At first, they’d tried to break into houses using their machine guns—shooting through walls, doors, and windows. When that didn’t work, they used crowbars on the door handles.
But that didn’t work, either, so they gained entrance by ripping the doors off their hinges. The doors they threw into the streets, where they still lay.
It had taken me awhile—as a nonmilitary American at the Kfar Aza kibbutz on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza—to figure out how things had unfolded in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. Dozens of Israelis had died just a few weeks prior on the site we were at, victims of Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israel.
I’d visited Israel once before as a member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s national council. But the events of Oct. 7 have rendered that country and its region a new place. As one of the first Americans…
