To ensure that there will never be another October 7

‏There are days in the life of a nation that do not end when the sun sets. They remain within it, changing the way it looks at itself, at its neighbors, and at the world. ‏For the State of Israel, October 7, 2023, is such a day. ‏Until that morning, Israel still believed that it was possible to build a different reality with Gaza. It provided electricity free of charge, brought hundreds of tons of food and medical equipment into Gaza, permitted thousands of workers from Gaza to enter Israel, and Israeli hospitals treated patients from Gaza  women, men, and children with Israeli doctors fighting for their lives just as they fought for the life of any other patient. ‏On the morning of October 7, that assumption was shattered with a brutality that is difficult to describe. ‏Hamas terrorists and other armed groups, alongside civilians from Gaza, young people and even elderly people on crutches, crossed the border. ‏They entered kibbutzim, homes, children’s rooms, and a music festival where thousands of young people had come simply to dance. ‏Some of them knew the homes intimately, only because these were their employers people who had provided them with a livelihood and welcomed them into their homes. ‏What happened in the hours that followed needs no exaggeration. The facts themselves are difficult enough. ‏Civilians were shot at close range. Families were burned alive in their homes. Young people were hunted through fields and along roads as they tried to escape from Nova. Bodies were mutilated. Women, men, elderly people, and children were abducted to Gaza. ‏Then the extent of the sexual violence also became clear. ‏In March 2024, Pramila Patten, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, published the findings of the team she led to Israel.  ‏The team examined more than 5,000 photographs and approximately 50 hours of video footage, visited the sites of the massacre and the morgue, and interviewed survivors, witnesses, and released hostages. ‏The team determined that that rape and gang rape occurred in at least three locations: the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im. ‏In most of these incidents, according to the team’s findings, the victims were raped and then killed. It also documented a pattern of victims, primarily women, who were found naked or partially naked from the waist down, bound and shot. Regarding the hostages, the team found clear and convincing information of sexual violence, including rape and sexualized torture. ‏These are sentences that are difficult to write, and even more difficult to imagine… ‏But the hardest thing is to understand that human beings did these things to other human beings. ‏And above all, one almost incomprehensible question remains: Who abducts a baby? Who takes babies and small children from their warm beds, still dressed in their pajamas pajamas with little teddy bears and the characters children love and takes them into the darkness of captivity? ‏Who takes elderly people over the age of eighty into tunnels and captivity? ‏What moral abyss must one cross in order to look at a child, a mother, or an elderly person and put them into a dark tunnel as a captive? ‏For me, October 7 also represented a personal rupture. ‏I am a lawyer, and for years I worked in the field of human rights. I also fought for the rights of Palestinians. I represented them in court and helped families from Gaza reach medical treatment in Israel. I believed that it was the duty of a democratic state to protect the rights of a person even when that person was on the other side of a conflict. ‏Perhaps that is why October 7 was also such a profound moral slap in the face for me. ‏The image of Kfir and Ariel Bibas, the two red-haired children who were abducted with their mother and killed in captivity, does not leave me. ‏And since then, I have found it difficult to accept the ease with which people, sometimes from thousands of kilometers away, judge the way Israel is fighting to ensure that such a day never happens again. ‏And here it is very important to note: Israel is committed to international law. The IDF has an International Law Department that accompanies operational activity, and its officers are integrated into operational planning processes and provide ongoing legal advice regarding the laws of armed conflict. ‏And there is another fact that is important to remember. ‏Israel has one of the most advanced air forces in the world. Gaza is a very small territory, and yet the war was not conducted from the air alone. ‏On the contrary, Israel sent its soldiers onto the ground into alleys, homes, and tunnels into places where they themselves were required to fight at close range and risk their lives. ‏Hundreds of them never returned. ‏Therefore, before judging a country for the way it protects its citizens, it is worth to know facts, as well as to remembering what happened on the day when it failed to protect them. ‏October 7 taught us, in the cruelest possible way, the price of that hour in which a state is not there to protect its citizens. ‏And since that morning, the State of Israel has had a duty that it cannot pass on to anyone else and cannot allow itself to fail in again: ‏To ensure that there will never be another October 7. My first column as Ambassador of Israel, written for a Greek newspaper, is dedicated to the memory of Ariel and Kfir Bibas. May their memory be a blessing.