Paranoid Brit Thinks Paragliders Are Hamas Fighters Attacking Her Village

Yorkshire is a place, Yorkshire is a state of mind. Photo: Danny Lawson/PA Images (Getty Images)

The world’s on high alert these days, with everyone told to watch out for suspicious packages at train stations or shifty-looking people at airports. Now one British woman has taken this permanent state of suspicion about five steps too far and claims they thought amateur paragliders were Hamas invading her village.

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A woman in South Yorkshire was caught out when a group of paragliders sailed over her village of Armthorpe on the outskirts of Doncaster, according to local news outlet the Doncaster Free Press. Instead of having the normal thought that they might just be a couple of friends out for a morning float, she presumed the worst.

The paper reports that the woman took to Twitter X to slam the paragliders as she feared they were Hamas moving in for an attack on her village of 14,000 people. According to the Doncaster Free Press:

The angry resident saw the craft – similar to those used in the attack on a music festival Israel which killed hundreds – soaring through the skies above Armthorpe over the weekend.

Taking to social media, she wrote: “Whoever thought it was funny to parasail over the village, it was in extremely poor taste.

“Take your twisted hatred somewhere else.”

Now, I’m from South Yorkshire and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen paragliders floating around where I grew up. Not once did it occur to me that they might be a troupe of trained killers moving in. Instead, like most normal people, I figured it was just members of a local paragliding club.

In fact, after the woman’s outburst on social media, that’s exactly what other locals chimed in to say. The Free Press reports that people had seen the paragliders taking to the skies in the area for the past few weekends.

Interestingly, there actually is a paragliding training facility just a 30-minute drive from Armthorpe. So really, that should be anyone’s first guess as to where the gliders came from, rather than a territory more than 2,300 miles away. Doncaster, what a place.