At the time of my first post about the Hamas October 7 attack on Israel, the Israeli death toll had passed 300, and “dozens” were reported taken hostage to Gaza. With those numbers in mind, I suggested that the dual goals of returning the hostages and completely defeating Hamas were not consistent:
The hostages held in Gaza will not be recovered alive unless Israel gives major concessions and leaves Hamas in power. While of course Israel wants to get them back alive, Israeli military options are severely constrained if that is the goal. Hamas has grown comfortable taking hostages and using them as shields to temper Israeli military responses. The goals of toppling Hamas and getting the hostages back alive are not consistent. Israel faces a tough choice.
Now the death toll exceeds 1400, the number of hostages are over 200, and the brutality and savagery of Hamas, with gruesome physical and sexual defilement even of dead bodies, has shocked Israelis and the civilized part of the civilized world (i.e. excluding western leftists and Islamists). We’ve documented Hamas’ crimes in dozens of posts (see bottom of this post for the full list).
We covered how international journalists were able to review terrorist bodycams and Israeli dashcams and surveillance cams, to see for themselves how cruel the Palestinian terrorist members and civilians who crossed the border with them were, “I just saw indescribable, raw footage of Hamas’ massacre along with 100 other international journalists”.
Those same videos were shown to American reporters in New York. NBC News reports on what it witnessed:
The brutality and elation of Hamas militants as they killed Israeli civilians — including babies, young children and the elderly — is evident in an Israeli government compilation of videos shown to two dozen journalists in New York on Friday.
The videos, which were aired for the first time outside of Israel, consist mostly of GoPro, cellphone and dashcam footage recorded by the attackers themselves.
Israeli officials said they showed the compilation to President Joe Biden when he visited Israel on October 18th. They also showed it to a group of journalists in Israel, including NBC’s Raf Sanchez, on Wednesday. The atrocities depicted suggest that jihadism has evolved in chilling and perverse new ways.
The NBC News report continues:
Throughout the roughly 45 minutes of footage, the attackers cheered as they killed unarmed people. Hamas members shot dead civilians in their living rooms, lit houses on fire, and hurled a grenade at a father trying to protect his three children, killing the father and one child, and partially blinding another. After civilians were shot dead in the car, Hamas militants pulled their limp bodies from the vehicle, got inside and drove away.The footage showed Hamas members engaged in the type of butchery depicted in ISIS videos. In one scene, a Hamas member asks another fighter to film him as he fires rounds into the head of an Israeli civilian who appears to already be dead. In another, a group of Hamas terrorits argue over who gets to cut off the head of a Thai man who was working in Israel. One of them then struggles to chop off his head with a hoe.The footage includes photographs of two babies that had been shot in the head and two infants who appear to have been burnt to a char….Videos showed Hamas fighters returning Gaza with Israeli hostages and corpses. In one, the body of an Israeli soldier is dumped on a street in Gaza, and Palestinian men stomp and kick it.In other videos, there are signs of rape. Footage shot by Israeli first responders shows the corpse of a young woman who is naked from the waist down. Israeli officials said they also found evidence that some women who were raped and killed had their legs broken.Israeli first responders were initially barred from taking videos or photographs of the dead out of respect for their families, officials said. But a decision was made to film what they found in order to preserve evidence of atrocities. Israeli officials said the video compilation is the most comprehensive visual evidence of war crimes carried out by Hamas.
Both a virtue and a weakness of Israeli society is the overwhelming concern for Israelis captured by Hamas or other terrorist groups.
In 2011, after his family mounted a public pressure campaign that ended up almost paralyzing Israeli society, the government agreed to exchange over 1000 terrorists in its custody for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Israeli society paid a very steep price for that exchange. By 2018, over one-third of Palestinian terrorists freed in the 2011 hostage deal returned to terror. Among the freed terrorists were almost the entire present Gaza military leadership of Hamas responsible for planning the October 7 attack. Thousands of Israelis died to recover one Israeli hostage.
Will Israeli society succumb to the pressure now that there are over 200 hostages, including babies and children? Already there are signs of a pressure campaign building.
Hamas has offered to exchange the 200 plus hostages for upwards of 10,000 terrorists in Israeli prisons. Representatives of the Israeli hostage families want the government to take the deal:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Saturday with representatives of families whose loved ones are being held captive in Gaza, and pledged that Israel “will exhaust every possibility” to bring about their return.The representatives urged Netanyahu to agree to an “everyone for everyone” prisoner exchange with the Hamas terror group, trading Palestinians incarcerated in Israel on security offenses for the hundreds who were abducted from Israel earlier this month during a devastating attack by Hamas.At the same time, at least 20 vigils of support for the families of the captives and memorials for those killed were held around the country on Saturday night. Many pushed the theme of a prisoner exchange to secure freedom for the captives held in Gaza. Some of the gatherings featured heavy criticism of Netanyahu.
One can feel for the families and the hostages, but also understand that such a hostage-for-prisoner exchange would mean thousands more Israelis would die in the future, and Hamas would remain in power.
The horrors of what Hamas did may be what holds Israel together in its goal of eliminating Hamas, which is not consistent with getting all the hostages back alive. That’s the hard truth.
Prior Posts:
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