On Friday morning, October 23, 2026—note that this is timed to be just before Shabbat, while Jews are preparing for the holy day—two Hamas gunmen drove to the Yehuda Junction checkpoint near Hebron carrying an M16, a pistol, and enough ammunition for a massacre.

Israeli officials say their target was Route 35, a civilian highway. They opened fire instead on the soldiers at the checkpoint.

Staff Sergeant Ron Yonatan Roytman, 23, and Sergeant Yuval Shai Svilem, 20, were killed.

Three more soldiers were wounded.

The gunmen were killed in a 20-minute firefight.

Hamas praised the attack as a “heroic operation.”

Israel responded appropriately: cordon off Hebron, search house to house for weapons and accomplices, demolish structures used by militants, and lock down the West Bank while the operation runs.

But within hours, the familiar second act began — the complaint about the response. B’Tselem warned of “collective punishment” and war crimes.

The UN human rights office called the lockdown “yet another episode in a never-ending stream of suffocating measures” and a “pattern of collective punishment whenever Palestinians commit acts of violence.”

The mosque closure on Friday and the olive harvest were cited as the injury.

Notice what is missing from the complaint: the dead soldiers.

The planned massacre on a civilian highway.

The weapons cache.

The praise from Hamas.

This is the pattern, and it is always in the same order.

First the provocation — an attack designed to kill as many Israelis as possible.

Then the security measure the attack made necessary.

Then the accusation, in which the measure becomes the crime and the attack disappears from the story.

Israel is not permitted the one thing every state is permitted: to defend its people and then be judged on the defense, rather than condemned for refusing to absorb the next attack quietly.

The checkpoint did its job on Friday — it stopped two gunmen from reaching Route 35.

The complaint now is that Israel is acting as if that matters.