Publication Date: Winter 2025
They Want it Darker
The Gaza War and its Backstory
by Dr. Yosef Gotlieb
Chapter One: Introduction
Early on Saturday morning October 7, 2023, my wife abruptly awakened me. Our daughter’s young family in Tel Aviv had already taken shelter in the reinforced room of their apartment: Starting at 06:29, missiles from the Gaza Strip had been fired at Tel Aviv, Israel’s most populous city, and other towns. The air-raid siren was sounding in our town, beckoning us to prepare for an attack.
We called our daughter from our own home shelter, our laundry room, where thick walls and a blast-resistant door offer safety from incoming missile and rocket fire. She and her husband had scooped up their month-old son from his crib and joined our older grandson, thirty-months old, in his bedroom, their saferoom. We have shelters or saferooms in our homes because Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have fired on Israeli civilian centers for years; given distances from Gaza and the velocity of the rockets typically shot from there, we living in central Israel have 90 to 120 seconds to reach our saferooms before projectiles hit. Residents near the Gaza border have only 15-30 seconds warning to take shelter before a missile hits.
Alerts were sounded in our town, twelve kilometers west of Jerusalem, at 8:14. By then, my son, a reserve officer in a special forces unit, was already driving south to his base with a colleague. They had not yet received a call-up from the army, but the breadth and intensity of Hamas’s rocket attack throughout Israel, along with the disturbing text messages they were receiving from friends and comrades on what was supposed to be a quiet holiday marking the end of the autumn High Holy Days, suggested that something was seriously amiss.
So, the war that began early that day became very personal for me from the start. It resonated of previous clashes between Israel and Hamas since the latter had taken control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 2007. On November 11-12, 2012, Hamas and its junior partner, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), fired more than 200 rockets into Israel, prompting the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to launch an eight-day operation, Pillar of Defense, during which 1,456 rockets were shot into Israel, striking civilian centers as far north as Tel Aviv.
Sign up here for book release notifications:
Sign Upauthor’s note: why this book?
I never aspired to be a journalist, but on Saturday, October 7, 2023, Black Sabbath, as we in Israel have come to call it, I became a war correspondent of sorts, deeply embedded at the front: Although the Hamas/Palestine Islamic Jihad army had invaded from Gaza and occupied Israeli communities in the south, all of Israel had come under attack. Rocket fire scorched the skies far and wide and marauders streamed into the countryside.
For the first hundred days of the Gaza War, I wrote a daily update describing developments as we experienced them here. These reports were intended for relatives, friends and colleagues abroad who wanted to be informed of events covered in only cursory fashion by the newspaper and broadcasts to which they had access. My updates drew from a broad range of sources, Israeli, regional and international, to provide a deeper portrayal of what was transpiring at the front and in Israel generally. Over time, my mailing list lengthened. People hungered to learn all I could tell them. They knew that the picture they were receiving from the media was both partial and increasingly skewed.
About Dr. Yosef Gotlieb
Born in San José, Costa Rica and raised in the United States, Yosef Gotlieb received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy, a master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies, and a doctorate in geography from Clark University in the U.S. His areas of expertise are climate change adaptation, international development, sustainability, and regional planning with focus on the Middle East and Central America. His doctoral research related to Kurdistan as a developing nonstate nation.
