Israeli ambassador to Czechia recalls the Hamas attack of October 7

Three years ago, on the morning of October 7, 2023, fighters from the Palestinian group Hamas breached the Gaza Strip border and attacked Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking roughly 250 hostage. Israel's ambassador to Czechia, Weisbrod, admits that to this day he still doesn't understand the logic behind that attack.

I still don't understand the logic of the attack

According to the ambassador, the attack cannot be explained by a single motive. Among the possible factors was the approaching normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, but preparations for the attack had begun much earlier. “We know Hamas had been preparing the attack for years. Sinwar didn't plan it in a single day,” Weisbrod said of the late Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, who organized the massacre and was later killed by the Israeli army during a military operation.

Trying to understand the attackers' motivation, the ambassador said, remains one of the hardest questions even three years on. Israelis, he believes, mistakenly tried to apply their own logic to Hamas's leadership. “You cannot project your own way of thinking onto people with that kind of ideology. These people genuinely believe in their ideology and think differently than we do,” Weisbrod noted. According to him, Hamas was willing to condemn not only Israelis but its own Gazan population to suffering as well: “These people are willing to sacrifice their own population. It's a very cynical approach. Even today I don't fully understand the logic of this attack.”

The ambassador also spoke about the interaction between Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran: even before the attack, coordination between them had visibly increased. Negotiations often invoked the Arabic phrase “wahdat al-sahat” — “unity of the fronts” — the idea of simultaneous, coordinated action against Israel on multiple fronts. In Weisbrod's view, the exact timing of the attack chosen by Sinwar may have surprised even some of Hamas's allies.

The ambassador's personal tragedy

Weisbrod recalls waking up on Saturday morning to news of the attack and immediately starting to think about how to get back to Israel. He soon learned that a former employee of his, from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, was among the dead. The attack also struck painfully close to home through the center for people with autism that his son attends: the institution's director turned out to be among the hostages, and the children later kept asking why she wasn't coming back. “It was very hard to explain that to them,” the ambassador admitted.

A few days after the attack, Weisbrod personally visited Kfar Aza — and called what he saw one of the most harrowing experiences of his life: “There was blood everywhere. Houses had been burned down.” He was also shaken by the fact that archaeologists had to be called to the site to help search for human remains in the ruins of destroyed homes.

Three years on: the price of resilience

According to the ambassador, it was clear within the very first hours after the attack that the Middle East was entering a new era. He named returning the hostages and preventing a repeat of such an attack as Israel's main goals in those first moments — though at the time no one imagined how long the ensuing conflict would last.

Since then, he said, Israel's security doctrine has changed and deterrence against the country's adversaries has grown stronger: “Today we have stronger deterrence against Gaza and Lebanon. We have restored our citizens' trust — they need to know they can live by the border without fear,” Weisbrod said. “We have shown the resilience of Israeli society. But we paid a high price for it. Our adversaries now know that we are resilient,” he concluded.

On the morning of October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters and militants from other Palestinian factions breached the Gaza Strip border and attacked Israeli communities, military bases and the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Reim. According to Israel, around 1,200 people were killed, most of them civilians, and about 250 were taken hostage into Gaza — Israel's largest single-day death toll and the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. In response, Israel launched a large-scale military operation in Gaza which, according to the Hamas-run health authorities, has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, devastated the territory and triggered a humanitarian crisis. In October 2025, a ceasefire brokered under a plan by US President Donald Trump took effect, under which surviving hostages were released. A lasting political settlement, however, remains unclear: Hamas refuses to disarm or give up power.

Source: novinky.cz