By Madeline Condor | Staff Writer
Death tolls continue to rise in Israel and Palestine after Hamas — the governing Palestinian body in the Gaza Strip — launched a surprise attack on Israel Saturday. In retaliation, Israel sent air strikes to the Gaza Strip Monday.
Joanne Cummings, lecturer in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core, Great Texts and political science, said the attacks are unusual in nature.
“[The attacks by Hamas] were able to come into Israel by air, land and sea, which Israel normally feels it is protected from,” Cummings said. “Israel, of course, has decided to retaliate in even more violent terms and has also cut off all supplies of water, electricity and food to the Gaza Strip, which is a very confined, very [condensed], populated area. … The Palestinians that live there are unable to leave in any direction.”
Hamas, or the “Islamic Resistance Movement,” is a militant Palestinian nationalist and Islamist movement with the goal of establishing an independent Islamic state in Palestine. The group was founded in 1987 under the power of the Muslim Brotherhood Movement. Hamas has had control of the Gaza Strip since 2007.
Israel Defense Forces said in a statement on X, formally known as Twitter, that over 900 Israelis have been killed. The Palestinian Ministry of Health said in a press release that the death toll for those in Gaza and the West Bank has reached over 800.
“Usually, in any given year or time period, … it will be a ratio of three to four Palestinians who have died for each Israeli that has passed … in this conflict,” Dr. Lynn Whitcomb, senior lecturer of Arabic, said. “That doesn’t make any of it right, but it does reflect the imbalance of power that Israel is a modern, advanced, developed nation that gets a lot of support and military assistance from the U.S. The Palestinians are people in two separate chunks living on the fringes of that modern, advanced, militarily powerful country.”
Although the attacks have occurred far from home, Cummings said Baylor students can still feel the weight of them.
“There are students at Baylor who have family and friends in Israel. There are students at Baylor who have family and friends in Gaza and in the Palestinian West Bank. So, there are a lot of students who are going to be extremely unsettled, even traumatized by what’s going on and what they hear,” Cummings said. “My greatest concern on the Baylor campus is that we maintain a sense of the Baylor Family and Baylor community. So, even if people hold different political views … on Israel and Palestine, even if they have different emotional responses, we need to not turn that into conflict and tension within the Baylor community.”
A senior from Bethlehem, Palestine, said it was devastating to hear news of the events in the region. They said they wished to remain anonymous due to the controversial nature of the topic.
“[I’ve] been hearing news like this since I was born, … but it was definitely really tough this week,” the student said. “I mean, I had exams, and on top of everything … just knowing that your people are … being killed every single day. [The attacks are] not a surprise, but this week, the amount of videos and pictures that you’ve seen, it’s really frustrating to hear Western media — how they see it as and how they portray it.”
The student said they want to clarify that Hamas is an extremist organization that is not representative of the Palestinian people.
“It’s pretty frustrating, because a lot of people felt like … Hamas is the same thing as a Palestinian fighter, and that’s not the case,” the student said. “Hamas doesn’t represent the Palestinian people. You know, Hamas is just some militant group — just like ISIS was an extremist group. The same thing goes for Hamas.”
