generalspeaking

When the kibbutzim were raided by armed Hamas, PLFP and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists on that dreadful day of savage infamy on October 7, among the terrorists were ordinary Palestinian, teens and men, some of whom knew those kibbutz environs intimately. People who had drawn helpful maps for the terrorists showing them where the security buildings were so those tasked to protecting the kibbutz could be dispatched first to enable the raiders to get on with their business of slaughter and rape unimpeded.

 

The years spent driving Gazans to medical appoints within Israel, taking children for cancer treatments, did not result in reciprocal care from the Palestinians to the Israelis who succoured them. Israelis who believed that they and the Palestinians could live in peace, trust one another, even if their leaders vowed otherwise. Israelis who passionately supported the idea of a 'two-state solution' despite the never-ending terrorist attacks; that once Palestinians had a state of their own they would accept the presence of Israel.

 

That dream is dead, as dead as the 1,200 Israelis who were slaughtered that day. As dead as the hostages who suffered through 500 impossibly evil incarceration days, as valuable possessions to be traded for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails for committing violent acts against Israelis -- those hostages who were returned to Israel in those mocking, jeering exchanges, who had died or had been killed during their  brutal internment.

 

Age and gender made no difference. Torment and anguish was perpetrated against the helpless in the clutches of those whose fuming hatred for Jews knew no bounds. Hatred so intense that entire families died in their torched homes on that fateful day of marauding terrorism. Children abducted with their parents or separated from their fathers and taken with their terrified mothers to Gaza, as were elderly and ill men and women. An infant of ten months and his four-year-old brother strangled to death with bare hands, both bodies mutilated for the fiction of having been killed in an Israeli bombing over Gaza.

 

 When the hostages were released by Hamas to the Red Cross for transfer to Israel they were first surrounded by squads of masked, heavily armed Hamas terrorists, the route along which they travelled packed with cheering Palestinians. The staged events on the release of the hostages were celebratory events of victory by terrorists over the state of Israel; the death of Jews marking the superiority of a death cult over respect for human life.

 

Men who were released spoke of being held in the vast underground tunnel network in Gaza, legs shackled, the irons cutting into their flesh, and maddening hunger. The Bibas family had taken shelter in the safe room of their house hearing the shouts of 'Allahu akbar!' all around them. Parents Yarden and Shiri in desperate consultation decided they would fight. Yarden took his pistol and tried to protect his family. He was placed in a cage in a tunnel.

 

Shiri Bibas, left with her infant boys could hear the terrorists trying break down the door of the safe room where she huddled with infant Ariel and baby Kfir. With the use of a hand drill they forced the handle open and the three were taken to Gaza. They lived for a month in captivity before being murdered. Yarden, the children's father was informed his family died in an Israeli airstrike. Finally released in an exchange, he believed his wife and children were alive and would soon join him in freedom.

 

There are still more hostages to be freed, both alive and dead. Hamas's mockery of the gaunt, starving hostages, in emotional upheaval, their minds traumatized, their bodies in various stages of shutting down, mark the terrorists' passionate commitment to death, revelling in the violence their savage atrocities identify their mission of destruction by. And these are the death-dealers that hordes of supporters in the West glorify.