
A viral thread in Hebrew circulating in Israel that will shock you:
“If you are reading this, know that it really happened.”
I don’t know where or when you’re reading this. I’m writing from my home in Jaffa, Israel. The date is April 9, 2025, and the time is 13:00.
For years upon years, we said that “Gaza needs to be flattened.” Well, Gaza is flat now. But not because it needed to be flattened — because we wanted to. We wanted to flatten Gaza, and we did. We did it to the sound of loud applause. The country is filled with victory cheers for every collapsed building and every obliterated family.
We say we did it because of the massacre on October 7, 2023, to free those who were kidnapped that day, or to ensure that such a massacre never happens again. I don’t know what story will ultimately become the accepted explanation for Gaza’s destruction, but those are lies. We did it because we wanted to.
We destroyed an entire region. At this point on the timeline, I still don’t know what will become of its more than two million residents. We have already killed at least fifty thousand — probably far more. As for the living, I know that their present is as terrible as a human existence can be, and their future is shrouded in uncertainty.
There is no future in Gaza. It cannot sustain life in its current condition, and any reconstruction will take many years and massive investment. At this stage, we are blocking every proposal for reconstruction, every external actor who wishes to take the Strip under its care, while we continue our campaign of destruction and killing.
There is no past in Gaza. There was life there, there was a civilization — but we destroyed every trace of it. Universities, museums, mosques, cemeteries. We didn’t need to destroy them, but we wanted to. We wanted to erase any sign that life ever existed there.
The Western world supported the destruction, or stood by. The United States financed and armed it. In Israel, all the institutions of the state played their part. Academia, the press, the courts, the cultural sphere — all supported and legitimized it.
We all wanted it.
The internal opposition was marginal and negligible, and we denounced the dissenters as traitors. The police forbade expressing opposition to the destruction, and the public supported this silencing. The destruction of Gaza became the national mission, and we carried it out with devotion and joy. Those who took an active part in it were granted the status of heroes.
We knew what we were doing. We knew the unimaginable suffering we were causing. We knew the crimes we were committing — in real time. We knew, and we declared before the whole world that this is what justice looks like, this is the face of morality.
I don’t know what I could have done differently. If there was anything I could have done to stop it, I didn’t know what it was. I wanted to resist, and I didn’t know how. This writing has no value other than to testify to what happened, and to express my helplessness in the face of it.
This is how it happened.
Tam Zandman, citizen of Israel
Mike