Bitter Fruits

There is an untold backtory to the gruesome Hamas massacre last Simchas Torah, tied into an agenda that went beyond their savage rampage of kidnapping, torture, violation and murder. Hamas was out to destroy the entire agricultural infrastructure of the western Negev and hoped that would cause an economic collapse. It was agricultural terrorism at its best, or worst.

We all know by now just how fiendish the Hamas attackers were, based on their very own documentation of the rampage. They wanted Israelis, and Jews the world over, to witness their savagery in all its grisly detail — to contemplate the psychological cruelty of children forced to watch their parents murdered before their eyes and vice versa, of women treated without a flicker of humanity. It was a systematic attempt to terrify the objects of their hatred so that the latter would give up and run away, abandoning their land.

But that wasn’t all. Their actions were carefully planned in order to inflict the greatest possible damage, physically, emotionally, and economically. The terrorists had complete plans of each agricultural kibbutz or moshav that they invaded, and therefore knew how to shut down the systems at their source. Those infrastructure plans were meticulously gathered by the thousands of Gaza residents who passed through the various border crossings every day to work on the Jewish settlements — treated as friends by their employers who would have coffee with them, help their families with medical care, and buy presents for their children.

“Agriculture wasn’t just collateral damage, as the general narrative goes. It was a deliberate target,” according to Moran Freibach, the head of agriculture in Nahal Oz, one of the 32 agricultural communities of the Eshkol Region that produce 70 percent of Israel’s vegetables, 20 percent of its fruit, and six percent of its milk.