October 7; A Day Israelis Should Blame Their Government For

One year after the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, Israeli people should blame their government as it was the unbridled hostilities of Netanyahu and his far-right ministers that first planted the seeds of this bloody conflict.

One year before on this very day, Hamas carried out a massive attack against Israel, killing more than a thousand and taking hundreds as hostages. In retaliation, Israel restored to a never-seen-before hostility against Palestinians and started in Gaza and the West Bank one of the deadliest armed conflicts in modern time.

According to the health ministry in Gaza, Israel’s war machine has killed more than 42,000 people so far, mostly civilians. Much of Gaza is in ruins, and international organizations accuse Israel of genocide.

But that’s not all. The war has spread to other parts of the region as well, with Lebanon and Yemen becoming new battlefield. A year of killing has stripped away layers of assumptions and illusions, especially for Benjamin Netanyahu, who still believes that he could manage the Palestinian issue without making concessions to their demands for self-determination.

Who to blame for the war?

But difficult and full of fear as the situation has been for Palestinians, Israels have also been living under unimaginable horror of missiles and drones hitting their homes in the middle of the night.

According to recent polls, more than half of Israelis feel extremely unsafe on missiles and drones attacks by Hamas and other parties to the war. This is while Israel claims to possess one of the most effective defense systems, consisting of several layers of missile defense.

When it comes to ‘who to blame for the war?’, Israeli should take a look back at the policies that their far-right government took towards Palestinians a few months before October last year.

To read between the lines, it was in fact Israel’s continued occupation, blockade of Gaza, expansion of settlements, Israel’s disregard for international law, as well as illegal provocative visits to the Al-Aqsa Mosque by Netanyahu’s far right minister Ben-Gvir, that sparked the war of which there is no imminent end in sight.  Following October 7 attack by Hamas, the group issued a statement on why they decided to do so and they exactly referred to all the above-mentioned reasons.