The Thing That Broke the Sabbath
This is a fractured testament to October 7th, where memory, grief, and history speak in whispers only the living can still hear. Reader discretion is advised.
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This is a guest essay by Francisco J. Bernal, a British writer.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
This essay was written in the literary style of “El informe de Brodie” (Brodie’s Report) by Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian writer whose short stories often blend myth, memory, and philosophical inquiry. Borges had a gift for distilling entire histories into a few quiet pages, often through the voice of an imagined narrator or forgotten witness.
“The Thing That Broke the Sabbath” is not a journalistic account, nor is it a work of fiction in the traditional sense. It is a literary meditation on real events, shaped by grief, restraint, and the desire to preserve something that resists documentation: the moral rupture of what happened on October 7, 2023.
Every effort has been made to remain respectful of the facts while allowing the form to speak in layers: fragments, echoes, commentary, and silence. It does not speak for the victims. It speaks after them.
Preface
The document that follows came to me not by accident, but without explanation. It was sent in a plain envelope with no return address, accompanied only by a typed note: “You may find this of interest. I have made no corrections.”
The manuscript was in English, though certain idioms suggest it may have been translated — possibly from Hebrew, or written by someone for whom English was not a first language. The paper was watermarked with the seal of a defunct commission.
I have not altered the text except to arrange its sections in what seemed a natural order. The fragments were not labelled, but appeared grouped by tone, not chronology. Several marginal notes were included in a separate envelope, written in different hands and languages. Some are reproduced in Section IV.
I do not know if the events described here occurred as written. Some of them are well known. Others are unverifiable, or unverifiable in the way things become when the bodies are buried, the footage lost, and the survivors too exhausted to speak.
It is tempting to treat this document as a parable, or a ritual. I resist the temptation. It was not sent as literature. I suspect it was not written as literature either.
I offer it here not as evidence, but as residue. It is not a complete account. It is not an argument. It is not a defence.
It is simply what was left.
— The Compiler
Jerusalem, 2042
Section I: The Thing That Broke the Sabbath
They came through the fields at dawn, from Gaza, in silence or singing. Some wore uniforms. Others, civilian clothes, as if to mock the idea that there was a difference. It was October 7th, the day of Simchat Torah. In Be’eri, in Kfar Aza, the doors were opened not by hands but by fire, by wire-cutters, by those who had memorised the blueprint of slaughter.
The first to die were not soldiers but grandmothers, infants, lovers in bed. The Thing that broke the Sabbath did not discriminate. It did not seek to negotiate. It had no flag but the one it wrapped around the corpses.
They filmed as they killed: GoPro strapped to helmet, phone held aloft like a sacred object. One man called his father from a stolen Israeli mobile: “I killed 10 Jews, Baba! I killed 10!” His father blessed him as if he had passed an exam.
At the Nova festival, they found the dancers, young and soft and bare-footed. The Thing did not speak their language, but it knew the choreography. It spun through the crowd with a rifle, with fire, with knives. Later, in the shelter pits, they found them layered like offerings. In some, the women had been raped. In others, burned alive. Some were both.
They took Shani Louk from the festival grounds, her body limp before the fire stopped. They paraded her through Gaza on a pickup truck, her limbs bent at impossible angles, her head tossed back in what looked, from far enough away, like laughter.
The Thing carried lists. It knew which houses held children. It knew who had dogs, who had babies, who had lived through the last war and thought peace was a matter of patience. In Netiv HaAsara, they found a family hiding in a safe room. They opened the door with grenades.
It walked through Kibbutz Nir Oz and left no room untouched. In one, a baby was found beside the bodies of its parents. The baby was alive.
The Thing did not move quickly. It had all morning. Some of its limbs lingered behind, filming, looting, eating from fridges, uploading the dead. Others carried the youngest hostages back across the fence, dragging them into tunnels with names.
They did not come for land. They did not come for freedom. They came for something older: to teach the Jew what he is.
And yet the Thing was not new. In Hebron in 1929, it wore different clothes. In Kishinev in 1903, it sang in another tongue. In Granada, in Fez, in Salonika, it was called by other names, but it devoured the same.
Now it has a camera.
Now it posts.
Now it smiles.
And if it weeps, no one sees it.
Section II: Fragments from the Shelters
These fragments were found inscribed on the back of cigarette boxes, in the margins of WhatsApp transcripts, on the inside of a child’s toy. Some may not be authentic. Some may not be from the living.
1.
We heard Hebrew. That’s why we opened the door.
Then someone shouted Allahu akbar and threw something in.
My brother was standing. After that he wasn’t.
2.
He said: “Give me your baby. I’ll help her.”
She didn’t want to. But she gave him the baby.
He shot the baby in front of her.
3.
There was a woman in the shelter. They made her choose.
Her daughter or her son.
I don’t know what she said. I only heard one shot.
4.
The music was still playing.
Even while they were screaming.
Even after the shooting stopped.
Even when the sky changed colour.
5.
I saw a boy run across the field with blood on his hands.
He wasn’t wounded.
He just didn’t know where to put them.
6.
They said they were from the army.
They wore our uniforms.
They called us by name.
7.
In the safe room, we texted our families.
We said: “It’s okay. They’ll come soon.”
But they didn’t come soon.
We stopped texting.
8.
I saw my father on one of the videos.
It was his house.
They filmed his death and posted it before we knew he was gone.
9.
There was a woman who was seven months pregnant.
They dragged her outside.
One of them said: “Don’t waste it.”
The others laughed.
10.
In the tunnel, they whispered to each other.
Sometimes they prayed.
Sometimes they watched football on their phones.
Once, one of them asked me if I liked Messi.
Section III: What Was Known Before
There are patterns that precede violence, and there are those who specialise in not seeing them.
In the years before the Thing crossed the fields, it was already present in certain gestures. In school books printed in Gaza, where maps bore no neighbour. In sermons recorded and uploaded, where Jews were not enemies but insects. In children’s television programmes where puppets sang of rifles. In parades where plastic rockets were carried like toys, and toy rockets were fired like prayers.
Those who warned of this were said to be alarmist. Or worse, political.
There were signs in the tunnels too. Not just their number or scale, but their architecture. The way they branched under civilian homes, the way one led directly to a kindergarten. The way their discovery was met not with fear, but indifference. One diplomat referred to them as “asymmetrical infrastructure.”
There were feasts when the killers returned from prison. Songs were written for them. Mothers handed out sweets in their honour. On one wall, a mural showed a knife plunging through the Star of David.
The Thing was not hidden. It was televised.
It was also whispered. A rocket technician defected and spoke of training camps for children. A translator wept during a court deposition and said: They mean it. The statement was redacted.
In certain cafés in the West, it became fashionable to speak of “decolonisation” without reference to maps, timelines, or treaties. One young scholar compared the massacre of schoolchildren to the tearing down of a statue. The audience applauded.
The Thing was not invited, but it was understood. What surprised people was not its arrival, but its appetite.
After the attack, many said they had not known. Or that they had known only partly. Or that they had known, but it was complicated.
Some explained that such things do not occur in a vacuum, as though murder required a context more compelling than hatred. As though dismembered bodies required a footnote.
They said this in panel discussions, in op-eds, in vigils with candles. They said it in the language of sorrow, but also in the grammar of forgetting.
The Thing has always had a talent for making others speak on its behalf.
Section IV: Glosses and Margins
The following notes were compiled from drafts, annotations, and partial translations of the original document. Their authorship is uncertain. Some appear to contradict the narrative. Others may be forgeries, or later interpolations. Their inclusion here is provisional.
(a)
“The Thing” is a symbolic shorthand for the operation conducted by elements of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades on October 7, 2023. The author’s use of allegory may obscure the political complexities of the event.
— Footnote in an academic edition withdrawn from circulation after complaints
(b)
The translator hesitated over the line: “They did not come for land. They did not come for freedom.”
He wrote in the margin: “I cannot tell if this is despair or clarity.”
Then he left it unchanged.
(c)
A French translation renders “The Thing that broke the Sabbath” as La Chose qui déchira le Repos. A later edition reverts to La Chose qui rompit le Chabbat for religious fidelity. Both editions omit the paragraph about the child who survived beside the corpses, citing “reader distress.”
(d)
A surviving copy of the text was submitted as evidence in a war crimes tribunal. It was dismissed as “literary.” The presiding judge asked whether it was a poem or a provocation.
(e)
In a televised debate, one panellist referred to the Thing as “trauma transposed onto metaphor.” Another replied, “It wasn’t a metaphor when they killed my niece.” The moderator thanked both and went to commercial.
(f)
The paragraph about the tunnels was marked with three red lines by a UN archivist and replaced in a later edition with the phrase: “infrastructure routes relevant to non-state actors.”
(g)
One edition includes a diagram of the Nova festival grounds, overlaid with red thread marking the movement paths of the attackers. The thread stops near a cluster labelled “Zone B (Shelter pits).” No legend is provided.
(h)
In a student edition prepared for Western classrooms, the section titled “Fragments from the Shelters” is preceded by a trigger warning. The warning is longer than the section itself.
(i)
A 2037 German edition includes a foreword by a cultural theorist who writes: “The text must be read as a work of second-generation mythography — a sacred mourning rite disguised as lamentation. The Thing is not real, but necessary.” The same publisher would later issue a retraction.
(j)
One anonymous gloss, found handwritten in the margins of a Hebrew copy: “You cannot make poetry from this. But you must try.”
Postscript
I do not know if the Thing can be killed, or only starved. I do not know if it sleeps, or merely waits. I have seen its name written in languages that have no word for neighbour. I have heard it sung in anthems and chanted at vigils where the candles were still warm.
One of the survivors said that in the tunnel, the lights went off at night so they would not know if it was morning. Another said she stopped counting the days, not because she forgot, but because there was nothing left to count toward.
These details are included here without interpretation. The reader may draw what conclusions they like. Others already have.
As for the Thing itself, I have not seen it since. But I know it walks somewhere. It is not hard to imagine it in another field, another house, another name.
We said never again. The Thing did not hear us.
Macron, Starmer, Albanese, and Carney would do well to read this.
What’s happening in Israel isn’t about land. It’s about religious hatred and dominance that goes back 1400 years.
The Christian world would do well to pay attention.
It's funny how there are Israelis and Jews in the diaspora that are still living on the 6th of October 2023.
As if non of this ever happened.