What Really Happened on October 7?

"You want to know what happened on October 7 that doesn't appear in the press? Here's what happened, according to Israeli sources. It was a one-time raid, by several thousand Hamas fighters, chosen at a relatively young age, because they've lost their sisters or their brothers or mothers or cousins or fathers in prior Israeli wars against them. So they chose them because they were so motivated that way - for revenge. Number two, they were unemployed, and they felt hopeless, they had no will to live anymore, and in that (Palestinian) culture when you're unemployed you're going to have a hard time getting married and raising a family, so they sent them over there. Hamas and others are probably stunned that they even got so far. And it was a homicide-suicide mission. They knew they were going to die, and so they started shooting anything they saw, whether it was soldiers, a party going on, civilians in their homes, until they were wiped out. Some of them got back with hostages, and, of course, there are seven thousand hostages in Israeli prisons, the Palestinians, because they are abducted in order to extract information from their relatives in Gaza and the West Bank, that's an old practice,, and they control extended families that way, so that's why we - Bruce Fein and I, teach them - Biden - to have a hostage-to-hostage exchange, in order to start a process of reconciliation and resolution of that conflict over there. But on terms of the attack the Israeli government (1) after the attack said they counted 1600 Hamas bodies that they killed in the shoot-out on October 7. And that's more than the estimated Israelis that were killed by these Hamas fighters. So you can see that there's something wrong with the numbers here. And about one hundred of the Israeli fourteen hundred were, by the way, migrant workers. They were Thai migrant workers, Polish migrant workers, and Arab Bedouins working in the orchards - innocently - and they were killed savagely. So this idea that Hamas is an existential threat to Palestine is absurd. It was a one-time raid that caught the military napping, and they're never going to get over the border again no matter what they do. So that's why we've got to stop this attempt to treat this whole war as if it's Israel's war of survival. It's nothing of the sort."

-----Ralph Nader, interview with Briahna Joy Gray, Bad Faith podcast, 11/16/23