![]() ![]() And as Israel tries to remove Hamas from power, the suffering of the people of Gaza - trapped between Hamas and Israel - has become heartbreaking, adding to the wrenching moral choices in this conflict, the balancing of life versus security.Ī home destroyed during the attack by Hamas is seen in Kibbutz Be'eri in Israel on October 14. Worse, Hamas leaders have repeated their pledge to continue their campaign, vowing to carry out similar missions again and again. It’s not the kind of information that compels a nation to seek negotiations with the perpetrators. The entire country is enveloped in anger and grief. Israelis are hearing from the victims and their families. There are many reports of rapes, and Israel is compiling evidence of sexual assaults alongside Hamas’s own videotaped evidence of dismemberment and decapitation. Israeli investigators reported seeing the bodies of small children burned aliv, and corpses found mutilated. Hamas fighters’ own body cameras recorded its members slaughtering entire families. It wasn’t just a massacre it was a sadistic frenzy of murder. Israelis have been learning more and more about the sheer horror of that day. Almost every Israeli knows someone who was killed or kidnapped, or someone who lost a relative or friend that day. The trauma of October 7 threatened to upend that tradition. Even if it ends up looking like a mistake in the arithmetic of war, with traded prisoners ultimately killing more people than the number of Israelis freed in the trade, making the painful deal is part of the nation’s core identity. Israel has a long tradition of going to great lengths to save individual citizens. Still, the decision to trade was the correct one. Sinwar is now the political head of Hamas in Gaza and believed to be the mastermind of the October 7 operation that killed about 1,200 people in Israel - more Jews than on any day since the Holocaust. When the pale, reed-thin Shalit finally left Gaza after half a decade in captivity, one of the men let out of prison in the deal was Yahya Sinwar. Gilad Shalit was taken hostage in 2006, the government ended up trading more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners from its jails in exchange for his freedom in 2011. Israel has done this before, and paid a high price for it. Opinion: Why Biden won’t do more to restrain Netanyahu REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/Pool Jonathan Ernst/Reuters President Joe Biden delivers a prime-time address to the nation about his approaches to the conflict between Israel and Hamas, humanitarian assistance in Gaza and continued support for Ukraine in their war with Russia, from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, U.S. Negotiating with a terrorist organization that has just slaughtered and brutalized more than 1,000 of the country’s citizens and remains committed to Israel’s destruction - repeatedly confirming that goal - is not only hard to swallow, it’s a moral and strategic dilemma of the highest order. Whatever Palestinians feel toward the organization that unleashed this round of fighting - and we will not hear many in Gaza now openly criticize Hamas - there’s little question that as long as this group remains in power, the future looks bleak for Gazans.įor Israel this deal is bitingly bittersweet. And the deal arguably strengthens Hamas, allowing it to claim credit, catch its breath and regroup. ![]() The deal, however, is hardly the stuff of unalloyed joy - for Palestinians or for Israel. After that, some hostages, likely to be mostly children, could start coming home by Thursday. Israel’s Supreme Court will review any petitions against the deal. And it is certainly welcome news for Gaza civilians, who will be thankful for other elements of the deal: an increase in the amount of humanitarian aid entering the strip and the expected release of 150 Palestinians prisoners from Israeli jails - three for every one of the hostages freed, along with the possible extension of the truce of an extra day for every ten additional hostages. ![]()
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