Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack, the deadliest terror atrocity in history, killed 2,996 people of the then 285 million population of the United States.

Hamas’ invasion of Israel on 7 October saw the slaughter of 1,139, a smaller number but proportionately a far greater toll than the 2001 assault on the US.

Given Israel’s 9.3 million population, the murders at the Nova music festival and adjacent kibbutzes would proportionally be equivalent to 53,000 souls in a US-sized population.

That’s only 10,000 fewer people than the estimated toll of Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August, 1945.

Small wonder then that Israelis are showing a steely resolve in their determination to eliminate Hamas as a force in its Gaza stronghold and are poised to strike at the other Iranian proxy in the immediate neighbourhood, Hezbollah in Lebanon.

After a week’s tour of Israel organized by the Australia/Israel Jewish Affairs Council spent interrogating an extraordinary range of sources from the foreign ministry, defense, Palestinian Authority, fortunate survivors of the Nova massacre, members from besieged kibbutzes and civilian reservists, the complexity of the situation becomes understandable.

Iran, the fount of the evil in the region, is pulling the strings of proxy armies Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthi across the Red Sea.

It is not alone however. A photograph held by the Alma research centre which focuses on security threats to Israel’s northern border, shows senior military figures from China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas with their Syrian hosts.

This is Team Apocalypse, a knotting of the malevolent strands in the web of evil confronting Western liberal democracies.The only party missing is a representative of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

We know that Hamas had been planning its 7 October invasion for four years and we can only guess at what these latter-day Wannsee conferees concluded.

In January, 1942, the Nazi leaders agreed on the means of industrialising death. Now we are seeing what Iran, its proxies and allies are capable of: invasion, murder, torture and rape of civilians and playing the world media through the manipulation of enthusiastically sympathetic media organisations like the ABC and similar bodies.

Iran, the grand agent of terror, is affecting us all.

Australia’s proud history in Israel which began when the First Light Horse Regiment took part in the first Battle of Rafah, driving out the Ottomans in January, 1917, and was sealed when Herbert Vere (Doc) Evatt led the negotiations in the infant UN as President of the General Assembly in 1948-49, establishing the nation, has been trashed by Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

As a very senior Israeli figure acknowledged, Israel had no control of the narrative after 7 October.

‘We should never have let Hamas provide the body count,’ he said. ‘The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) should have given figures from the start.’

Those figures were the bodies strewn from Ground Zero, the Nova music site, across the mown paddocks and down the roads and highways leading away from the epicentre of the murders along the routes taken by terrified young men and women in their desperation.

Hundreds and hundreds of cars, some burnt out, all pockmarked with bullets, remain where they were abandoned among the eucalypts near where 364 youngsters were murdered at the Sukkot dance festival, and more than 250 were kidnapped.

Burnt-out homes in nearby kibbutzes remain just as the terrorists, the IDF rescuers, and first responders left them,with spray-painted symbols indicating they have been cleared of booby traps and bodies.

The few who escaped have a very different narrative from that fed by Hamas to our public broadcasters.

Twenty-four-year-old Shalev Biton, had returned from a working holiday in Australia (he met his girlfriend in Melbourne) two days before attending the music festival with five friends.

Like most of the 4,000 attendees, they were in a tent sleeping when awoken by the sound of explosions at 5.55 a.m.

‘I had danced till 4 a.m, and was half-awake, but these were not in the rhythm of the bass,’ the young musician said.

At 6.29 a.m. (he noted the precise times) he heard the unmistakeable sound of missiles and by 6.50 a.m. he and his mates had packed and were in the car park where they heard gunfire but it was not close.

At 7.20 a.m. a young woman, bleeding from her torso, staggered into the car park and they all began running.

Twenty minutes later, terrorists appeared, shooting directly at the group with their guns in automatic mode and Shalev received a phone call from a cousin, a policeman, who said, ‘Run for your life, or dig a hole and hide.’

With two friends, he ran a very fast two or three kilometres and found a young woman shaking with fear under a bush.

With her, they ran on and gathered another two boys at the six-kilometre mark, and at nine kilometres they saw a greenhouse next to a farm.

With his two friends, Shalev walked to the locked farm gate and asked a group of 12 or 14 Thai workers who were cooking breakfast there for water.

An Arab man speaking in a heavy Gazan accent came forward and said he was the manager of the farm.

He was fifty-five-year-old Yunis, a Bedouin, their saviour.

‘He spoke to us like a father and I trusted him. He warned us that terrorists were coming and told us all (there were now eight of us) to get under the house and hide.’

They squeezed into a 40-centimetre crawl space and watched as two terrorists approached the farm gate and asked Yunis where the Jews had gone.

Shalev said he repeated every prayer he knew, particularly the Lord’s prayer found in the Hebrew Torah, as the 23rd psalm which in the King James version begins, ‘The Lord is my shepherd….’

He could hear Yunis telling the terrorists that he was a Muslim, too, with six children at home. After three or four minutes of conversation the terrorists hid near the greenhouse where they were observed by an Israeli helicopter gunship and killed.

Shalev was back home by 7 p.m. Yunis, he said, is a most humble man, ‘the most amazing guy in my life’.

‘I say we are like father and son, he prefers to say we are brothers.’

Shalev has written a song about his experience but it is not full of hate, it is a gentle soulful pastoral and one day it might be played at another music festival to a crowd of peace-loving youngsters under another full moon.

Yunis will be invited.