Two years have passed since October 7, 2023, when Hamas poured out of Gaza and unleashed the most brutal massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Entire families were butchered, children burned alive, women raped and paraded through the streets. Western journalists and politicians called it “unprecedented,” as if they were seeing something entirely new. But for Jews, and for anyone who has studied Islamic history, it was not new at all. It was a repetition. It was a reenactment. It was the same jihad that has been carried out against them for fourteen centuries.
The tragedy of October 7 did not begin with Hamas rockets. It did not begin in 1948 with Israel’s rebirth. It began in Medina in the seventh century, when Muhammad established Islam as a political-religious system of war.
To honor the memory of the victims of October 7 is to speak the truth about the ideology that slaughtered them. And that truth requires looking back to where jihad against the Jews first became sanctified: in Muhammad’s conquest of Medina.
The Massacre
When Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE, the Hijra, it marked the transformation of Islam from a persecuted sect to a political force. In Mecca, Muhammad had been dismissed and mocked. In Medina, he seized power. Within a short time he positioned himself not merely as a preacher but as a ruler, a judge, and a warlord.
Medina was home not only to pagan Arab tribes but also to Jewish clans who had lived there for centuries, among them, the Banu Qurayza. After Muhammad consolidated power in Medina, he began raiding Quraysh trading caravans. These raids provoked an alliance of several tribes against him, so Muhammad ordered trenches to be dug around the city. According to Islamic sources, the Jews of Banu Qurayza even assisted his men by providing digging tools.
Yet after Muhammad’s victory, he accused the Banu Qurayza of treason, not because they had actually betrayed him, but because a single member of the enemy alliance had visited them. What followed was extermination.
Muhammad and his followers surrounded the Banu Qurayza’s strongholds for nearly a month. The Jews were cut off from food and water, under constant psychological pressure. According to Ibn Ishaq, they sought terms of peace, hoping to be treated like the Banu Nadir, another Jewish tribe earlier Muhammad expelled from Medina.