At 6.30am on Oct. 7, hundreds of armed Hamas terrorists invaded Israel from Gaza. They took over Israeli towns and villages, broke into homes and slaughtered entire families. Some civilians were burned in their homes. Others were dragged outside and brutally executed. Young children witnessed their mothers being butchered. Some villages were burned to the ground.
At the same time, Hamas terrorists infiltrated a music festival attended by thousands of young people, killing everyone in their way. Hundreds of young men and women who were there to celebrate life and music were murdered.
The Hamas terrorists returned to Gaza, parading desecrated and naked bodies of young women through the streets, as hundreds of observers celebrated and handed out candy.
If that is not enough, the Hamas terrorists also kidnapped more than 150 people, mostly civilians, including children, babies, mothers, fathers, disabled people and elderly women. Some were dragged out of their nursing homes. The youngest was a six-month-old and the eldest an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor.
About 1,300 men and women were murdered on Oct. 7 alone, the greatest number of Jews murdered in a single day since the Holocaust.
More than 3,000 people were injured, some critically, but all have been traumatized for life.
This was not only an attack against Israelis. Dozens of the people who were wounded, murdered or abducted were citizens of the US, the UK, Canada, France, Italy, Thailand, Ukraine, Nepal, Brazil, Germany, Russia, China and elsewhere. More than 43 states had citizens who were murdered and kidnapped.
Oct. 7 is Israel’s Sept. 11, 2001, and Pearl Harbor combined. It is a small country; 1,300 dead in Israel would be proportionally equivalent to more than 3,000 people dead in Taiwan.
We all know someone who was killed, wounded or abducted. I know three people who lost their lives on Oct. 7 and the number might climb, as many of the bodies have yet to be identified because they were desecrated so badly.
There is a lot to be said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The issue is complex, but what happened in Israel on Oct. 7 is unacceptable. It was no struggle for the freedom of Palestine. It was a well-planned massacre of innocent civilians. It was terrorism at its most brutal.
Hamas has proven that it is no different from the Islamic State group.
This is not just another round of combat. This is a major historic event that has global implications. If this unhuman cruelty happened in Israel, it can happen anywhere.
This is traumatic, as people can no longer feel safe in their own homes.
Israel is fighting for its existence and in this war against terrorism, no one should be indifferent.
Maya Yaron is Israel’s representative to Taiwan
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS