Volunteer groups, including members of Israel’s Jewish Orthodox communities, have taken up firearms training at a gun range in Ra’anana north of Tel Aviv in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks.
Footage shows participants ducking in and out of cover and firing paintball handguns at targets in a bespoke shooting range designed to provide training in counter-insurgency.
“We thought that we could trust the police or the army and now we saw that if something happens there will be time, critical time, maybe ten minutes, maybe an hour, maybe three hours before the police and army come,” said Roni Ayalon, a firearms trainer and former soldier.
“In these ten minutes or in this half hour, the local population and the local community will have to deal with the situation by themselves. And we are here to help them know what to do when the time comes and have the equipment and knowledge of how to deal with such a situation,” he continued.
Ayalon says he plans to use the volunteers from the shooting range to create ‘neighbourhood security’ teams to protect Israeli settlements that are ‘very close to Arab villages’.
“They feel very insecure. And what we want to do is to take all these volunteers to build neighbourhood security so everybody will see that in the neighbourhood they have security online 24 hours a day, with people, with guns, they know what to do.”
Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on Saturday, October 7, firing thousands of rockets as its militants on the ground broke through into Israeli territory, in what the group described as ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’.
The Israeli military accused the group of committing atrocities in the border kibbutz settlements. Hamas subsequently released a statement describing claims of ‘killing children, beheading them and targeting civilians’ as ‘fabricated allegations promoted by some Western media outlets’.
Israel declared war on the group and a ‘complete siege’ of Gaza, with a large-scale campaign of air strikes which Palestinian officials reported had killed over 1,500 people in the first week – and many thousands more since.
A ground incursion began at the end of the third, with Israeli leaders vowing to ‘wipe out’ Hamas. The IDF claimed that Hamas locations and infrastructure were targeted in the response. However, United Nations experts warned against ‘collective punishment’ for the people of Gaza, before predicting a ‘humanitarian crisis’ and then claimed that ‘hell is settling in’ for the region.
