On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists snatched Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, Carmel Gat, 39, Eden Yerushalmi, 24, Almog Sarusi, 26, Alex Lobanov, 32, and Ori Danino, 25 from the Supernova Music Festival and their homes along the border with Gaza along with 250 other innocents and held them as hostages.
As we know from hostages rescued alive since, Hamas tortures the Israeli captives as a matter of course. They are raped. They are beaten. They are starved. And they are humiliated and psychologically tortured day in and day out.
And many of them have also been executed.
Hamas executed Hersh, Carmel, Eden, Almog, Alex and Ori, apparently quite recently. And the IDF brought their bodies home on Saturday night.
Rather than respond to the heartbreaking news with condemnations of Hamas and demands that Israel fight to victory; rather than call for Israel to execute an equal or larger number of Hamas terrorists who participated in the Oct. 7 atrocities who are currently in Israeli jails, Israel’s opposition leaders in the Knesset have joined the anarchist groups in blaming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for Hamas’s murder of the six.
As one, Benny Gantz, Yair Lapid, Yair Golan and their underlings have joined the leftist groups that have been using mass riots, political violence and general mayhem since 2019 in an effort to oust Netanyahu from power, and have called on Israelis to take to the streets in response to the executions and bring down the government through violence.
The behavior of the likes of Lapid, Gantz, Golan; of 90% of Israel’s media organs and the rest of the left’s representatives, raises the question: Have they lost their minds?
Hamas took the hostages on Oct. 7 because its calculating leader Yahya Sinwar rightly identified hostages as Israel’s soft underbelly. In 1985, Israel freed 1,150 terrorists from Israeli jails in exchange for three Israeli hostages held in Syria by Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. Among those freed was Ahmed Yassin, who founded Hamas two and a half years later.
Yassin and his fellow terrorists freed in the deal used their freedom to transform terrorism from a tactical nuisance into a strategic threat to the existence of Israel, leading waves of terror campaigns for the next two decades.
The Jibril deal taught Israel’s enemies that Israeli hostages are their ace in the hole. Oct. 7 was born in October 2011, when Israel freed 1,027 terrorists, including Sinwar, for IDF Sgt. Gilad Shalit, whom Hamas terrorists had held hostage since June 2006.
Sinwar’s war strategy has been the same since the outset of the war: To use international pressure and domestic political unrest to compel Israel to capitulate to his demands. If he and Hamas are able to survive, Hamas wins. Obviously, the hostages are a key means of accomplishing his goal. To understand how he uses them, consider the hostage videos.
Freed hostages attest that while in Hamas captivity, they were videoed constantly. They were forced to say whatever texts Hamas propagandists told them to say, over and over again.
Given Hamas’s apparently endless supply of hostage videos, why has Sinwar released so few?
The answer of course, is that Sinwar views them as a tool. The texts of nearly every single video have been nearly identical. The hostages blame Netanyahu for their suffering and demand that the government bow to Hamas’s demands or else Hamas will kill them.
All the agency is on Israel. Hamas merely responds to the actions of the government. Whether the hostages live or die is Israel’s decision, not Hamas’s. In other words, the sole purpose of the videos is to destabilize the government by inducing the public to believe that it is the government—not Hamas—that is effectively holding the hostages captive.
This brings us to the recent execution of the six. Apparently, their captors saw that IDF units were closing in on their position. They could have seized the hostages and run somewhere else. But they executed them. Why?
Consider recent events.
For the past several months, responding to the joint demand of the left and the Biden-Harris administration, Netanyahu has been sending Israeli hostage negotiators to Qatar and Egypt to try to reach a deal with Hamas for the freeing of around 20 of the 101 hostages—dead and alive—Hamas holds in Gaza.
Israel has accepted in principle two exceedingly problematic deals presented by President Joe Biden, the first in May and the second last month. The offers require Israel to release hundreds of Hamas terrorists, including murderers, in exchange for around 20 hostages. They also require Israel to accept a ceasefire for at least six weeks and the removal of most of its forces from Gaza. The deals involve several stages.
Israel’s position is that after the first stage, it will be free to renew military operations. Although the Biden-Harris administration has paid lip service to this demand, it is apparent that it views the deal as a means to achieve a permanent ceasefire. And as the days till the presidential election on Nov. 5 tick by, the administration will use all the leverage the U.S. has on Israel to compel Israel not to renew hostilities. In other words, regardless of what the deal’s text says, agreeing to Stage 1 means agreeing to an end to the war with Hamas intact, that is, with Hamas victory.
While Israel’s position has changed over the course of the talks, Hamas’s has stayed constant. It demands a total cessation of Israel’s military campaign against Hamas, and the total withdrawal of all IDF units from all of Gaza, including the border with Egypt. Reportedly, there are thousands of fully armed Hamas terrorists in Sinai waiting for the ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal from the border to enter Gaza and to in short order rebuild Hamas’s regime and its devastated forces.
Since May, and with greater determination and urgency in recent weeks, Netanyahu has stated repeatedly that although he is willing to make massive, painful concessions to free even a small number of hostages, he is not willing to remove IDF units from the Gaza-Egypt border. In light of the U.S. position, his stance makes sense. The only way for Israel not to lose is to keep Hamas cut off from its outside supporters. A JNS/Direct Polls survey from July showed that some 60% of Israelis support that position.
On the other hand, in acts of gross insubordination and strategic lunacy, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar, Mossad Director David Barnea and other top officials have let it be known through their media mouthpieces that they oppose Netanyahu’s position. Halevy, Bar and others refuse to acknowledge the administration’s actual policy and insist that Israel can afford to leave the Gaza-Egypt border for six weeks. And returning will be an easy matter.
The generals’ position is supported by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Gallant fully abandoned his voters in Likud and began serving as a mouthpiece for the left and the Biden-Harris administration in the Security Cabinet immediately after returning from his weeklong visit to Washington in June.
The discourse in Israel isn’t simply removed from reality because it is based on a false presentation of the U.S. position by the security brass. The entire domestic debate is taking place while Hamas isn’t even participating in the negotiations. For the generals, for Gallant and their comrades in the Knesset, the media and on the streets, the only one responsible for anything is Netanyahu.
In other words, Gallant, the generals, the left’s political leaders and the rioters in the streets are all playing the roles Sinwar assigned them.
This reality played out starkly during Thursday night’s Security Cabinet meeting.
From leaks of the supposedly secret deliberations that can be traced directly to Gallant, we learned that Gallant presented his fellow ministers with an ultimatum that might as well have been written by Sinwar. Gallant said that if they don’t agree to withdraw from the Gaza-Egypt border (temporarily), the hostages will be killed.
Netanyahu reportedly exploded at Gallant and explained that there is no such thing as a temporary withdrawal from the border zone, because of the actual U.S. position opposing a reinstatement of hostilities. Gallant responded to this dose of reality with a total meltdown. He said that Netanyahu was effectively calling for the hostages to be murdered.
Netanyahu responded by presenting a draft Security Cabinet decision to reject any concessions on Israel’s control over the Gaza-Egypt border in any hostage talks. It passed with one nay vote—Gallant’s.
Then on Saturday night, the news began percolating that the hostages were executed and the IDF retrieved the bodies.
As Tal Gilboa, whose nephew Guy Gilboa-Dalal remains hostage in Gaza, wrote on her X account on Sunday morning, “If the formula is ‘dead hostages = shutting down the country,’ … what would you do if you were Sinwar?”
Gallant responded to the news of their executions by publishing a statement on X demanding that the Security Cabinet reconvene and cancel its decision on the Gaza-Egypt border from Thursday night.
Towards noon on Sunday, Netanyahu issued his first response to the news that that the hostages had been executed. He explained that Hamas stopped carrying out serious negotiations with Israel last December. Sinwar rejected the U.S. ceasefire for hostages deals in May and August—both of which Israel accepted. Netanyahu concluded by noting that the execution of the six hostages makes clear, yet again, that Hamas doesn’t want a deal.
Given past experience, in all likelihood the left’s current calls for mass riots will indeed lead to unrest. But they won’t bring down the government. All the same, as Gilboa inferred, they will place the rest of the hostages in even greater peril.
Israel needs to win this terrible war. It has no choice. Just as the Jibril deal paved the way for 20 years of escalating terror warfare against Israel, and just as Oct. 7 was born with the Shalit deal, so events far more terrible than that one-day holocaust will happen if we dare to play by Sinwar’s rules. It is shocking, and frankly unforgiveable, that Israel’s left, led to his disgrace by Gallant, insists on doing so.