One year ago on 22 April 2025, 26 people were killed in the Baisaran Valley near Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir. They were tourists, honeymooners, families, and young men on holiday, sitting in a meadow so beautiful that locals call it the mini-Switzerland of India. They had no warning. They had no defense. The terrorists who entered that valley on the afternoon of April 22, 2025 were armed with M4 carbines and AK-47s. Before they fired a single shot, they did something that has stayed with me since I first read about it.

They asked their victims their names.

Not because they wanted to know them. Because they wanted to sort them. Those who could recite the Islamic Kalima were identified as Muslim and spared. Those who could not were killed. Some Hindu men were made to remove their trousers to be checked for circumcision before being shot at close range. Shubham Dwivedi from Kanpur was the first to fall. A terrorist walked up to him and his wife and asked directly, “Hindu hai, Muslim hai?” Shubham said, “We are Hindus.” He was shot in the head. Indian Navy Lieutenant Vinay Narwal from Haryana was killed six days after his wedding. A daughter of a victim from Pune later recounted that when her father failed to recite the verse he was asked to repeat, “They pumped three bullets into him: one in the head, one behind the ear, and one in the back.”

The terrorists also told the Hindu widows, before walking away, that they had been spared so they could go and narrate the horrors of their husbands’ killing to Prime Minister Modi.

I want to stay with that detail for a moment, because it is important. This was not random violence. It was not the spray of bullets in a panicked ambush. It was organized, deliberate, identity-based murder. It was the targeting of people not for what they had done but for who they were.

Eighteen months before Pahalgam, on October 7, 2023, something broadly similar unfolded in southern Israel.

The Parallel That Should Not Have to Be Made

At approximately 6:30 in the morning on October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a coordinated attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip. In total, 1,195 people were killed that day, including at least 828 civilians. At the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, where young Israelis had gathered to dance through the night of the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret, 364 people were murdered. Families in the kibbutzim of Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, and Nir Yitzhak were massacred in their homes. 251 people were taken hostage into Gaza, including children and elderly grandparents. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

The victims at the Nova festival were not soldiers. They were young people celebrating a holiday on a dance floor. The people in the kibbutzim were farmers, teachers, and artists. They were killed because they were Jews, living in Israel. Their identity was their crime in the eyes of those who came for them.

The method was different from Pahalgam. The geography was different. The organizations responsible were different. But the logic was identical: sort the people by faith, and kill those who belong to the wrong one.

Israeli Ambassador to India Reuven Azar, in a video message........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)