An Israeli military representative called Hamas’ attack on Israel “the worst massacre of innocent civilians in Israel’s history,” according to Reuters.
Yoni Asher recounted seeing a video of his wife and two small children being seized by Palestinian gunmen. “My two little girls, they’re only babies. They’re not even five years old and three years old,” Asher said. His wife had taken the children to visit her mother.
Many Israelis do not know if their loved ones are dead or alive. It’s difficult to imagine.
Trey Yingst, a veteran foreign correspondent for Fox News, didn’t have to imagine the horror of the terrorist attack. Scenes of parents showing up to give hair samples from their kids to officials who might be able to use them to identify bodies haunt Yingst, and will for a long time to come.
Yingst was reporting from Isreal on the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel, which, as of Monday, had killed over 900 Israelis, according to CBS News. Most of the dead were civilians.
“There’s been a center set up here in Israel where families can give names and even DNA,” Yingst reported outside a police station in Sderot, according to The Hill.
“And when you watch the Israeli press at night, you see scenes of parents showing up to …,” he continued. At this point, reporting on the slaughter was getting to be too much. Yingst had to hold back the tears. The horror of war was taking its toll.
“Sorry, it’s … it’s difficult,” Yingst managed to say after a pause to collect himself. “But parents showing up to give hair of their kids to the authorities to see if they can match the DNA to the bodies.”
‘IT’S DIFFICULT’: @TreyYingst shares the emotional toll families are going through in Israel as they desperately try to find loved ones during the war. pic.twitter.com/OhsIMfBocm
— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 9, 2023
What Yingst had seen over the last several days was “just horrific.” Horror is the absence of reason. There was no reason for innocent civilians to die except to prove terror. Terror extinguishes reason, strangles hope and blots out all light. Terrorists are evil.
Uri David said he had talked on the phone with his two daughters, Tair and Odaya, during the attack. He talked to them for about half an hour before he “heard shooting, shouting in Arabic, I told them to lie on the ground and hold hands,” he told a news conference, according to Reuters, before breaking down and crying.
He said the girls no longer responded to him and that he did not know their fate.
CBS reported that “more than 250 of the dead were people who had been attending a music festival near the border with Gaza when gunmen attacked.” As of Monday, at least 2,150 had been reported wounded.
The U.S. National Security Council said at least nine U.S. nationals were among the dead. An unknown number of them were still missing.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for “mighty vengeance”, according to Reuters.
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said, “The price the Gaza Strip will pay will be a very heavy one that will change reality for generations.”
The violence between Muslims and Jews has a long history punctuated with acts of revenge. The cycle of vengeance appears morally necessary and morally abhorrent at once.
It is both inevitable and destructive where innocents are slaughtered for longstanding often unfathomable blood feuds. There’s no end in sight.
The Israelis must strike back. And, if the past is any indicator, terrorists will strike Israel again as the cycle continues, it would seem, until the end of time.
“And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet,” (Matthew 24:6). So it is written.
We live in a broken world that can never be made right by the all-too-human cycle of vengeance. But it will be made right and evil will suffer the ultimate punishment — the wrath of God.
And may God have mercy on us all.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.