Of course if this is so it's hard to explain why Hamas consistently gets over 50% of the vote in the Gazan "elections", but set that aside. No doubt there are some Palestinian Arabs who just want to live in peace with their Israeli neighbors, but this story by Andrew Tobin in the Washington Free Beacon makes one wonder how many of them there are.
Tobin begins by noting that the attackers of Israeli civilians on October 7th weren't just Hamas fighters. These terrorists were joined by a large mob of Palestinian civilians in their massacre. Here are some excerpts:
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....There are additional details at the link. It's hard to believe, perhaps, but there are a lot of Americans on the left who are denying that any of this happened or that it's as bad as the reports indicate. Because the number of deniers is so large the Israeli Defense Force is planning to release captured video taken by Hamas and other Gazans that documents the atrocities.
"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....the people of Gaza, who we once thought were good, are responsible. It’s not just Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Ordinary people from Gaza took [our citizens]."
Yarkoni, who survived Oct. 7 in the safe room of his house in Kibbutz Nirim, estimated that 3,000 Gazans were involved in the attack, about half of them "civilians." The IDF has put the total number of terrorists at 2,500 to 3,500 but declined to specify whether that figure includes non-Hamas members.....
"I saw a scene [in the video footage] where a Gazan civilian chopped off a man's head. It took him several attempts to detach the head from the body," he said.
According to a video that was posted online, Gazans used a bulldozer to tear down a section of Israel's border fence, and hundreds of unarmed men and boys—wearing T-shirts, baseball caps, sneakers, and flip-flops—crossed into the country. They came mostly on foot but also by bicycle, scooter, and motorcycle. Someone appears to have brought a donkey.
Other online videos show ordinary Gazans taking selfies on and around Israeli tanks and ransacking a military base on the border. All the while, cries of "Allahu Akbar" rang out.
The mob soon arrived in nearby Israeli communities that Hamas was already terrorizing. Security footage and Hamas videos from Be'eri, Nir Oz, and other kibbutzim capture dozens of ordinary-looking Gazans looting and taking part in killings and kidnappings, including of women and children....
Meanwhile, in the streets of Gaza, crowds greeted the returning kidnappers as conquering heroes, online videos show. Some Gazans taunted the Israeli hostages and defiled the dead as they were paraded through the streets.
Raz Cohen, a 24-year-old former Israeli commando, saw both Hamas terrorists and ordinary Gazans kill and rape revelers at the Nova music festival in Re'im, where at least 260 people were slaughtered. After escaping the Hamas terrorists, Cohen hid in a bush with a group of friends for almost seven hours. He watched as a gang of Gazan civilians—men wearing Adidas and armed only with knives and axes—raped and murdered a young Jewish woman.
"While they were raping and killing, they always laughed. I can't forget how they laughed," Cohen told the Free Beacon.
Several members of Cohen's group later ran from the bush and were caught by the same gang of Gazans. He said he heard his friends' screams as they were tortured and stabbed to death. "You know when you hear the screams of someone who is dying," said Cohen, who was eventually rescued by Israeli soldiers.
A young couple who were abducted at the Nova festival also appear to have been victims of ordinary Gazans. Footage shows that Noa Argamani and Avinatan Or were taken away by a group of about a dozen young men, some of them teenagers. As Or's brother told Israel's Channel 99, the kidnappers did not look to be armed. Minutes before Or was captured, he texted friends that 20 "people" were hunting down and lynching Jews, according to screenshots published by Israel's Ynet news site....
Daniel Meir, Nirim's security chief, said, "The civilians went into houses and turned them upside down. They took phones, computers, jewelry, whatever they could find," he recalled. "From what I know, they also took most of the hostages."
Even though Nirim suffered less than some of its neighbors, Meir said the attack—and particularly the role of ordinary Gazans—shattered his community's faith in coexistence. Many of the kibbutzniks were longtime peace activists, and there was widespread support among them for a program that allowed thousands of Gazans to work in Israel....
"Today we understand that [the Palestinians] are educated differently. They are educated for something else. Just as we crave peace, they crave jihad," Meir said. "They are raising monsters. And it is impossible to make peace with monsters."
No doubt the deniers will claim that those nefarious Israelis photo-shopped the videos, but for those who are still unblinded by anti-semitic hatred, the reports of the thousands of Palestinians who joined in the slaughter should put an end to the myth that the Palestinian Gazans are not sympathetic to Hamas.
