‘Just as Cruel as the Terrorists’: Many Ordinary Palestinians Joined in Hamas’s Atrocities Against Israel

Large numbers of Palestinian ‘innocent civilians’ who were not members of any terrorist group entered Israel and participated in the atrocities.

“We saw that it was not only Hamas who came to slaughter us. It was all the residents of Gaza, including people who worked in our kibbutzim.”

Because Islamic Jew hatred is the root cause of the war against the Jewish state.

Related: The Gaza border area is vulnerable, but the main issue as Israel girds for a long fight is that many Gazans support the terrorists.

‘Just as Cruel as the Terrorists’: Many Ordinary Palestinians Joined in Hamas’s Atrocities Against Israel

By: Andrew Tobin,WFB, October 24, 2023

TEL AVIV—As Hamas terrorists carried out a highly choreographed massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, they received a source of support that amplified the horror that took place that day. A mob of ordinary Palestinians spontaneously joined in what became the deadliest pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust, according to videos, eyewitness accounts, and the Israel Defense Forces.

Whereas the Hamas terrorists wore uniforms and carried military-grade weapons, the Gazans who followed them into the Jewish state were dressed as civilians and mostly unarmed, two officials from Israel’s devastated Gaza border region said. Young men with knives, overweight dads, and at least one elderly man on crutches were among those who exploited Hamas’s rampage to create a second wave of carnage that rivaled the barbarism of the professional terrorists.

The IDF declined to provide details about non-Hamas Gazans’s involvement in the Oct. 7 attack. But IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon that large numbers of Gazans who were not members of any terrorist group entered Israel and participated in the atrocities.

“They did what you say they did,” Conricus said.

The extent to which the Gazan public took part in Hamas’s campaign of terror has yet to be fully understood even in Israel. But for the communities near Israel’s Gaza border—home to many of the country’s remaining peaceniks—firsthand knowledge of what their Palestinian neighbors did has already hardened into a new consensus: Coexistence is dead, and Gaza must be crushed.

“The second wave of Arabs who came into the country were just as cruel as the terrorists of the first wave,” Gadi Yarkoni, the mayor of the Eshkol Regional Council, which encompasses most of the Gaza border communities, told the Free Beacon. “We saw that it was not only Hamas who came to slaughter us. It was all the residents of Gaza, including people who worked in our kibbutzim.”

Yarkoni was elected mayor under the banner of Israel’s center-left Blue and White party less than a year after he lost both his legs in a mortar attack during Israel’s 2014 Gaza war. Only now has his idealism been pushed past the breaking point.

In a monologue on Israel’s Channel 12 news that went viral online last week, Yarkoni forcefully disagreed with the anchor’s reporting on allegations, since debunked, that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza during its ongoing war with Hamas.

[….]Speaking with the Free Beacon, Yarkoni referred to gruesome footage and survivor testimonies that have not been made public.

“I saw a scene where a Gazan civilian chopped off a man’s head. It took him several attempts to detach the head from the body,” he said.