A five-year-old article in the Times of Israel has taken on new significance for its accurate prediction of recent events.Hamas: Israel’s own creation was penned December 3, 2018 by blogger Shlomo Alegra. Despite writing four years, ten months and four days before the October 7 attacks from Gaza, the author envisioned the events of the past two weeks with stunning accuracy.“Eventually Israel will have to make a large military campaign because the way things are presently going Hamas will eventually build up a more powerful military power with a large amount of rockets which can overwhelm the Iron dome system and build up enough people with weapons to storm the border and infiltrate into Israel killing any Jewish person they see in their path,” wrote Alegra.At least 3,000 rockets were fired on Israel from the Gaza Strip on October 7. An estimated 2,500 Hamas militants broke through the Gaza border and used trucks, motorcycles, bulldozers, speedboats and paragliders to launch attacks on Israeli military and citizens and even take hostages. Israeli dead number at least 1,400 and include 260 from a music festival.Shlomo was born in Miami in 1989 and holds a degree from Florida Atlantic University in Political Science. He moved to Israel in 2012 where he became a combat soldier in the Netzach Yehuda Battalion. Later, Shlomo studied at Yeshivat Shavie Hevron in Hebron. His Times bio called him as “a proud reservist in the Golani Brigade” and a resident of Kiryat Arba.At least 70 soldiers of the Golani Brigade were killed in the October 7 attacks. Shlomo has not posted to the Times since September 10. He also foresaw the Israeli response in 2018.“Israel has created this monster and will one day have to deal with its complete elimination,” predicted Shlomo.“[D]ue to Hamas’ international support and military prowess Israel will have to deal with public backlash for its soldiers killed and international backlash for civilians killed, but it will eventually have to take action because Israel can not continue to co-exist with a terror state inside itself that continues to be a threat to its own citizens.”The southern border of the Gaza Strip is shared with Egypt, which, as Shlomo explained, executed Muslim Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb in 1966. Even so, Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin thought the presence of an Islamic group would be useful to divide allegiances to the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization.In the early seventies, Shiekh Ahmed Yassin started the organization Mujama Al Islamiya and established the Islamic University in Gaza, as well as hospitals and schools. Israel recognized his group as a charity in 1979. Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, later told the New York Times he funded Islamists in Gaza as a “counterweight” to the PLO.In 1984, Israel gave Yassin a 12-year sentence for forming an underground organization with hidden arms caches. However, Israel released him a year later. The first intifada (uprising) started in 1987, the same year Yassin co-founded Hamas.Divisions grew so fierce between PLO student supporters and Islamists, that at one point a bus full of Islamic activists arrived at a Gaza checkpoint wanting to fight. Retired Brig. Gen. Shalom Harari, a military intelligence officer in Gaza at the time, told those manning the checkpoint, “If they want to burn each other, let them go.”Yassin was arrested again in 1989 for ordering killings and sentenced to life imprisonment. However, in 1997, he was released in a prisoner exchange with Jordan for two Mossad agents. Yassin advocated suicide bombings but tried to maintain peace with the PLO, even though the PLO intermittently put him under house arrest. Eventually Israel killed the wheelchair-bound Yassin, shooting him with hellfire missiles in 2004 as he left early morning prayers in Gaza City.Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. One year later, Hamas won in Palesstinian elections. The Gaza Strip fell into civil war and Hamas threw Palestinian Authority opponents off of rooftops.Prior to the October 7 Gaza attacks, many Israeli forces had been moved from Gaza to the West Bank. Writing in 2018, Shlomo thought Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Israel’s security agency Shin Beit made that region far less of a threat than Gaza.“Israel is going to have to eventually eliminate Hamas and run a serious military campaign to reoccupy the Gaza Strip, return the Jews who were expelled and…eliminate the terror threat Hamas poses,” Shlomo wrote.Shlomo said a Gaza Strip invasion would result in large army casualties if the Israeli Defence Force wanted to minimize civilian casualties, or many civilian casualties if minimizing military casualties was the goal.“No present Israeli administration wants to deal with either the backlash from the Israeli public or the backlash of the international community” from either scenario, wrote Shlomo.
