At the end of a six-hour debate, PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s government early Wednesday morning approved a deal with Hamas to release at least 50 hostages from captivity in Gaza over four days, during which there will be a lull in the fighting.
According to the approved outline, 30 children, eight mothers, and 12 elderly women will be released. The release of every ten additional hostages would result in an additional day of respite for the Hamas Nazis, who will use it to reorganize, replenish their resources, and resume the fighting better prepared.
The cabinet ministers were told that the first group of hostages would be released on Thursday.
According to a Channel 14 report, to make sure that Hamas does not drag out the deal, the government limited its entire duration to only 10 days, presumably starting Thursday. Assuming that Hamas brings more hostages, it will be rewarded with an additional day of respite for every 10 Israelis it releases, within a ten-day window. At the end of the ten days, the deal is void and a new government decision would be required for a new deal.
This clause convinced the Religious Zionism ministers to change their minds and support the deal. However, the three Otzma Yehudit ministers held on to their original objection to the deal.
According to the same report, Likud Minister Miki Zohar taunted Itamar Ben Gvir, asking: Why did you hold an “in-depth” discussion of your faction before you heard all the details? To which Ben Gvir replied: Because everything we heard here now, we saw before in the media, so it’s very good that we held the meeting. At which point Likud Minister Gila Gamliel preached to Ben Gvir: We need to be united in the decision! And Ben Gvir responded: But we are not united. This is a decision that will damage generations. It will hurt us badly.
Yes, it will. Prime Minister Netanyahu, not for the first time, capitulated to public pressure and ordered the interruption of a stellar IDF attack on the Nazi enemy so his enemies on the left would love him. He did it in 2011 when he capitulated before the same crowd and released more than a thousand terrorists with Jewish blood on their hands in exchange for a single IDF corporal named Gilad Shalit. Needless to say, those same murderers revisited the Jewish State on October 7, in an operation that was masterminded by Yahya Sinwar who, you guessed it, was part of that 2011 prisoner exchange.
From this point on, we can count on Bibi to be a crowd-pleaser and not a leader. He does not have that one essential quality of a leader that shone throughout PM David Ben Gurion’s tenure: the ability to give the people not what they wanted but what he believed they needed.
HAMAS WINS
A rejuvenated Hamas issued a statement after the deal had been approved by Israel, saying: “Following difficult and complicated negotiations which lasted many days, we announce that a humanitarian ceasefire has been reached for four days, through the frantic efforts of Egypt and Qatar.”
According to the Nazi group, the deal includes a ceasefire on both sides, the cessation of all Israeli military operations throughout Gaza including the movement of military vehicles, the entry of hundreds of trucks with humanitarian aid, medical aid, and fuel, the cessation of Israeli aircraft traffic over southern Gaza for four days, the cessation of Israeli aircraft traffic over northern Gaza every day between 10:00 AM and 4:00 PM, and freedom of movement for Gazans from north to south on the Philadelphi route.
Hamas also stated that Israel committed to not inflict harm or detain anyone throughout the entire Gaza Strip during the ceasefire. And they warned: “Our finger will be on the trigger.”
What can Hamas achieve under the Ceasefire?
1. Move the Gaza population back north with no one stopping them.
2. Move around terrorists using ambulances, tunnels, and thinly disguised as civilians
3. Reset the timers on hidden rocket launchers
4. Map the location of all IDF soldiers and units
5. Import more weapons via Rafah smuggling tunnels
6. Move hostages to new locations
7. Transfer “humanitarian aid” and fuel to Hamas units
8. Build up international pressure to keep the ceasefire going.
9. Build up international pressure to force the IDF out of Gaza.
10. Play psychological games with Israel using the hostages.
And a bonus point:
11. Give the Kaplan anarchists additional time to undermine Israeli unity and put more pressure on Bibi to end the war.
RON DERMER’S AUSCHWITZ FIB
Now, if you thought Minister Ron Dermer was a thinker, even an intellectual, I must confess that I’ve changed my mind on that one. Minister Dermer told the cabinet ministers: “Even though the deal is difficult, I don’t think any of you cannot go for it.” And then, so help me, he said: “In the Holocaust, Jews wanted to bomb the tracks leading to Auschwitz. The State Department refused and claimed that it was not one of the goals of the war. For us, it is the goal. We have a country, we have the ability, it’s about saving lives. Grab it with both hands, to save many lives.”
Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer’s official job is to represent the Israeli side to the world media, a job that on occasion requires some fibbing. So, he fibbed on the Auschwitz thing, too.
As the US Department of War kept refusing to bomb the railroad tracks leading to the death camps, even on missions that targeted areas very nearby, by 1944 Jews began to demand the bombing of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex itself, complete with the thousands of Jewish inmates in it.
The first proposal to bomb Auschwitz was made on May 16, 1944, by Slovak Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl, the leader of a Jewish underground. At about the same time, two officials of the Jewish Agency in Palestine made similar suggestions – Yitzhak Gruenbaum to the US Consul-General in Jerusalem Lowell C. Pinkerton, and Moshe Shertok (later Sharet) to George Hall, the British under-secretary of state for foreign affairs.
On June 19, 1944, the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem received the reports summary of the industrial death operations in the Nazi camps, and David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency, immediately upon learning that Auschwitz was indeed a death camp, urged President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to bomb the camp and the train tracks leading to the camp.
Despite the certainty that thousands of Jews may die, these Jewish leaders did not dream of asking the Allied forces to stop the war effort for a single day to negotiate for their release, because you don’t negotiate with Nazis, you kill them, and kill them, until you force them down to their knees.
Israel’s mainstream media ignore a considerable contingency of families of hostages who demand that all the hostages would be set free, or no deal. They argue that no one Jewish soul is more important than another. Moreover, those families argue the national value of eliminating Hamas is higher than the personal value of releasing their loved ones. Also: among the kidnapped soldiers, if they are still alive, there are many wounded whose condition may be worse than that of the children, the mothers, and the elderly slated to go free.
Against their clarity of mind and heart, Netanyahu’s failure as a leader appears even more staggering. To those who still compare him to Ben Gurion, I must paraphrase the 1988 United States vice-presidential Democratic candidate Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s response to Republican candidate Senator Dan Quayle: “I knew Ben Gurion. Bibi, you’re no Ben Gurion.”
