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.
This file by U.S. Secretary of Defense is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
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