Good day all. As expected, the usual suspects are trying to force Israel to cave in to Hamas over the hostages as well as letting food and water into the Gaza Strip. Israel might let some supplies into Gaza provided they can prove it won’t aid the terrorists. As for the hostages? Israel won’t negotiate.
The attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7th has sent shock waves through Israel. The slaughter of unarmed men, women and children, along with the butchery and savagery displayed by Hamas is being equated with the Holocaust. The casualties alone make it the worst terrorist attack since 9/11.
One of the issues has been the 150-200+ people taken hostage by Hamas to be used as a shield and a bargaining tool. Israel has decided that they aren’t going to play that game any longer. They intend to obliterate Hamas and it’s supporters and won’t negotiate. Here are the details from the Times of Israel:
National Security Council head Tzachi Hanegbi said on Saturday that there are no active negotiation efforts underway by Israel to repatriate the Israelis and some other foreign nationals kidnapped by Hamas last Saturday, saying “there is no way right now to have a negotiation” with the terror organization.
“Israel will not hold negotiations with an enemy that we have vowed to wipe from the face of the earth,” he said, briefing reporters at the Israel Defense Force’s Tel Aviv headquarters. His comments prompted fury from the families of the missing, with their spokesman accusing the government of abandoning them.
I fully understand the families and deeply sympathize with them. I have no idea how I would react in a similar situation. However, as hard as this is, Israel has no choice now and must move in. If they can save the hostages, they will, but they can not be the overriding factor in how the IDF proceeds.
Hanegbi also stated that the cabinet’s war goal is to remove the Hamas terror group from military and political control over the Gaza Strip, but declined to elaborate on planned next steps for the coastal enclave.
This is called “Not telling the enemy how you plan to attack them.” Another term would be “Operational Security.”
Hamas and Islamic Jihad claim to be holding 130 hostages, with some reports estimating the number as at least 200.
They may have started out with 200, but I suspect they’ve butchered 70 people, either due to their dying from wounds received in the attack, or being raped and tortured to death.
Hamas has also said that any prisoner swap negotiations will only take place after the end of the fighting.
Obviously, Hamas is still thinking that this is going to be like every other terrorist attack they’ve done. It hasn’t sunk into their inbred heads yet that Israel isn’t playing by those rules any longer. They are going Old Testament on Hamas’s collective asses and they are going to flatten Gaza if necessary to get at them.
Pounding targets in the Gaza Strip for the past eight days, (This has been sitting in my to do list since it was published, A/W), Israel has said that it will not hold back against Hamas even at the cost of harming kidnapped Israelis. Hamas has claimed several captives have been killed in Israeli strikes; Israel has largely dismissed this as Hamas propaganda.
It’s possible that several hostages may have been killed, considering Hamas’s preferred use of hostages and civilians as human shields. I suspect that Israel is trying to locate all the missing people, and is working up plans to rescue them if they can. One probable issue is that Hamas will have scattered the hostages all over the place to make it impossible for Israel to recover them all in one mission.
This is why I think that Israel is not putting saving the hostages as their top priority. This is going to be, once the IDF launches their assault, a flat out search and kill operation. Hamas and their supporters in Gaza are going to find out what happens when the gloves come off.
Hamas might try to get help from their usual supporters, but I think that well has gone dry. Raping women and hopping the heads off babies tends to repulse decent people. Hopefully, Israel will be able to rescue some, preferably all of the surviving hostages, but I’m not expecting much.
***Update***
Just before I posted this, news came out that Israel had rescued one of the hostages, a female IDF soldier. She’s doing as well as can be expected and is home with her family. I have no information, however I suspect that none of her captors were taken alive.
Thatisall
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading...
~The Angry Webmaster~
