open terrain, and thus he avoided the deathtrap further up the road. Not made for cross-country driving, Bar and his friends eventually got out and ran with the sounds of gunshots everywhere. He ran for miles that morning, stopping for breaks and hiding with others in bushes and trees, narrowly missing at times the Hamas soldiers who were hunting down the fleeing partygoers.
The field of memorial posters at the Nova festival grounds was crushingly depressing. It is not hyperbole to call this a massacre. No other word describes it. Every one of the 370 or so posters had a picture of a young, beautiful, vibrant, smiling face – young men and women in their late teens or early twenties – who were at the start of their (adult) lives. I felt like I could have just as easily been looking at the pictures of the faces of my students at Scalia Law that is given to me before class starts each semester. These young people came to a rave on October 6 to dance and party for peace with the Gazans, and 370 of them were raped, tortured, and murdered.
While we were at the Nova festival grounds, we were also reminded of the continuing war in Gaza. In a nearby grove, the IDF had setup artillery for shelling Hamas positions in Gaza. We could not see the cannons, but when those 155mm howitzers fired, the loud boom filled the air and you could feel a slight concussive force in your chest. As Bar began telling his story, we heard the first artillery shot, and we all jumped a bit, despite having been told in advance on our bus that we would hear this at the Nova festival grounds. (We could hear very muffled booms from faraway during our earlier visit to Nir Oz.) Well, I can now attest that knowing in the abstract that we would hear artillery and then in fact hearing and feeling this artillery were entirely different, just as reading about October 7 and visiting the sites of the atrocities of October 7 are entirely different experiences. This is the reason why we bear witness to October 7 by visiting these sites, just as people visit the Nazi death camps today. When we heard the first cannon fire during Bar's story, one of the people in our mission standing next to me asked, "What was that?," and without thinking, I immediately replied, "Justice."
The last thing we did was tour the Nahal Oz military base, which was attacked on October 7. There was a pitched battle at the base at the command center, which had only one door for entry, as IDF soldiers, some of them still in their underwear because they were awoken at 6:30 by the attack, battled Hamas commandos who attacked the command center with AK-47s, grenades, and RPGs. After the base was quickly overrun, 22 soldiers fought from inside the command center until Hamas soldiers threw incendiary devices into the command center, which started a conflagration that burned out the command center. Five IDF soldiers were able to escape out a small bathroom window in the back, but the rest were burned alive. (Below are some pictures from the remains of the inside of the command center.) We were also shown their new high-tech observation capabilities that replaced the observation towers they used to use and we even saw up close some Merkava tanks – no photos allowed, understandably.
Nahal Oz is also where Hamas captured and tortured female soldiers, all of them were between 19-20 years old and in training and working as lookouts at the base. Many of us have already seen videos of them by Hamas that were taken from GoPro cameras and later released by Israel (Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Agam Berger, Daniela Gilboa and Naama Levy). Some remain hostages of Hamas to this day.
We ended the evening by joining Grilling for Israel (www.grillingforisrael.com) to assist in preparing a BBQ dinner of hamburgers and steaks for the soldiers stationed at the base. Grilling for Israel is an incredible organization, staffed by volunteers who are helping feed the IDF; please support them, if you can, and offer to volunteer if you visit Israel. After our deeply disturbing and difficult day learning the details of the Hamas atrocities and war crimes of October 7, it was wonderful to focus on something positive in preparing BBQ dinners, which we then ate along with the soldiers while we chatted with them about their lives and interests outside of the IDF, as many are reservists called to active duty like Captain Ittah earlier. They were all so friendly and joyous, and the beautiful smiles of these young men and women reflecting perfectly the spirit of Israel were a perfect tonic after a depressing day of death and destruction.
We then left Nahal Oz very late in the evening for the long drive to Tel Aviv, where we would complete our mission the next day. We arrived in Tel Aviv around midnight. It was a truly exhausting day, mentally and physically. I still have not processed everything I heard and saw. The next day would start with an even more difficult viewing of the 45-minute film of the videos from the GoPro cameras worn by the Hamas soldiers, which left me in literal shock for a couple hours. But the next day was also filled with fascinating meetings and discussions about international law with former officials, IDF lawyers, and private lawyers representing Israel or NGOs before the ICC or ICJ. We all learned more than we could have hoped for about how modern international law has been applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how it is rigged process that allows bad actors like Hamas and their supporting client states, like Iran, to use it in explicit lawfare tactics against Israel. That will be the subject of my next posts.
