“Occupiers can only have temporary power, eventually they have to leave. They have to go back somewhere. But men fighting for their homes cannot be defeated. You give them no choice; they must fight you. They have nowhere else to go, nowhere to retreat to.” FBhutto Never have Palestinians succeeded in taking back so much of their land and breaking out of the segregated ghettoes in which Israel had concentrated them. This is possibly the largestever Palestinian liberation operation in modern history. This was not an attack, it was a response! Anyone would fight back after the decades-long process of colonisation, after they have been turned into stateless refugees expelled and concentrated in tiny ghettoes, imprisoned, or killed for daring to resist. For 15 years Israel has besieged Gaza with snipers stationed all around it, drones occupying its skies, 24/7 and new patrols shooting at any fishermen who venture too deep.

If this happened to your city, wouldn’t you fight back?

Palestinians didn’t “infiltrate Israel”. Most Gazans are not actually from Gaza.70% of them are from the same surrounding lands they liberated yesterday morning. Israel wiped out and cleansed many Palestinian villages that Israel wiped out and ethically cleansed. Most Gazans are from these places, fighting to return home. Typically, Israeli- held Palestinian hostages are only released through a swap with Israeli prisoners. Hammas has enough Israeli prisoners to free every single Palestinian hostage held by Israelis. The last Hamas-Israel prisoner swap was 1 Israeli soldier for 1027 Palestinians.

 Above all the most important historic moment already reshared millions of times online, Palestinian bulldozers have brought down parts of the Israeli wall and fence that surrounds Gaza and traps its residents. This comes as Palestinians have finally regained control of parts of the border, including the crossing in and out of Gaza. This is indeed a historic achievement.

Israeli’s security policy for decades now has been to “manage the conflict”. Successive Israeli governments insisted on round after round of violence as if any of it would make a difference. They talk about “security”, “deterrence”, “changing the equation”. All of these have been code words for bombing the Gaza Strip to a pulp. Always justified as targeting terrorists, yet always with heavy civilian casualties. In between these rounds the violence they made life impossible for the Gazans and acted surprised when it all boiled over. They talked about normalisation with UAE and now Saudi Arabia, while hoping the world would turn a blind eye to the open-air prison they built in their backyard. Apart from the unfathomable violation of human rights, they have created a massive security liability for all the Israelis. The question each Israeli is asking is- where were the soldiers yesterday? The unfortunate truth is that they were “preoccupied “ with the West Bank.

So far this year Israel one of the most powerful militaries in the world has killed 400 Palestinians, including dozens of children. In 2021 alone, Israel killed over 260 Palestinians in Gaza including at least 67 children, less than 2 weeks. Israel has subjected Palestinians in Gaza to a brutal siege for 16 years. It cut Gaza off from the rest of the world, trapping over 2 million Palestinian residents inside, causing a severe shortage of life-saving medicines, food and clean water that made life unbearable. The root cause of violence in Israel and Palestine is Israel’s decades-long military occupation, racist apartheid system and its brutal siege on millions of Palestinians in Gaza.