Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, June 10, 2024

In 2008, a fake international humanitarian organization force tricked FARC terrorists into releasing hostages. No one complained of "perfidy."

Ken Roth claims claims that the Israelis who entered the Nuseirat camp dressed in civilian clothing were guilty of the crime of perfidy:

"Disguising combatants in civilian clothing in order to commit hostilities constitutes perfidy," a war crime. .Israel's rescue team reportedly entered Nuseirat in a furniture truck "driven by a female soldier in civilian clothes."

An Israeli military spokesman "declined to say whether" the soldiers who conducted the rescue operation "were disguised as Palestinian civilians, a tactic that Israeli special forces have previously used." That's because it is the war crime of perfidy.

Roth's source, strangely, is an article in a US Navy law journal and not a link to actual international law. The article makes clear that it is only the opinion of the author. Why does Roth not link to actual international law?

Because it is not at all clear cut that pretending to be a civilian during a hostage rescue mission is perfidious.

A 2014 monograph from the Israel Democracy Institute from 2014 looks at exactly this issue in great detail. Roth's blanket statement that this was perfidy is not accurate at all, but it is a complex question, depending on the exact nature of the incident and who does what.

But it is clear that Roth doesn't really care about perfidy, and just wants to insult Israel, And we have proof from an incident in Colombia in 2008. That incident was far closer to classic perfidy than anything Israel did on Saturday.

On 2 July 2008, the Colombian government directed a daring operation took place at Apaporis River in the department of Guaviare to free several hostages including Íngrid Betancourt. The aim was to motivate the leader of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) known as Cesar that the hostages he held were to be moved to another hostage camp by helicopter, with the help of an international humanitarian NGO, so that negotiations could begin for their release. The Colombians decided to pose as an NGO ..

On Tuesday two helicopters painted white and orange and with a stylized red bird made up of wavy red lines above two curved branches of blue leaves on the sides of the helicopter which disguised it as a fictitious NGO left a military base in an Andean mountain valley and settled in a jungle clearing. Another helicopter was carrying Colombian agents wearing Che Guevara T-shirts which landed to pick up the hostages. On board were Colombian military intelligence agents plus a doctor and two nurses. The rescuers included an agent, pretending to be Italian, another supposedly from the Middle East and an Australian with English ‘identical to Crocodile Dundee’. Two others wore Che Guevara T-shirts. The NGO group was accompanied by a TV crew of two who were Colombian commandos.

15 hostages were rescued from the FARC and two guerrillas including the commander who was liable for the hostages were captured.

So we have Colombian armed forces posing as FARC rebels, as humanitarian aid NGO employees, and as journalists, all as part of a successful ruse to fool Cesar into handing over the hostages.

By any measure this is far more perfidious than what Israel did.

Did Human Rights Watch, headed by Ken Roth at the time, call out Colombia for its perfidy? Not at all. It said, "Human Rights Watch today welcomed reports that 15 hostages that had been held for several years by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have been rescued. Human Rights Watch called on the FARC to immediately and unconditionally release hundreds of others still being held...In light of reports that there were no civilian casualties, the Colombian security forces should be commended for carrying out an effective mission that respected international humanitarian law. "

HRW declared the rescue operation that relied on feigning protected status of journalists, NGO workers and also the perfidy of pretending to be fellow rebels in their dress and actions followed international law.

So why was that legal, according to Roth, but not the IDF action to rescue hostages?

In fact, there are a number of legal analyses trying to figure out why world governments and NGOs all seemed to give Colombia a pass. The best explanation given is that everyone hated FARC so the ends justified the means.

As always, the rules for Israel are different than for everyone else.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Ten (count'em, TEN!) EoZ cartoons!

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

06/09 Links: Daring Israeli Rescue of 4 Hostages Discredits Appeasement; ‘At the level of Entebbe’; Journalist, doctor held Israelis hostage in Gaza

From Ian:

Daniel Greenfield: Daring Israeli Rescue of 4 Hostages Discredits Appeasement

After months in which it was falsely claimed that the only way to rescue hostages was to cut a deal with Islamic terrorists, Israel launched a daring daylight rescue operation, simultaneously hitting two houses where four hostages were being held.

The operation brought together the Israeli Army, the Shin Bet, its version of the FBI, Yamam, and the border police, which penetrated deep into enemy territory in a risky rescue mission that required precise timing and holding off hordes of terrorists who swarmed to attack the rescuers.

Despite the odds, Israel pulled it off. And the media and the political establishment doubled down on the narrative.

The White House and international leaders repeated their demands for a “ceasefire” that would leave Hamas in power and ready to launch another Oct 7.

The media eagerly passed on the Hamas claims of “mass civilian casualties”.

Both were responding to the fact that the operation had once again shown that the only right and moral thing to do was to defeat the terrorists.

There is only way to stop the cycle of Islamic terrorism and that is to stop cutting deals with the terrorists.

‘At the level of Entebbe’

The operation’s sole Israeli casualty was Chief Inspector Arnon Zamora, 36, a Yamam squad commander. He is survived by his wife and two children.

Noa Argamani (26) was held in one apartment, locked in a room, while Almog Meir Jan (21), Andrey Kozlov (27) and Shlomi Ziv (40) were held in second apartment, in a building 200 meters away, according to Hagari. All four had been kidnapped from the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im on Oct. 7, and were constantly watched by armed Hamas guards.

“Families with guards who had weapons inside the buildings, inside the flats, together, holding the hostages,” said Hagari.

Hamas periodically moved the hostages from one location to another, some of which were above ground and some of which were below. The fact that four hostages were being held above ground relatively close together created a unique opportunity.

At 11:00 a.m., the special forces assault teams got the “go” from Halevi and set out, approaching the two buildings in Nuseirat—a heavily populated civilian area.

At 11:25 a.m., the forces entered both buildings at the same time, engaged the terrorists, and extracted the hostages, with air support.

Had the operation targeted only one of the buildings, the IDF assessed that the Hamas guards in the second building would have killed their hostages, believing a raid was imminent, Hagari explained. “That is the reason why we made this decision,” he said.

The operation had been canceled three times before finally being given the green light, said Hagari.

“We gather the intelligence in multiple ways in order to make sure that we are ready for [an] operation,” he added. As information comes in, commanders need to decide whether or not to wait for more, he explained.

“There are a lot of details, like in a puzzle,” he said. “We may never have all of the links, but we have to make sure that we have enough links to ensure there is leverage.”

The IDF built models of the apartments for special forces to rehearse the rescue, according to Hagari. “The scale of the rehearsals was as large as the [1976] Entebbe operation—[in terms of] the models we used, as well as the way in which we trained, and we had to make sure that everything was done simultaneously,” he said.

Extensive preparations notwithstanding, tensions in the ISA command room were extremely high as the operation got underway, Hagari recalled.

“In Noa Argamani’s building our forces surprised them completely; it was still hard. In the other building, we had crossfires with the guards during which the commander of the squad from the [Yamam] Unit was injured,” he said.

Zamora was evacuated to hospital in critical condition, where he later died of his wounds.

“A very brave warrior,” said Hagari.

At this point in the operation, the word was out and terrorists armed with RPGs were “running in the streets” of the heavily populated residential neighborhood, converging on the rescue force, he continued.

“The cynical way in which Hamas is using [the] civilian population [of Gaza] in order to fire at our forces, embedding themselves within civilians, is tragic,” he stated.

“There was so much fire drawn to our forces, which meant we needed to fire from the air as well as the streets,” he said. “It was done very very professionally and precisely,” he emphasized, adding that the IDF had a pre-planned target bank of terrorist forces in the area.

The successful rescue highlights the high-level integration of Israel’s various security and military organizations, with the IDF, ISA, Yamam and IAF demonstrating their combined capabilities in intelligence gathering, operational planning and execution.

Hagari noted that 120 hostages are still held by Hamas in Gaza, and reaffirmed Israel’s commitment to securing their release.

“We will do everything possible to return all the hostages home. This morning’s operation was not only a success but also an opportunity to fulfill the goals of this war,” he said.

Col. Richard Kemp: 'Incredibly impressive, difficult to rescue hostages from 2 places'

Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of the British military forces in Afghanistan, spoke to Israel National News - Arutz Sheva about the daring rescue operation in Nuseirat yesterday (Saturday) in which four hostages were rescued alive, eight months after they were kidnapped from the Nova music festival on October 7.

"This was an extremely significant event in this war," Col. Kemp told us. "The IDF has been fighting very hard, very effectively, and with immense success in Gaza. They have destroyed most of the Hamas terror army and are on the path of its final destruction as a fighting force that can threaten Israel. But all Israelis’ hearts are firmly with the hostages and this dramatic rescue operation of four of them is a much-needed shot in the arm for people who have endured so much for so long in what is becoming Israel’s longest-ever war."

He noted that such successful hostage rescues are rare during warfare. "Successful hostage rescue in a hostile environment is probably the most difficult of military operations. I have been involved in the rescue of British hostages in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is rare for them to succeed. There are two prerequisites that are both extremely hard to achieve. First, you must have pinpoint intelligence to tell you exactly where the hostages are being held and in what conditions, including who and how many are guarding them. Second, you must be able to achieve surprise, in other words, to launch the operation without prior detection. Bearing in mind it is likely that hostages will have a gun to their heads and any warning that a rescue is coming will likely see them killed immediately. Terrorists will also often be expecting a rescue and will prepare to kill the rescuers eg by booby traps, snipers, etc."

"In this case, hostages were rescued from two separate locations which is incredibly impressive given the necessity to coordinate them so precisely to avoid terrorists in one location being so that one assault does not trigger reaction from terrorists in the other," he said.

"I have the utmost admiration for those soldiers, police, and intelligence officers who carried out this operation. Each one of them knew well the lethal dangers they faced, which has been tragically shown by the death of Yamam Chief Inspector Arnon Zemorah.

When asked about the question a BBC presenter asked about the possibility of the IDF issuing a warning prior to launching the rescue operation in order to reduce Gazan casualties, Col. Kemp responded that "that sort of question can be dismissed as a sign of complete ignorance of the reality of war. To give a warning that you are about to launch a hostage rescue operation would be a guarantee of that operation’s failure."

Official Palestinian Authority news doesn't mention the rescue once but claims there was a "massacre"

The official Palestinian Authority news agency Wafa had many stories about the events in the Nuseirat camp yesterday = but readers would have no idea that four Israeli hostages were rescued. To the Palestinian media, it was merely a senseless "massacre.'

The initial news story said,

80 citizens were martyred, the majority of them children and women, and others were injured, today, Saturday, as a result of the intense occupation bombardment, by land, sea and air, on the Central Governorate in the central Gaza Strip, specifically the Nuseirat camp, which witnessed unprecedented aggression, for more than two hours.

The followup:

The death toll of the massacre, carried out by the Israeli occupation forces as a result of targeting the central governorate in the central Gaza Strip, especially the Nuseirat camp, rose today, Saturday, to 210 martyrs and more than 400 injured.

Our correspondent said that military vehicles suddenly entered the areas east and northwest of the Nuseirat camp, coinciding with violent artillery shelling that targeted large areas of the camp.

The occupation vehicles also penetrated near the Wadi Gaza Bridge on the Salah al-Din Road in the center of the Gaza Strip, and expanded their incursion east of Deir al-Balah and into the Bureij and al-Maghazi camps.

Then a whole series of reactions from the Arab world that similarly ignored the point of the rsid:

The Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement issued on Saturday evening, “The Arab Republic of Egypt condemns in the strongest terms the Israeli attacks on the Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip, which resulted in the martyrdom of more than 150 Palestinians and the injury of hundreds, in blatant violation of all provisions of the law, international law, international humanitarian law, and all the values of humanity and human rights.”

The Jordanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriate Affairs condemned the brutal Israeli attack that targeted the Nuseirat camp today, Saturday, and resulted in the death and injury of hundreds, which reflects the systematic targeting of Palestinian civilians, and the Israeli persistence in violating international law and international humanitarian law, and continuing to commit war crimes.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation condemned the horrific bloody massacre committed by the Israeli occupation army in the Nuseirat camp in the Gaza Strip, which led to the martyrdom and wounding of hundreds of Palestinian citizens, the majority of whom were women and children. The organization considered, in a statement issued by it, that "what is happening is a continuation of organized state terrorism and the crime of genocide, in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and relevant United Nations resolutions."

Here's a photo that you will never see in Palestinian media.*

* I spoke too soon. Roya News used a similar photo to claim that Hamas treats the hostages better than Israelis treat prisoners.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The infographic above shows some of the drivers for people believing misinformation. we see a lot of that in the sheer amount of anti-Israel propaganda and bias in the news media, especially since October 7.

One topic not often focused on, however, is the tendency of normal people to fill in information gaps with internally developed narratives that fit their biases.

During wartime especially, we only hear maybe 10% of what's really going on. We are all ignorant. As the dramatic rescue operation on Saturday showed again, there is a lot happening behind the scenes that we are not aware of.

When we are given incomplete information, it is natural as humans to fill in the blanks with whatever stories seem to make the most sense to us. We have a hard time accepting that we don't understand something; we look for familiar patterns and attempt to fit the little we do know into a framework where we feel that we are on more solid ground.

And that's where people reveal their biases, specifically, cognitive biases.

Imagine a video of a heated confrontation between a white person and a person of color in a mostly white neighborhood. Without audio or any other context, some people will assume the person of color was doing something that justifiably upset the white person, others would assume the white person is a racist who is attacking the person of color for no reason and would not act the same way if the other person was white. Bias will determine which of those scenarios people favor, and most people will subconsciously fill in the gaps to fit their biases as they watch the video, and cement those beliefs when watching it repeatedly, looking for hints like facial expressions and posture to justify their initial judgements.

During this war, we are seeing this play out every hour of every day. Modern antisemites invariably fill in the knowledge gaps with lurid narratives of Israeli evil. They project their bias that Jews are bloodthirsty, malicious, liars, and uncaring about anyone but other Jews. Subconsciously or consciously they take fragmentary narratives and turn them into anti-Israel screeds.

A great example is UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese's tweet yesterday soon after news of the hostage rescue raid in Gaza.

She doesn't know how many civilians were killed, and how many militants were killed, but she believes the only source available at the time - the Hamas propaganda outlet the Gaza Media Office.

She believes the lie that the IDF soldiers were hiding in an "aid truck" when even the truck identified by Al Jazeera as an "aid trucK' had a logo for a dishwashing soap (and even 24 hours later it is not at all clear that this was the truck that was used, some Gazans claim it was a furniture truck.)

She believes that Israel had a choice of only two positions: give up all terrorists, thus legitimizing Hamas' kidnappings, or use the hostages as an excuse to wantonly attack Gaza civilians in a planned genocide. There is no other option. It is an oversimplification of reality that fits her biases perfectly.

And she then concludes, based on her obvious ignorance, that the rescue is a "genocidal action" and not really meant to rescue hostages. Not only that, but her antisemitic interpretation of incorrect, biased and fragmentary data is is "crystal clear."

Albanese is not stupid. But her bias against Jews prompts her to take a very incomplete view of a situation and fill in the gaps to fit her anti-Israel and antisemitic bias, of Jews who suffered genocide now maliciously engaging in genocide themselves.

This is the pattern that nearly everyone uses: they look for evidence to back up their stories, and ignore anything that contradicts them. But the important fact is that the stories precede the evidence, and the evidence is cherry-picked to support the story, not the other way around.

Israelis who have been in the IDF know how important it is as a basic underlying principle to adhere to international law, to avoid harming civilians as much as possible. They are trained in the Laws of Armed Conflict more than 95% of journalists or human rights workers. They also know that LOAC doesn't mean sacrificing yourself or your fellow soldiers or your own civilians to save enemy civilians, that the lives of your own side take precedence when they are in danger. (Don't trust me, read the Geneva Conventions yourself. )

But too many in the media and NGOs and even other governments, who should definitely know better, make assumptions of Israeli malice that have no basis in reality. Whether the gaps in knowledge are a result the IDF not wanting to reveal its intel, or in their believing Hamas lies, or an unwillingness to look at how the IDF actually works (which is documented or those who care to know,) is not a as important as the fact that they choose to fill in the gaps with the worst possible interpretation and stories about Jews.

Israel is objectively doing more to protect enemy civilians than any army in history ever has. (Feel free to find counterexamples. The US has gotten close in some limited operations.) Hamas has engineered the war to maximize its own side's civilian casualties because its main weapon is world pressure on Israel; dead civilians are the best way to achieve that. Hamas lies from the Al Ahli hospital to today are obvious and proven.

Given all that, any assumption of Israeli malice or indifference towards Gaza civilians - and any assumption that Hamas cares one whit about Gaza lives or tells the truth in its accusations against Israel - is not a reflection of reality but a projection of antisemitic attitudes onto the IDF and Israel as a whole.

Of course, I have biases too. I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to Israel, with my own research into how the IDF works, my own knowledge of how Israelis really think from actually speaking to them and interviewing them, my knowledge about how large organizations like the IDF work and how difficult it is for emotions like "revenge" to be part of multi-layer decision-making with layers of legal oversight, and a history of hindsight that almost always shows that the Israelis did everything that could be expected of any moral army - and when they fell short, they worked hard to fix the mistakes.

Sometimes I am wrong in my assumptions of giving the IDF the benefit of the doubt, but not very often.

Anyone who looks at the Gaza rescue operation and sees only an anti-Israel narrative is not objective. But beyond that, none of us outside a few decision-makers know the extent of Israeli preparation, the amount of intelligence it had, the alternatives considered and debated, the amount of time available and other limitations, the chances that the hostages would be moved elsewhere during the preparations, the controls put into place to minimize civilian casualties, how many were actually killed and how many of them were legal combatants. These are all pieces of information that are necessary to evaluate the morality of the operation, and almost no one knows it all. Creating an anti-Israel story based on a tiny percentage of facts available is not analysis - it is propaganda.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

AP's Josef Federman and Larry Fenn wrote an important article, the first one by mainstream media that reported on the glaring inconsistencies between different Hamas accounts of the number of Gazans killed in the war and pointing to evidence that these were done knowingly. But while it questions the number of women and children killed and shows how the Gza authorities are contradicting themselves, it still accepts their total casualty counts as accurate - and that is absurd.

The proportion of Palestinian women and children being killed in the Israel-Hamas war appears to have declined sharply, an Associated Press analysis of Gaza Health Ministry data has found, a trend that both coincides with Israel’s changing battlefield tactics and contradicts the ministry’s own public statements.

The trend is significant because the death rate for women and children is the best available proxy for civilian casualties in one of the 21st century’s most destructive conflicts. In October, when the war began, it was above 60%. For the month of April, it was below 40%. Yet the shift went unnoticed for months by the U.N. and much of the media, and the Hamas-linked Health Ministry has made no effort to set the record straight.

AP even implies that the total number of reported deaths may be understated:

Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director for Human Rights Watch, said his group has always found the Health Ministry’s numbers to be “generally reliable” because it has direct access to hospitals and morgues.

Whatever the reason for fewer women and child being killed, Shakir said, in the grand scheme, the trend pales when compared with the war’s overall devastation. “The death toll may be an undercount,” he added, because many bodies are still under rubble and the war has made it difficult for the Health Ministry to comprehensively gather data.

AP then claims that the differences between the detailed health ministry numbers and the total amount is from bodies that have not been identified:

The ministry said publicly on April 30 that 34,622 had died in the war. The AP analysis was based on the 22,961 individuals fully identified at the time by the Health Ministry with names, genders, ages, and Israeli-issued identification numbers.

The ministry says 9,940 of the dead – 29% of its April 30 total – were not listed in the data because they remain “unidentified.” These include bodies not claimed by families, decomposed beyond recognition or whose records were lost in Israeli raids on hospitals.

Perhaps there are a couple of hundred such bodies, but the vast majority of the difference in the two counts is that most of the 10,000 without complete data are made up.

We saw the Hamas "Gaza Media Office" make up statistics on Saturday. Its Telegram channel claimed 210 dead in the Israeli rescue operation in Nusseirat, but the health ministry did not as of this writing make that claim, only saying 55 at a press conference on Saturday afternoon. The 210 figure was made up by the Hamas media office, and wasn't based on anything the health ministry had released.

Just as the media office had been making up fake "women and children" casualties, it has also been making up fake total numbers of casualties. AP recognizes the inconsistencies in one - knowing that Hamas is lying - but still believes the other claims even with tons of evidence that these claims are wholly fictional.

Anyone who covered the Al Ahli hospital incident, where Hamas immediately claimed 471 victims while no Western source believed it, knows that Hamas has been lying since the beginning of the war. It is unconscionable and immoral for the media to keep reporting the Hamas lies when they know they are lies themselves.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

06/08 Links: ‘Operation Arnon’: How 4 hostages were freed from Hamas captivity in central Gaza; John Spencer: Disinformation, death toll & the 'day after' the war in Gaza

From Ian:

‘Operation Arnon’: How 4 hostages were freed from Hamas captivity in central Gaza

The Israel Defense Forces, Shin Bet security agency and Israel Police on Saturday morning carried out one of the most daring, complex, high-risk yet successful operations amid the war against Hamas, rescuing four hostages alive from the terror group’s captivity in the Gaza Strip. The mission was conducted in broad daylight and in an area where Israeli forces had not previously operated.

The operation to rescue Noa Argamani, 26, Almog Meir Jan, 21, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41 was planned out weeks in advance, according to information seen by The Times of Israel. Known originally as “Seeds of Summer,” its name was changed after the event to “Operation Arnon” after Yamam officer Chief Inspector Arnon Zamora, who was critically wounded by Hamas fire amid the rescue of three of the hostages and later died of his wounds.

During the planning period, intelligence on the hostages’ locations was obtained and studied. Amid the war, Hamas has repeatedly moved hostages around Gaza, in an attempt to prevent Israeli rescue operations.

In the days leading up to the rescue, the police’s elite Yamam counter-terrorism unit drilled various models of the extraction from central Gaza’s Nuseirat, which military officials said were “similar to the Entebbe raid” of 1976, when Israeli commandos rescued more than 100 hostages in Uganda.

Also in the days before the mission, the military launched a new operation in eastern Bureij — to the east of Nuseirat — and in east Deir al-Balah — to the southeast of where the hostages were rescued — in an apparent feint to reduce Hamas’s defenses in Nuseirat.

And according to a diplomatic source, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant approved the operation on Thursday evening when a war cabinet and security cabinet meeting was canceled.

Simultaneous attacks
Ultimately, the raid was carried out Saturday morning, after the Shin Bet recommended it would be an optimal time to surprise the Hamas terrorists holding the four hostages captive. Previous hostage rescue operations in Gaza have taken place overnight.

At 11:00 a.m. the order was given to the Yamam and Shin Bet officers to raid two multi-story buildings in Nuseirat, where Hamas was holding the hostages.

Nuseirat is one of the few areas of Gaza where ground troops have not yet entered during the IDF’s ground offensive against the Hamas terror group.

The buildings were about 200 meters apart, and the decision to go for both simultaneously was due to the possibility that Hamas may murder the hostages after identifying the rescue operation at the other location.

Argamani was held by Hamas guards alone in the home of a Palestinian family, while the other three hostages were held at a separate home, also with guards. According to the IDF, Hamas pays such families to hold the hostages in their houses. (Meir Jan said on his release that he, Kozlov and Ziv were held together throughout their eight months in captivity, in a total of four homes, Channel 12 reported on Saturday night.)

Argamani’s rescue was described by military officials as relatively smooth considering the circumstances. But a major gun battle erupted at the home where Meir Jan, Kozlov, and Ziv were held.

Zamora, the commander of the rescue team at the second building, where the three hostages were being held, was critically wounded by Hamas fire and later died of his wounds. The Hamas guards were killed in the exchange.

Under fire, and stuck
A short while later, as the three hostages and Zamora were being extracted from Nuseirat, their vehicle came under fire, causing it to get stuck in Gaza. Other forces quickly reached the scene to rescue them, bringing them to a makeshift helipad in Gaza, from where they were airlifted to Tel Hashomer Hospital in central Israel.

Noa was similarly taken by helicopter to the hospital, shortly before the other three were extracted from Gaza.

According to the IDF, the rescue forces faced a massive amount of gunfire and RPG fire in Nuseirat, leading the ground troops and the Israeli Air Force to carry out major strikes in the area.

The strikes, targeting the areas from where Hamas operatives were opening fire, were aimed at protecting the rescue forces and the hostages.

Hamas’s government media office said at least 210 people were killed amid the operation.

The IDF acknowledged that it killed Palestinian civilians amid the fighting, but it placed the blame on Hamas for holding hostages and fighting in a dense civilian environment.

“We know about under 100 [Palestinian] casualties. I don’t know how many of them are terrorists,” IDF Spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said in a briefing with journalists, reported by Reuters.

Hamas operatives also fired anti-aircraft missiles at Israeli helicopters over the area amid the operation, without managing to score any hits.

Aside from Zamora, several more troops were slightly hurt by shrapnel amid the operation.

IDF rescues four hostages from Hamas captivity in daring Gaza operation

Ch.-Insp. Arnon Zamora, 36, the Yamam fighter who was wounded in Saturday's hostage rescue operation, succumbed to his wounds at the hospital, the Israel Police announced later Saturday.

The operation to free Aramani went off without much of a hitch, but the operation to free the other three hostages in a separate building around two meters away led to a significant exchange of gunfire in which Zamora was killed. Both buildings were around three to four stories high.

The operation started to be planned months ago, but was delayed a number of times to improve the exact intelligence about the whereabouts, risks, and security parameters related to rescuing the hostages.

At one point, the operation was going to be only to rescue Argamani, but at a later stage, it was decided to carry out a higher risk simultaneous operation in both locations, lest Hamas guards in the second location kill the other three hostages, hearing there was a nearby IDF attack, and not realizing that they were not part of the operation.

Part of the operation was also facilitated by the fact that the hostages were being held in civilian apartments above ground, as opposed to tunnels, where many other hostages are held.

On the other hand, the fact that some of those holding the hostages were not official members of Hamas but civilians who were paid to supervise them to better conceal their location created complications for the entire operation.

The operation was finally approved in principle by the war cabinet, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and National Unity party officials Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot (both former IDF chiefs) on Thursday night.

Around 11:00 a.m. on Saturday, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi and Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar ordered the operation to be executed from a joint operations command center, with the belief that in this specific case, an operation in broad daylight would achieve greater surprise, despite the additional risks of being seen more vividly in daylight than in a nighttime operation.

Further, after all four hostages were taken out of the locations they were being held and brought into a land escape vehicle, the vehicle got stuck.

At this point, the hostages were more exposed, and the entire operation could have ended in disaster with at least dozens of terrorists descending on the hostages and IDF rescue forces, with some of the terrorists armed with rocket-propelled grenades that could kill both the ground rescue forces and rescue helicopters.

In response, additional forces of IDF division 98 and the air force let loose a massive barrage of fire.

Any Hamas terrorists who tried to attack the hostages and initial IDF rescue force were killed, along with potentially civilians.

Because this part of the operation was not only unplanned, but occurred under tremendous time pressure and in a mixed terrorist-civilian area, the IDF still does not know the exact breakdown of Palestinian terrorists to Palestinian civilians killed.

However, both in this and some past instances, the IDF was suspicious that Hamas was inflating the numbers of civilians to cover up its embarrassing military losses and to try to tar Israel’s legitimacy globally.

Eventually the mix of reinforcements and rescue helicopters successfully evacuated the IDF forces and the hostages.

Incidentally, it turned out that much of the operations that Division 98 has been carrying out in central Gaza and Nuseirat since the middle of last week were part of an elaborate decoy to make the Hamas terrorists feel like the IDF was nearby but did not know where the hostages were while allowing security forces to clandestinely setup a close by rescue operation.

In a statement, Hagari said, "This operation was a success in rescuing and returning four hostages. We will continue to do everything to return the 120 hostages still held in Gaza. We are confident that we will reach you, and this operation will not end until you are returned home.”

He added, "We will not give up on a single hostage. I want to say that it is a great pride to see the security forces working together, shoulder to shoulder, in a vital operation: returning the hostages home. When the operation reached this level of intelligence and was approved [by the relevant bodies] ... only then were we permitted to proceed. Hamas intentionally hides the hostages in civilian neighborhoods."

06/07 Links Pt2: Why Is there no Palestinian State?; The progressive left hates the Jews; ‘NYT’ union leader calls Zionists ‘butchers’ who ‘know how to kill’

From Ian:

Hussain Abdul-Hussain: Why Is there no Palestinian State?

The model of Palestinian leadership compares to neighboring Arab countries Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. Since independence, these countries have lived in one of two states: Autocracy or civil war. Since the rise of Islamism in the 1980s, civil wars have been won by Islamist militias, all of them backed and bank-rolled by the Islamist regime of Iran, which uses them as tools in its bid to dominate the region.

When dealing with these Arabs, including Palestinians, Israel has had to deal with enemy dictators like Egypt’s Gamal Abdul-Nasser, Iraq’s Saddam Hussain, and Syria’s Assad dynasty, or friendly autocrats like Jordan’s Hashemite monarchs and the Egyptian presidents since Anwar Sadat.

With militias, Israel has not been as lucky as with friendly autocrats. Militias are Islamists whose ideology — as outlined by Sunni Egyptian Sayyid Qutb and endorsed by Shia Iranian Ruhollah Khomeini — considers the conflict with Israel not as one over national interests but as a zero-sum game that started with the rise of Islam, over 1400 years ago.

In 1993, Israel hoped that Arafat — then PLO chief since 1968 — would be the friendly Palestine dictator who could guarantee peace, like his Egyptian and Jordanian counterparts. Arafat proved unable or unwilling to do so. Like him, Abbas, 89, has been weak, corrupt and deflects blame for his failure unto Israel.

Among Palestinians today, Marwan Barghouti commands majority support. Barghouti is a former Arafat lieutenant who is serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison for his role in the death of Israelis during the Second Intifada.

So far, Barghouti’s allure has been his animosity toward Israel. Should he sue for peace if released, he would likely lose his popularity.

With the impossibility of a liberal Palestinian democracy, and with no apparent strongman, the chances of creating a Palestinian state are next to nil. And since one of the two states in the two-state solution should be the Palestinian state, and since such a state is nowhere to be found, the two-state solution will remain elusive.

Israel, for its part, would almost certainly concede 1967 territory to a friendly Arab sovereign, Palestinian or otherwise. It could, therefore, hand the West Bank over to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt. But it is most likely that, judging by their 1948-1967 experience, neither Amman nor Cairo would want to take back the territory of rowdy and violent Palestinian militias, whose attention might then turn away from Israel and unto their new governments, causing instability, as they did in Jordan in 1970.

As it stands, the Palestinians are unable to stand up a state required for peace with Israel. No Arab country wants to take them or rule their territories. After October 7, Israel will never repeat its 2005 unilateral withdrawal experiment that, instead of leading to a Palestinian state, turned Gaza into an enemy military camp.

For Israel and the Palestinians, the only possible solution in the foreseeable future is more of the same: A makeshift arrangement of Palestinian self-governance meshed with Israeli policing and periodic flareups.

Unless America is willing to go back to state-building and spreading democracy, it will have to wait until Palestinians figure out how to build a state that Israel can make peace with. Israel cannot build a Palestinian state for them. Only Palestinians can, but first, they must listen and learn how.

Experts split on significance of Palestinian state recognitions

Recognition of a Palestinian state now also encourages Hamas, as noted by Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, who called the move by Ireland, Spain and Norway “a gold medal to Hamas terrorists who kidnapped our daughters and burned infants.”

Switzerland’s House of Representatives on Tuesday rejected a motion to recognize Palestinian statehood with SWI swissinfo.ch reporting that the Swiss Federal Council believes “the time is not right” for such a move.

French President Emmanuel Macron, too, said in late May that while he is open to recognizing a state, the timing is not right.

“There are no taboos for France, and I am totally ready to recognize a Palestinian state. … I think this recognition must be at a useful moment,” he said in Germany. “I will not do an emotional recognition.”

Denmark and Australia, too, both recently voted against recognition.

Brom does not think the countries recognizing “Palestine” are doing so out of anti-Jewish or anti-Israel sentiment but out of a sincere belief that a Palestinian state is the best solution. Even so, he would rather that recognition came about in a different way.

“I would prefer [recognition] came about through an agreement instead of unilateral recognition,” he said, adding, “but that won’t happen with the [current Israeli] government.”

There are also the thorny questions of who is to govern “Palestine” and what its borders are.

During his speech announcing recognition, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez described “Palestine” as composed of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, connected via a corridor, with eastern Jerusalem as its capital and unified under the “legitimate government” of the P.A.

However, according to polls of public opinion in both Gaza and Judea and Samaria, Palestinians do not share that assessment of the P.A.

Only some 8% of respondents favor a P.A.-controlled government, according to the Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) research firm.

A poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that only 14% of Palestinians approve of P.A. head Mahmoud Abbas and only 18% want to see the P.A. in control of Gaza after the war. Sixty-three percent of respondents preferred Hamas.

This is an inconvenient fact for the Spanish premier, who declared in his speech that his country’s recognition of “Palestine” “reflects our absolute rejection of Hamas, a terrorist organization [that] is against the two-state solution.”

According to customary international law, a state is a body with a defined territory, population and government—most of which do not apply in the case of “Palestine.”

Denmark cited this in its rejection of recognition.

“We cannot recognize an independent Palestinian state for the sole reason that the preconditions are not really there,” Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen noted when the legislation was first debated in parliament in April.

On the whole, while the moves arguably do have a negative impact, which Israel is taking seriously, the degree to which they’re actually advancing Palestinian statehood on the ground is questionable.

The progressive left hates the Jews

It’s been an especially strange time to be a Jewish woman on the left. When we explain why we might not want trans women in our single-sex spaces, referring to past experiences of male violence, we are accused of “weaponizing our trauma.” When we talk about our fear of Hamas, because Jews have some experience when it comes to genocidal fascist groups, we’re accused of “weaponizing the Holocaust.” Women in general – like Jews – tend not to be believed anyway when they describe violence committed against them. After all, according to a recent annual report from the victims’ commissioner for England and Wales, only 5% of reported rapes result in charges being brought, never mind convictions. So when stories started to emerge fairly soon after October 7 that Hamas had committed horrific sexual violence during the pogrom, I knew the reaction would be bad. I hoped, given we’d so recently come through the #MeToo movement, with its urgent messaging that women should be believed, that it wouldn’t be too bad. I was wrong.

The October 7 rapes of Israeli women – and men – were so brutal that Meni Binyamin, the head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police, said it was “the most extreme sexual abuses we have seen.”

It took UN Women fifty days even to acknowledge that these sexual assaults had happened. When Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, was asked why, she reportedly replied that the evidence of rape was “not solid,” even though there was video footage of Israeli women with blood-sodden crotches and reports from witnesses about dead Israeli women’s mutilated vaginas. On October 30, almost 150 “scholars in feminist, queer and trans studies” signed an open letter implying that to support Israeli women was to endorse “colonial feminism.” Not a single UK charity that purports to protect women from violence condemned Hamas’s brutality – except Jewish Women’s Aid. After I wrote an article in the Jewish Chronicle asking how this fitted in with [the charities’] feminist credentials, they replied with a statement saying that the reports of Israeli women being raped were merely “the Islamophobic and racist weaponization of sexual violence that presents it as an Arab, as opposed to a global, problem.” Screenshot from a video released by the IDF showing a Hamas terrorist in a Kibbutz near Gaza on October 7, 2023. (IDF)

In an attempt to make people believe what had actually happened on October 7, the IDF compiled and edited the footage they had from Hamas’s GoPro cameras, made it into a film, called Bearing Witness, and took it around the world to show small, carefully selected audiences. Most journalists who watched it wrote afterwards about how traumatizing they found it. Others had different reactions.

The far-left activist Owen Jones, The Guardian’s most high-profile journalist, went to a screening of Bearing Witness and afterwards posted a 25-minute video review. He claimed that “the purpose of the film was made very clear: that we were to ‘bear witness,’ as it was repeatedly put, to the horrors committed by Hamas and also make the PR case for Israel’s onslaught against Gaza.” Others who attended the screening told me that no one said any such thing – the purpose was to provide video footage of the pogrom. Jones said, “If there was rape and sexual violence committed, we don’t see that on camera,” apparently unaware that the IDF had already said it only included footage that “preserved the dignity” of those killed.

When progressive-left identity politics takes you to a place where you are jazz hands-ing away the rapes of Israeli women by fascist Islamists, maybe you should ask yourself if this movement has outlived its purpose.

Identity politics has filled the gap left by the fall of communism, when people on the left could identify as part of a distinct tribe and duly subscribe to all of its beliefs, no matter how absurd, self-defeating and cruel…. It reveals such vanity, but also such bankrupt intelligence, this desire to outsource any critical thinking to an external, prefabricated ideology. And identity politics, like communism, like fascism, gives license to its followers to celebrate sadism and dehumanize entire demographics. Perhaps the thing that surprises me the most about human nature, even in my mature middle age, is how enduring this desire is.

06/07 Links Pt1: Palestine Is a State of Mind; The Biggest Media Scandal of the Era Has Arrived; Thomas Hand: 'Ashamed to call myself Irish'

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Palestine Is a State of Mind

One of the great drawbacks of the pro-Palestinian support structure in the West is that it has almost nothing to do with Palestinians. It is, instead, entirely constructed around hating Israel. The attention the Palestinians receive from their Western activists is precisely correlated with the level of blame that can be pinned upon the Jewish state.

Even the “resistance by any means” mantra furthers this dynamic. What can be done for the Palestinians and their society? Only the destruction of Israel. Until that happens, the “pro-Palestinians” are conveniently absolved of improving anyone’s life. That’s the beauty of making it all about “the occupation.” Root causes require pulling up the roots.

But now we have an example of how this applies not just to anti-Zionist activists but to national governments. It is a museum-worthy display of the West’s Israel-obsessed worldview.

You may remember in late May, when the governments of Spain, Ireland, and Norway jointly announced that they were recognizing “Palestine.” The Europeans have been under increasing pressure to DO SOMETHING about Israel’s continued pursuit of Hamas leaders and the Israeli hostages they hold. By that they mean: find a way to hurt the Israelis.

But the tangible ways to do so would be insane. Should they switch from the American side to the Iranian side in this conflict? Government leaders wanted to show their citizens that they were being heard, but you can’t just go around breaking apart the Western alliance over anti-Zionist hysteria. (I mean, you can, but it’s a line even Europeans prefer not to cross.) So they “recognized a Palestinian state.”

The only real effect a move like this might have was to shatter any remaining hope for many of the hostages by encouraging Hamas to see Israel as increasingly isolated and likely to be blamed for the failure of any deal. And that’s exactly what happened.

The Root Cause of October 7: Iran's Regime

The October 7 attack was timed to shift the focus from fundamental challenges to the survival of the decayed, inept Islamist theocracy. Iranians’ unprecedented nationwide mobilization for peaceful overthrow – the Woman, Life, Freedom movement – was being brutally suppressed at home as Hamas butchered in Israel. Had the community of democratic nations seized the opportunity and found the will to support the mass uprising in Iran (rather than give mere lip service to the violation of Iranians’ human rights), the seat of Islamist revolutionary terror could have been sacked and a difficult but viable transition to a responsible, reasonable Iran at peace with Israel and the world could well have been fostered. Instead, with the October 7 attack Khamenei and his IRGC henchmen sealed the indifference of Western politicians toward Iranian liberal aspirations and enabled the regime to tighten its grip on the thousands of young protestors it was torturing and raping inside its prisons.

The expansion of the Abraham Accords was also in the sights of the ayatollahs. It was imperative that a new bilateral peace between Saudi Arabia and Israel be thwarted. The shock and awe of October 7 was so severe, and the Israeli response to it so massive, that it forced the Saudis to cancel overtures to the Israeli government. October 7 took the Middle East backward to a time when world media attention on the region was dull and flat, concerned only with the seemingly implacable “Arab-Israeli conflict” rather than hopeful transformation by Iranians and Saudis pressing for an entirely new future.

The Iran regime’s role in the October 7 attack is fundamental and a manifestation of its daily “Death to Israel” chants and call to wipe Israel off the map. The Biden administration, however, has chosen to minimize the fact that Hamas has been developed and directed by Tehran, deflecting scrutiny from the world’s top state sponsor of terror. This appeasement mindset helped Tehran to believe it could get away with a massive terror attack on Israel in the first place. The Biden foreign policy is predicated on a worldview that seeks to end American presence in the Middle East region, has little interest in aiding democracy movements to topple authoritarians, rejects as the Obama administration did the post-9/11 vision to link democratization with security and sustainable peace in the region, sees appeasement of the ayatollahs as means to minimize instability and its own involvement in the region, and so has lifted the Maximum Pressure placed on the regime by the Trump administration. But feeding the crocodile has resulted in only a bigger appetite, as the delisting of the Houthis, a first move by the Biden administration to show its willingness to please Tehran, quickly proved. On the nuclear file, too, Iran’s regime has taken advantage of Washington’s overtures and willingness to turn a blind eye on sanctions to up its enrichment.

The October 7 attack on Israel is part and parcel of the Islamic Republic’s larger, multifaceted war on the West and liberalism. It has resulted in suffering and insecurity for the Israeli people, rising antisemitism across the globe, and moral confusion within democracies. Terror that should have been met with global condemnation and solidarity with the Israeli people instead resulted in the proliferation of the hate projected by Iran’s regime. Any policy truly designed to prevent Islamist terror and cultivate peace for the region must begin with a strategy to bring down that regime, but as evidenced by messages of condolences on the passing of the mass executioner Raisi, Western governments remain determined to appease it.

Some Saudi textbooks start erasing "Palestine" from maps

IMPACT-SE, which monitors and reports on textbooks and bias in various countries, just issued a new report on Saudi Arabian textbooks.

Besides looking at how the textbooks portray Israel, which is slowly improving, it looks at other topics like polytheism, Christianity, gays and others, and in all areas the books are more liberal and tolerant compared to previous textbook editions.

While how they portray Palestinians was not a topic of the study, some of the findings indicate that the Saudis are de-emphasizing the Palestinian cause compared to earlier years. Officially, they still support it wholeheartedly, but some changes are significant.

For example:

The 2023 editions of grades 5 and 9 social studies textbooks show the systematic trend of featuring the area of Israel proper and Palestine as unnamed, as opposed to the 2022 editions which marked it as “Palestine”

In several geography textbooks, when previously Israel was replaced with "Palestine," now they removed all labels naming countries that do nto directly border Saudi Arabia. Other maps which replaced Israel with "Palestine" were completely removed.

In a social studies textbook, the entire chapter addressing the Palestinian cause was removed in 2022.

In 2023, a picture of the White Mosque in Ramlah, featured in a chapter about the Umayyad dynasty, no longer mentions that it is located in Palestine. The city, located near Tel Aviv, was established in the 8th century during of the Umayyad era as the capital of Jund Filastin, the military district of Palestine, in the Bilad al-Sham province.

There are still several maps that still replace Israel with "Palestine." But the trend is away from that. (Also, several mentions of "the Israeli enemy" have been replaced with "the Israeli occupation.")

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Even today, @UNICEF and @UN_Women continue to use discredited Hamas casualty numbers

The top story on the UNICEF webpage UNICEF webpage about Gaza. It says "The conflict in the Gaza Strip is taking a catastrophic toll on children. More than 14,000 children have reportedly been killed, according to the latest estimate by the Palestinian Ministry of Health; thousands more have been injured."

Similarly, UN Women's latest article on Gaza says "over 10,000 women have been killed, among them an estimated 6,000 mothers, leaving 19,000 children orphaned."

But the Ministry of Health has walked back those statistics, which came from Hamas. It currently says roughly half those number of children and women have been killed. UN-OCHA updated its statistics to reflect those changes weeks ago, albeit in small print.

So why do UNICEF and UN Women still report the Hamas-created lies as truth, more than a month after even other UN agencies reluctantly admit that the numbers are wrong?

It is clear that the truth doesn't matter to these UN agencies. They want to make Israel look as monstrous as possible, and if that means relying on a terror group that murders women and children in cold blood, that is fine.

Today, AP made a tentative step to correct the record. The article is far from perfect and doesn't note that the health ministry is parroting unsourced Hamas claims of women and children killed. But hopefully other media will do their own analyses of the data and finally admit what we've known all along - their claims of civilian deaths in Gaza come from Hamas propaganda and not from any actual counting of victims.

Will the UN and NGOs then correct their own reporting? It seems highly unlikely. UN Women and UNICEF need the higher numbers to justify their fundraising and public relations, so they have strong incentive to pretend the Hamss numbers are the real ones.

Both these agencies are making a huge mistake. While much of the UN is obviously politicized against Israel, agencies dedicated to protecting children and women have been assumed to be more honest and less political because of their humanitarian objectives. Every day they refuse to correct their own increasingly obvious errors, they risk appearing to care more about demonizing Israel than protecting children and women.

And then it will be the women and children themselves who be hurt by their loss of credibility.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

An Australian shop features Jew-hatred on its display window

In the town of Katoomba in New South Wales, Australia, is an antique and Persian rug shop.

Prominently displayed in the window is this picture of the Nordic anti-Santa Claus known as Krampus.

In the legend of Krampus, this devil-like character - with horns, a hooked nose and who is a puppet master. He punishes naughty children ahead of Christmas, and in some traditions he eats them. Scholars have noted the similarity between Krampus and medieval antisemitic depictions of Jews who were accused of murdering Christian children.

But why would anyone think that this version of Krampus is antisemitic? Well,just read the caption that the shop owner put on the picture.

THE ZIONISTS OWN'S YOUR GOVERMENT, INSTALL ALL POLITICIANS, CONTROL THE JUSTICE SYSTEM PRINT ALL FIAT CURRENCY, OWN PHARMACY AND MEDICAL! THE MILITARY AND POLICE ARE THEIR LAP DOGS. YOU ARE SHEEP OWNED BY THE ELITES, TO BE DISPOSED OF WHEN YOUR NO LONGER USE FULL.

And the shop-owner helpfully adds another sign:

The Australian adds, "Another conspiracy theory-filled sign in the window alleged Zionists, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and the Rothschilds were going to reduce the global population through vaccines."

Here's where right-wing antisemitism meets left-wing "anti-Zionism." The horseshoe looks more and more like a circle.

(h/t Alex Ryvchin)

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!