SLO County residents feel ‘shattered’ after Hamas attack, Israel’s invasion of Gaza

Growing up in the West Bank, Abdel remembers farmers markets overflowing with oranges, olives and grapes grown by Palestinian merchants.

He also remembers Israeli forces uprooting olive groves and shooting his neighbors in the street.

“They can kill a Palestinian with no regret,” said Abdel, who has lived in San Luis Obispo County for more than 30 years and asked to be identified only by his first name. “They don’t treat them like humans.”

That is one of the reasons Abdel walked in the March for Palestine on Oct. 21, which drew hundreds of people of all ages to Mission Plaza in downtown San Luis Obispo — calling for an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine and an immediate ceasefire in Gaza to protect civilian life.

On Oct. 7, Palestinian militant group Hamas, which the United States labeled as a terrorist organization, attacked Israeli towns along the northern border of the Gaza Strip, killing more than 1,400 people. Israeli officials said that children were among the dead but have not confirmed how many.

Hamas also took about 200 hostages, including 30 children, in an attempt to push Israel to release the thousands of Palestinian people who, according to Israeli human rights group Hamoked, are detained without an explanation of their charges.

In response to the attack, Israel has unleashed an onslaught of airstrikes on Gaza, killing at least 9,061 people, with an unknown count of people — dead and alive — buried under the rubble of demolished buildings, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Israel’s blockade of Gaza prevents Palestinians from fleeing into neighboring countries, while limiting food, water and medical supplies from entering the area. According to Human Rights Watch, the blockade prevents civilians from meeting their basic needs and is a form of “collective punishment” that violates international humanitarian law.

The latest stretch of violence has left San Luis Obispo County residents — especially those with family, relatives and friends in Israel and Palestine — grieving, while also dealing with antisemitism and Islamophobia locally.

“There’s a saying in the Islamic tradition that the community of human beings are like one body, and when one finger is pricked, the entire body shudders in pain,” San Luis Obispo physician Dr. Rushdi Abdul Cader said. “Even though these people are on the other side of the world, and they’re dying and suffering where they are, the rest of us are shattered.”

Antisemitism spikes in SLO County

When Hamas first attacked Israel, Ra’anan Doron feared for his sister’s life.

Her village is nestled in the Israeli countryside between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and on Oct. 15, Hamas launched a missile into a field near her house.

“I worry about the next missile,” Doron said. “Unlike people in large communities, she doesn’t have a bomb shelter. She doesn’t have a safe room. She lives in a rural area that doesn’t usually need that.”

Born in Israel, Doron now lives in San Luis Obispo and serves as the president of Congregation Beth David’s Board of Trustees.

According to Doron, the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 empowered people to voice antisemitic beliefs locally. After the attack, the white nationalist hate group California Blackshirts distributed fliers in San Luis Obispo and Templeton that said Jewish people do not deserve basic human rights.

“We’re suffering the consequences 10,000 miles away,” Doron said.

To protect its congregants, Congregation Beth David increased its security protocols, according to Doron.

San Luis Obispo police Chief Rick Scott, San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson and other local leaders signed a resolution on Oct. 24 against “hate and bigotry” in response to the flyers and tension surrounding the war.

“I’m very concerned for the safety of our Jewish community, and yet I feel tremendously supported by Chief Scott and our police and our interfaith partners, and that includes the mosque,” Congregation Beth David Rabbi Micah Hyman said.

Hyman grieves the loss of Israeli and Palestinian life, but blames Hamas for all civilian casualties, saying the group is using civilians as “defensive shields.”

Israeli officials said their airstrikes target Hamas militants and infrastructure, which are located in civilian areas. Hyman believes in Israel’s right to defend itself, he said, while limiting civilian casualties when possible.

He noted that the local Jewish community is united in grief and solidarity but divided politically — as some people support Israel’s airstrikes in Gaza, while others do not.

Both Hamas and Israel must agree to preserve civilian life during the conflict, he said.

“We have to insist on mutual rules and ethics,” Hyman said. “This cannot be a one-sided approach.”

Life under the Israeli occupation

Since 2007, Israel has imposed a land, air and sea blockade of Gaza. Today, its 2.2 million residents can’t leave without the Israeli government’s permission. Israel controls the flow of water, food, fuel, electricity and humanitarian aid in and out of Gaza.

“It was an oppressive living condition unlike anything I’ve ever really imagined,” said San Luis Obispo physician Dr. Heidi Hutchison, who traveled to Gaza in 2022 to train medical professionals to prepare for mass casualty events. “I also found a tremendously vibrant, welcoming, resilient populace trying to live normal lives in the face of the oppression and adversity, and I was very impressed by that.”

Hutchinson said she was particularly struck by how the blockade hinders medical care.

For example, Israel banned the import of radios in Gaza, so ambulance operators communicate by phone — which is the first form of communication to collapse during an emergency.

“It sort of chokes their medical system,” she said.

Meanwhile, Israel often denies Palestinian patients the ability to travel to Israel or other neighboring countries for life-saving medical care not available in Gaza, she said.

During his time in the West Bank with the International Medical Corps, Abdul Cader observed the same “blocking of care,” he said.

“The most difficult thing was movement — was getting somebody with cancer, for example, to a cancer hospital,” Abdul Cader said.

A Gaza resident told him about a woman who requested to go to Israel for an ear, nose and throat procedure.

Israeli soldiers forced her to remove all of her clothes and answer questions about people she knew in Gaza. They still denied her entry to Israel for treatment, Abdul Cader said.

Abdel, the local resident who grew up in the West Bank, said Israeli forces have a longstanding pattern of oppression in the region. Israel took control of Palestinian territories in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem in the 1967 war.

“History didn’t start last week,” Abdel said. “More than four generations of Palestinians, they’ve been struggling and suffering.”

When Abdel visited his brother in December, he noticed that the farmers markets no longer sold Palestinian produce because Israel’s control of the water supply makes it difficult for Palestinians to farm their land, he said.

Meanwhile, he said, Israeli settlers in the West Bank shoot at his family and other farmers when they attempt to harvest their olives.

“They oppress the Palestinians. They took their land, they disperse them, they’re killing them, they dehumanize them. They treat them, you know, like savages,” Abdel said.

Still, he said, Palestinians wish to live safely in their ancestral land. He called for a ceasefire in Gaza, and for Israel to return the West Bank to Palestine.

“We have this belonging to the land,” Abdel said. “There is always going to be Palestine. The Israelis, they might erase it from Google Maps, but they cannot erase it from the Bible.”

SLO County residents demand a ceasefire in Gaza

The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with about 2.2 million people packed into 139 square miles of land. According to a 2022 report from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 47.3% of Gaza’s population are children.

Israel’s airstrikes have demolished apartment buildings, struck mosques, churches and even a refugee camp in northern Gaza twice within 24 hours.

Israeli forces have killed at least 3,760 children and injured 7,695 more in Palestine since Oct. 7, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

To put this into local context, more children have been injured in Gaza than are enrolled in the entire San Luis Coastal Unified School District — which has about 7,500 students.

Dr. Abdul Cader acknowledged Israel’s need to respond to Hamas’ attack, “but we don’t justify the murder of thousands of civilians in the process,” he said.

“When I was in Nablus, decades ago, I literally pulled a piece of a child’s scalp out of the rubble of a damaged church,” Abdul Cader said. “Seeing the same thing happen in Gaza, but on a much, much larger scale — I think it’s reprehensible.”

He fears that Israel’s indiscriminate killing of civilians could “create the next generation of Hamas.”

“When you bomb buildings and kill a family of innocent people, the people that are left behind are going to be broken,” Abdul Cader said. “They are people that the language of groups like Hamas are going to be that much more attractive to.”

Abdul Cader urged his American neighbors to call their congressional representative to demand a ceasefire in Palestine.

Voters can reach Rep. Salud Carbajal’s San Luis Obispo office at 805-546-8348 and his Washington, D.C., office at 202-225-3601. North County voters can reach Rep. Jimmy Pannetta’s Paso Robles office at 805-400-6535 and his Washington, D.C. office at 202-225-2861.

Abdul Cader shared a verse from the Muslim holy book, the Quran: “Oh you who believe, stand up for justice even as against yourselves as witnesses to God. Whether it be against yourselves or your own kin,” he recited.

He said he is proud of the Jewish protesters at Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C,. calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

“They’re saying: Not in my name, and this has gotta stop,” Abdul Cader said. “It needs to be Jewish voices who are willing to stand up to the Israeli state and say, ‘Stop, this is a shame.’”

Hutchison, the San Luis Obispo doctor who visited Gaza in 2022, agreed, noting that the children of Gaza make up almost half of the population.

“We have to separate Hamas from the rest of the Palestinian people,” Hutchison said. “We really do have a young, innocent population of civilians.”

“I think that we have a duty to protect their lives,” she added.