Suzanne Maloney
On October 3, 2023, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei addressed a large crowd of government officials and international visitors in Tehran. As he approached his conclusion, Khamenei’s remarks turned to Israel—the Islamic Republic’s self-proclaimed nemesis. Invoking a verse from the Koran, Khamenei insisted that the Jewish state would “die of [its] rage.” He reminded the audience that the Iranian theocracy’s founder, Ruhollah Khomeini, had described Israel as a cancer. And he ended his speech with a prediction: “This cancer will definitely be eradicated, God willing, at the hands of the Palestinian people and the resistance forces throughout the region.”
Four days later, sirens sounded as rockets flew out of Gaza and into southern Israel. More than 1,000 Palestinian militants followed, breaching the border barricade on motorcycles and jeeps, swarming from boats on the sea, and paragliding in from the air. In less than 24 hours, the militants killed 1,180 Israelis and captured 251 more. The massacre committed by Hamas and other Palestinian fighters was the deadliest act of anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust. It precipitated a ferocious Israeli military response that has wiped out Hamas’s leadership and eliminated thousands of the group’s fighters, while also killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and devastating Gaza’s infrastructure.
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