Last night, Shira Yael Ish-Ran, 21, and her husband, Amichai, were standing in a bus stop in their community of Ofra. They were coming back from a Hanukkah candle lighting ceremony, commemorating a friend who had died in a car crash. She was 30 weeks pregnant, looking forward to the unspeakable joy of welcoming her baby boy into the world. A white car came driving by. It slowed down, slow enough for one of the passengers to steady his semi-automatic weapon, take aim, and open fire. There were soldiers standing at the bus stop, according to one eyewitness to the attack, but the terrorist chose to shoot the pregnant woman first.
Shira was severely wounded. She was rushed to the hospital, where her baby was delivered in a C-section. Like his mother, he is still struggling to survive.
In the barbarous annals of Palestinian terrorism, this latest vile act is, sadly, not much of an exception. But it serves, as every attack on innocent people does, as a sharp distinction that could not be made frequently enough. This conflict isn’t about one side versus another, or about divergent narratives competing, or about two people locked in a magical cycle of violence. It’s about something much more elemental. It’s about life versus death.
The animal who aimed his rifle at the midsection of a noticeably pregnant woman is a member of a death cult. This cult celebrated his attack when it called the attack “heroic” and “an affirmation of our people’s choice,” to quote the official statement released yesterday by Hamas. That’s the same Hamas endorsed last week by 57 nations, foiling a UN resolution against the murderous terror group. The death cult isn’t really interested in statesmanship, which is why it turned the one sliver of earth it controls, Gaza, into a miserable wasteland, building terror tunnels instead of schools and hospitals and embezzling billions. The death cult is only concerned with murdering as many Jews as it can find and kill, Jews whose sole interest, in turn, is simply to live their lives.
People—and there are terrifyingly many of them in the West—who have trouble understanding this basic equation aren’t part of the solution to anything. They’re part of the problem. If you think the situation is complicated, or that special dispensations ought to be made because of historical circumstances, just stop and think about the kind of people who would shoot a pregnant mother and a baby in utero along with six other innocent people celebrating a religious holiday, and then celebrate that act as “heroic.” That, really, is all you need to know. You either choose death or you choose life; the rest is commentary.