Hostage Rescue Under Way
Israelis Advance in Northern Gaza
The waiting seems to have ended. Three long weeks after the reign of terror, by Hamas death squads, in the communities of the Gaza periphery, Israeli forces have entered Gaza and have been operating there since Saturday. They are proceeding methodically and so far, outside of urban areas and so far, with no IDF casualties.
Today we got the uplifting news that Ori Megidish, a soldier held captive by Hamas, has been rescued over night and reunited with her family. We also learned with horror that the IDF had recovered part of a severed head and matched it using DNA to Shani Louk, z”l, the woman whose body was paraded through Gaza on a motorcycle.
A spokesman for the Israeli ground forces, speaking on the daily update from Israel’s TV7, emphasized that the mission of the IDF in Gaza was dual, to rescue the hostages and to uproot Hamas. The liberation of Corporal Megidash shows us that these two objectives are not necessarily incompatible.
Image from Times of Israel: Freed Captive Cpl Ori Megidash with her Family
The ground operation in Gaza began on Saturday, hours after hostage negotiations were said to have stalled. The release of a large number of hostages was said to be close to achievement, when Hamas demanded fuel and reduced the number of captives being offered. Israel determined then that Hamas would not delay the ground offensive any further by dragging out negotiations that had freed only four out of 240 hostages in three weeks.
In spite of Iranian threats, the fighting on the northern border has so far not erupted into full scale war. Hezbollah intensified its rocket fire and Israel struck Hezbollah targets deeper inside Lebanon, but most of the enormous Hezbollah arsenal remained unused and Israeli troops have not entered Lebanon.
There’s another much bigger group of hostages who also stand to benefit from Israel’s incursion into Gaza. For sixteen years, the Gaza strip has been in the grip of Hamas, which seized power there in 2007. In executing their coup, they killed the members of other Palestinian factions, including those who supported the Palestinian Authority. Since then they have brought nothing but misery to the people of Gaza. A generation of Gazan young people has been indoctrinated into the Islamist ideology of the Hamas fanatics. They have been recruited as fighters from a young age. Thousands of other Palestinian children are said to have died digging the hundreds of miles of tunnels that Hamas uses to protect its fighters and weapons.
This network of tunnels, the “Hamas Metro” is where the hostages are thought to be held. Prime Minister Netanyahu said yesterday in a speech, that Hamas’ main military headquarters was located underneath the main hospital in Gaza City. This fits a larger pattern observed over many years in which Hamas uses the civilian population of Gaza to protect itself from Israeli attacks.
Image: In Gaza people shield the fighters while in Israel fighters protect the people
This strategy explains why civilians in Israel are protected by the army and provided with bomb shelters, while civilians in Gaza have nowhere to go.
The single minded dedication of Hamas to organizing ever deadlier violence against Israel has left the people of Gaza vulnerable and impoverished. Before Hamas took power, Gaza’s borders were open and people were free to come and go between Gaza and the other Palestinian territories. Hamas was present, but their hostile activities were curtailed by the forces of the Palestinian Authority.
After the coup, Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza to try to keep military equipment out of the hands of the terrorist regime. Hamas attacked Israel nonetheless, leading Israel to strike Gaza from the air. In 2014, after the murder of three kidnapped Israeli boys, Israel conducted an incursion into Gaza on the ground.
After the fighting, Hamas diverted foreign reconstruction aid to the construction of its tunnel network. So Israel limited the import of cement into Gaza, leaving more and more Gazans homeless after each round of fighting.
In response to the deteriorating economic conditions, ever more foreign aid poured into Gaza. Israel provides electricity for a few hours a day which nobody pays for. In normal times, 500 trucks a day enter Gaza with the necessities of life. This has left Hamas free to devote its efforts to devising ever more deadly strategies to kill Israelis, while the benevolence of outside donors keeps destitute Gazan civilians alive.
This economic devastation serves Hamas well, as people look to it for advantages which it doles out in return for support. Hamas also collects taxes on goods that are smuggled into the strip from Egypt through the tunnel network. All of this has left the ordinary people of Gaza entirely at the mercy of their sadistic and nihilistic rulers.
So it is possible to see the uprooting of Hamas rule in Gaza as also constituting a hostage rescue mission. In this case the hostages are the civilian population of Gaza. It is they who have been trapped for a generation in the hellish circumstances created by the economic blockade. It is they who have had to tolerate the destruction caused by Israel’s incursions in response to ever more deadly attacks by Hamas. It is they who have died when missiles misfired and landed short of the Israeli border.
In fact the current Israeli campaign can be seen as the largest hostage rescue mission of all time. If Israel succeeds in its war aims, the people of Gaza will be free for the first time in almost two decades to choose a different future, one that does not lead to endless war with Israel.
This evening there is a delegation of families of Israeli hostages here in Ottawa. I join in prayers that the present ground operation will bring their loved ones home safely. We also pray for the safety of all of the fighters of the Israel Defense Forces and other security forces. While the greatest peril is now in Gaza, the soldiers on the Lebanese border are also in harm’s way. Israeli troops also saw action today against terrorists in Jenin, and a policeman was stabbed by a terrorist on the streets of Jerusalem.
May they all be crowned with victory return safely to their loved ones.