On the third anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, Daily Wire intern and College Fix writer Leona Salinas reflects on her recent visit to the Jewish nation and the impact it made on her own struggles with tragedy.
Salinas grew up in Uvalde, Texas where, in 2022, a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary. She knew some of the victims, including several of the children. She also knew the shooter.
“Four years later, I went to Israel still carrying that anger, expecting to find the same bitterness in people who had lost far more. I didn’t,” she wrote at the Daily Wire this week.
“The restraint I witnessed in Israelis was the refusal to become what had tried to destroy them,” Salinas wrote:
We spent a full day at sites of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre. One of them was a kibbutz whose gate bordered Gaza. The kibbutz has remained untouched since Oct 7. The walls are riddled with bullet holes, rooms stay blackened by grenades, and children’s toys sit covered in dust among the rubble. Homes where families had lived ordinary lives became the rooms in which they were slaughtered.
Hamas terrorists went from home to home without distinguishing between the young and the old, men and women, race or religion. They shot people in their beds and burned families alive. When I walked the grounds, I could feel the weight of the attack in my bones.
Standing there, I found it hard to reconcile the remains of the village with the atrocities that had been carried out inside those houses. At that moment, all problems I carried from the United States felt insignificant in comparison.
At the Nova festival grounds we listened to Shalev Biton, a young man not much older than me, who shared with raw emotion the account of his survival on Oct. 7. He described fleeing as Hamas gunmen moved through the festival grounds hunting people down.
A Bedouin Muslim farm worker hid him along with others. When the terrorists reached the farm, they shouted that they knew he was hiding Jews and demanded to know where they were, threatening to kill him if he refused. Biton told me, “I wouldn’t wish that horror on any human being, including civilians in Gaza.” He added, “In the eyes of Hamas, they don’t see Jew or Muslim; you’re just in their way.”
The Israelis I met were people who had every reason to hate. Many had lost friends, neighbors, and family members. Some had walked into their own homes and found them killed, or had survived by only a few minutes while others were taken or shot in front of them. They had endured atrocities most Americans cannot conceptualize.
Read her full column at the Daily Wire.
