It was a raid, not a terrorist attack. It had specific military and political objectives which the Hamas raiders successfully accomplished. That’s what Scott Ritter argues in his latest article, posted yesterday on his Scott Ritter Extra website. Ritter says that the Israeli claims that the Oct. 7 attack was a massive terrorist attack comparable to 9/11 are “demonstrably false.” “Nearly a third of the Israeli casualties [the number was revised downwards to 1,200 last week] consisted of military, security, and police officers. Moreover, it turns out that the number one killer of Israelis on Oct. 7 wasn’t Hamas or other Palestinian factions, but the Israeli military itself.” Ritter cites evidence, also cited by Max Blumenthal in his Oct. 27 Grayzone article “October 7 Testimonies Reveal Israel’s Military ‘Shelling’ Israeli Citizens with Tanks, Missiles” and by other independent writers, that many of the Israelis who died, including at the music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, were actually killed by rocket and cannon fire from IDF Apache helicopters and tanks.
Ritter also reports that the kibbutzim surrounding Gaza were not purely civilian, but rather armed camps with significant IDF presence and that Hamas treated them as such. Ritter notes, “The Israeli government has had to walk back its claims that Hamas beheaded 40 children and has provided no credible evidence that Hamas was involved in the rape or sexual assault of a single Israeli female. Eyewitness accounts describe the Hamas fighters as disciplined, determined, and deadly in the attack, and yet courteous and gentle when dealing with civilian captives.”
But the Israeli establishment has to say it was a terrorist attack in order to provide cover for its own mass killing of civilians and to keep Benjamin Netanyahu out of jail. Otherwise, “the competency of the Israeli military, security, and intelligence services would be called into question, as would the political leadership responsible for overseeing and directing their operations.”
As for the objectives of the raid, Ritter lists them as:
“First, to reassert the right of the Palestinian people to a homeland not defined by the Abraham Accords.
