 Hi guys, welcome back to my youtube channel Daniel Rosili here bringing you this video today from Jerusalem the capital of Israel in the Middle East here amid the ongoing and escalating conflict that is taking place and my last videos or my videos for the past six months probably have consisted of me putting together these canva animations for better and for worse. I'm using canva to just straight explain socioeconomic problems in Israel and just interesting things or stuff that I think is going to be interesting to people about Israel and that's very much become the focus of this channel and the format for the moment of this channel but I thought I'd break things up a little bit and because I felt like doing it just to give some kind of off the cuff comments about what it's like at the moment here in Jerusalem specifically and Israel more generally so what's currently going on basically is Israel and Hamas it started on Saturday October 7th which already feels like a lifetime ago early in the morning and it's important to for people who aren't Jewish and aren't familiar with the Jewish calendar and how it works Saturday the Shabbat is basically a day when traditional Jews don't go offline they don't use technology they go to synagogue so when this was breaking out firstly I wasn't in Israel at that at that exact moment and secondly I wasn't checking my phone along with a substantial part of the world Jewish population and even the population here in Israel so a lot of people in Israel didn't find out about this until the evening when after sundown people start using electricity again now they might have heard about it from rocket sirens going off or rocket sirens going off and emergency response teams activating but there's a good chance that you could have been in Israel and what's going to go down is probably the worst day in the modern history of the state and simply have not heard about this atrocity until the evening I'm not sure that's important but I just wanted to throw that in there when I personally found out about this I was that Saturday in Barcelona Spain on a beach and after Shabbat one of the first things I do is always check the news because what can I say I'm a news addict like everyone in this country and the reports were horrific and what I think is very important to understand about this round of fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is that this isn't just another summer war and it's not even summer of course but there's been some sort of a routine in recent years to this phenomenon whereby Hamas will send rockets over into Israel Israel will respond with air strikes and a few you know kind of aggressive statements in the media and then everything will return to normal what we're looking at at the moment is a very very qualitatively different situation Israel has made explicitly clear that its target and its goal for this operation is to eliminate Hamas and something that's important to understand about the Middle East is that everyone is terrified of being perceived as weak so in my opinion and my sort of viewing of the situation when Israel went out there and said we are not going to regard operation as complete until Hamas has been vanquished from the Gaza Strip there was no going back at that point so Israel's come out and said that and that commits it to a very different kind of warfare than we've seen previously it's also qualitatively differently because we're looking at various fronts opening up and I think people have been speculating why hasn't Israel gone into Gaza yet why hasn't the ground infiltration taking place and I think the answer has to do that there's a lot of stuff going on currently behind the scenes you have Israel trying to figure out what to do about the you know 200 or so of its citizens who are currently being held in captivity in Gaza and really about only one of whom there is information then simultaneously you have the northern border with Lebanon and his Bala heating up and very important to remember that from Israel's security standpoint although Hamas is capable of causing death and destruction through its rather crude short range rockets his Bala is an entirely different military entity with much much better arsenal of weapons much much more precision guided and from a military perspective it's my understanding constitutes a much greater threat to Israel's security than Hamas does in Gaza so there's been a lot of videos on YouTube from people based here and the usual YouTube clickbait fodder with kind of shocked faces and what's it like being on the ground in Israel and all that and I just wanted to give a more kind of candid account with that background out of the way so as I mentioned I was in Spain when this war kicked off and when I heard about it it was very difficult to not think about anything else I chose to come back to Israel because this is where I've been my home for the past 10 years I can give sort of you know practical reasons like I came back I didn't even think about not returning to Israel or taking a break from Israel because I needed to get back to get my medication here which is true but really it feels to me that it's impossible when you feel a sense of belonging to a country and allegiance with the country when it comes under attack in such a heinous way not to be there even just if you're doing nothing to help as a show of solidarity with the country so that it didn't even factor into my calculus that I wouldn't come back to Israel I flew back to Israel just after the conflict broke out on Sunday so basically day one of the conflict we're now on day 11 and I took an El Al flight back to Israel I usually don't fly El Al and on this case I was very grateful to fly El Al because they do security like nobody else essentially it's Israel's national airline and the moves in Barcelona when I was checking in was very tense as you'd expect because anywhere that Israelis gather on foreign soil at a time like this is a big security risk and I will leave out some details about what it was like in Barcelona there was one slightly sketchy incident at the security check in that caught the attention of the armed armed police at the gate but basically our flight back to Israel it was kind of memorable because the cabin crew you know it's it was just not a situation this massacre is the worst massacre in Israel's history the worst massacre for Jews since the Holocaust this isn't just a you know routine war not that there is such thing as a routine war but this is a different magnitude of event so it was impossible for people to smile and not and pretend everything's okay when it's not okay so the cabin crew made a speech about El Al being committed to preserving the airway between the rest of the world and Israel and when you think about access in and out of Israel the airport in Ben Gurion is really the only artery connecting Israel to the world at the moment because you know the land border with Lebanon is a non-runner they're at war the land border with Syria is a non-runner they're at war I could go on so the airport's a piece of vital national infrastructure and the links to Israel which El Al actually started out as a military airline and then became a civilian operator they see it as a mission and they have been on a mission to bring Israelis in from all over the world if you happen to be a plane spotting geek like I am go on to flightradar24.com and look at the airspace over Israel currently and you'll see just basically only almost only El Al Arquia in Israel operating in and out of Ben Gurion and those are the three Israeli airlines all of them are equipped with anti rocket systems and that's probably why they're flying and nobody else is flying almost at the moment to and from the airport here so what's it like on the ground I mean basically Jerusalem is really really quiet I live in Jerusalem the streets are very empty the police presence is extremely conspicuous and widespread so there's a lot of I mean there's always a bit of you know armed security you're seeing Israel police and Israel's border police the Meshterat Aghvul in Hebrew the Jean Dorma Rea of Israel that is responsible for policing tents areas and the borders so they're out in force everywhere around the city and stuff is closed and the reason stuff is closed is two fold firstly because for certain things like restaurants and bars and what have you people are generally feeling that it's a bit inappropriate to be conducting entertainment activities at a time when you know so many families around the country are grieving the loss of their loved ones or that their loved ones are in captivity that's one reason and the second reason is that there's been a massive massive call up to Israel's army and basically the man power and the woman power has been just slashed so I'm finding stuff like you go to a supermarket stuff is closing I can't pick up my post at the moment it's a petty concern I'm not complaining but the local delivery point is not operating because they're they've all been conscripted stuff isn't keeping to their opening the regular opening hours and it's just a very unusual situation it does remind me a lot of COVID when the streets were empty and people at the very start of the lockdowns were just staying in I went on a walk one evening at 5 a.m around Jerusalem because I'm an insomniac and I saw a cat and that was it so really talking very very empty Jerusalem isn't typically targeted by rockets and there's been interesting discussions on social media groups why is that the case the the sort of understood reason is if you look around Jerusalem and you look in what's in the periphery if you look to Ramallah to the north Bethlehem to the south um east Jerusalem arab east Jerusalem to the east so from Hamas's perspective one they have less longer range munitions be their longer be their longer as you increase in distance from Gaza the inaccuracies magnify and they could there's a strong chance of them hitting uh some area in the pa so that's kind of from my understanding why Jerusalem isn't targeted we're seeing red alert sirens go off all around the country kind of round the clock at the moment there was however two in Jerusalem yesterday Hamas fired a barrage of rockets uh when Israel's parliament the Knesset sat down to discuss that was intentional and it was actually the first time in my life that I heard the iron dome interceptor um intercepting a missile a Hamas missile in the sky uh it's on my youtube channel from I think yesterday I uploaded it and it is loud it is loud um my family was asking why was I filming and not running for shelter the reason is because the city is divided into alert areas so I knew it was for the next alert area over but it didn't really make it less uh scary I couldn't see the rocket but when the Israel's iron dome missile defense system intercepts the rocket in the sky if you can think of a firework display multiply that by four or five in terms of loudness and it's a clash that you just um shakes windows literally so what's going on at the moment just my thoughts generally on the conflict um Israel is posturing for a months long campaign and as I think I mentioned in this take hopefully once Israel said that its goal its operational goal is to eliminate Hamas it really really can't go back from my perspective I think currently what's happening is Israel is both uh conducting release negotiations for the hostages president Biden is uh coming in I believe tomorrow so that's just another uh macro and the French president is coming in uh as well as the world leaders are gathering to show their support the German chancellor as well um so really there is a huge amount going on and I think that what's going on is Israel is besides doing that trying to figure out what to do about the hostages trying to figure out what to do about containing the northern front because Hezbollah have very explicitly made out their plans to not only replicate what Hamas did only 10 days ago from the Gaza Strip they've made it's going to be worse and as I mentioned they're really really strategically logistically militarily a bigger threat to Israel's survival um in general and of course Iran being the kind of granddaddy sponsoring all these proxies and financing all these proxies um but these are the ones on the ground breathing down Israel's neck at the moment there's been other low-grade activity on different borders Palestinians gathering the Jordanian border um Israel preemptively striking some targets in Syria but really the two fronts that currently are worrying Israel is the front with the Gaza Strip where Israel is going to have to go in and the border with Lebanon the blue line which is a weird place I'm quite familiar with because I've been all around that border during peacetime and it's a very very deceptively quiet part of the world with lush farmland on both the Israeli and the Lebanese side and Israel's actually currently enforced a closed military zone both around the Gaza Strip and around Lebanon so anyway I could go on really talking about this for hours and hours and hours but I thought that rather than do that I tried just to kind of give my synopsis for friends people are interested in the conflict uh what is just to give you a bit of a flavor for what it's like here we are working I'm still working I think I'd go crazy um just watching the news all day so I'm working from home uh but I'm not working not from home whatever that's still called working from the office unless it's uh there's a strong reason I'm just staying in place as much as possible because I know where my safe shelter is and if the rocket siren alerts go off again I kind of know where to go um whereas if you leave your house it's kind of uh easier to find yourself in a position where there's you don't know where safe space can be found and increasing your danger of being uh killed by a rocket essentially uh I really do feel I just want to say one final thing for the ordinary civilians in the Gaza Strip because they are all paying the price for the atrocities committed by Hamas Palestinians did elect Hamas Hamas does enjoy widespread support in the Palestinian territories but not universal support and there are innocent people in the Gaza Strip who are being blockaded by Israel's blockade currently going on and long-standing blockade but they're also being blockaded by Hamas which is trying to prevent them from escaping and using any humanitarian card or as Israel is attempting a set up and Egypt um generally impeding access as well on the southern border very important to remember Gaza has borders both with Israel and with Egypt on both sides so they're really stuck between Iraq and a hard place to an exponential degree with airstrikes airstrikes raining down on them and it must be awful and I can only hope that Israel will take whatever action is required to eliminate Hamas once and for all while minimizing of course preferably eliminating but that's not really possible when conducting a war against an organization like Hamas that's deeply embedded in civilian infrastructure underground tunnel network using human shields all those things taken together I think it's essentially impossible for Israel not to inflict collateral damage while being in any way effective but I hope that it's kept to the absolute minimum and that the fewest number of palestine ordinary Palestinians possible pay the price for this awful conflict that Hamas has started with Israel um in from Gaza I hope that's been useful or you know interesting if you have comments please leave them the comment description thanks for watching this video appreciate as I've said before people who've reached out with messages checking in on me I'm doing fine thank you for asking and until the next video