I Have a Hamas Cat

I woke up today in a situation that felt like a nightmare. Anyone who has followed my writing over the years knows that my love for animals often surpasses my love for people. I have never been ashamed to admit that. I am the person who cries when the dog dies in a movie. I can sit through scenes of human tragedy with tears in my eyes, but show me an innocent animal suffering and I completely fall apart.

That is why what happened this morning hit me so hard.

For the past three weeks, the weather has been incredibly warm. One week even reached the level of a Code Red heatwave. Every night I lay awake in bed because of a horrible smell. It was not the heat that kept me awake. It was a stench so overwhelming that I honestly thought something had died inside the house.

In the darkness I searched under my bed but could not see anything. I asked my daughter to smell it as well, but she had a cold and could not smell a thing. I washed my sheets. I cleaned my bedroom. Nothing helped. The smell remained.

Last night my breathing became much worse. I am used to respiratory problems, so I blamed my health rather than the smell.

Then my cat suddenly started throwing up under my bed. I tried to catch him, but he escaped. Frustrated, I pushed my enormous king size bed away from the wall.

There was something lying underneath.

I carefully picked it up with a piece of paper.

It was not vomit.

It was a beautiful little bird with bright yellow feathers.

Dead.

Completely dead.

I completely lost it.

I started crying uncontrollably. I yelled at my cat. I called him a cruel little terrorist and an evil monster. At that moment I was so angry that I seriously thought he did not deserve to stay in my house anymore.

My daughter looked at me and said I was overreacting.

“It is nature,” she said.

Normally, I would agree.

Cats hunt birds. That is what cats do.

If my cat had been hungry, had caught the bird, eaten it and survived because of it, I would have hated it but I could have accepted it. That is nature. Predators kill because they need food.

But this bird had not been eaten.

It had simply been killed.

Left under my bed like a trophy.

Its tiny body slowly decomposed until the smell filled my bedroom and almost made me sick.

That is not survival.

That is killing for the sake of killing.

At that moment a painful analogy entered my mind.

It reminded me of Hamas.

On October 7, Hamas did not attack because it needed food. It did not murder because it needed territory that very day. It massacred innocent civilians with extraordinary brutality. Babies, children, women, elderly people and entire families were murdered. Others were kidnapped into Gaza. The cruelty itself became part of the message. The suffering was not an unfortunate side effect. It became the objective.

Looking at that little bird under my bed, I suddenly understood on a tiny personal level what it means to lose innocence in an instant.

I know that comparing a dead bird to the unimaginable horror experienced by Israeli families is not the same. Nothing could ever compare with the trauma of losing loved ones to terrorism. But the feeling of seeing pointless destruction touched something deep inside me.

I will never forget that little bird.

And I suspect many Israelis will never again look at the world in quite the same way after October 7.

Perhaps I will never look at my cat in the same way again either.

Thinking about all this brought back memories from my childhood in the Middle East.

I remember the road from Tiberias to the Golan Heights. Tall trees lined both sides of the road. They had originally been planted to conceal the movement of Israeli military vehicles approaching the Syrian border.

We drove that road often because we lived in Damascus and visited Israel every two weeks.

I remember hiding in the back seat of the car during those journeys. I cried almost every trip.

The distance was only around thirty to fifty kilometers, yet during one drive we counted seventy seven dead animals lying beside the road. Cats. Dogs. Horses. Donkeys. Jackals. Foxes. Ermines. One lifeless body after another.

I cried every single time.

Back then it often seemed as if animals were treated as though their lives had little value.

In Damascus I fed around sixty stray cats in our neighborhood. Stray dogs were almost nonexistent because their lives were even harsher.

Sometimes, on the road outside the city, I saw groups of children chasing terrified dogs and beating them with sticks. I screamed at my father to stop the car so I could help the animal.

He never did.

Not because he did not care.

Stopping the car was simply too dangerous.

Security always came first.

I also saw horses and donkeys carrying loads so heavy that they could barely remain standing. Those images have never left me.

When we later moved to Jerusalem, things were noticeably better.

There were still many stray cats, but people fed them. Families walked their dogs through the streets. I rarely saw horses being abused.

That was one of the many reasons I grew to love Israel so deeply.

Of course, cruelty still existed.

I remember Arab boys ringing doorbells selling beautiful wild birds trapped inside tiny cages. They had captured them from nature simply to make money.

Whenever I could, I bought those birds.

Not because I wanted to own them.

Because I wanted to open the cage and watch them fly away.

Freedom was worth far more than possession.

Today I find myself living with what I jokingly call my Hamas cat.

A cat that kills without eating.

A cat that reminds me, in a very uncomfortable way, of how meaningless violence can feel when destruction becomes the goal rather than survival.

The little bird is gone.

The smell has disappeared.

But the memory remains.

Every memory somehow brings me back to Israel.

Every memory reminds me why innocent life matters.

Whether that life belongs to a tiny yellow bird or to innocent people whose lives were stolen by terrorism.