The Israel Defense Force have rescued two elderly hostages seized by Hamas in the October 7th terror raid, but Associated Press reporters Najib Jobain, Josef Federman, and Samy Magdy want you to sympathize with the Palestinian Arabs who held them captive!
Israel says about 100 hostages remain in Hamas captivity.
by Najib Jobain, Josef Federman, and Samy Magdy, Associated Press | Monday, February 12, 2024 | 7:37 AM EST
RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli forces rescued two hostages early Monday, storming a heavily guarded apartment in the Gaza Strip and extracting the captives under fire in a dramatic raid that was a small but symbolically significant success for Israel. Heavy airstrikes that provided cover for the operation killed at least 67 Palestinians, according to health officials in the beleaguered territory.
The plight of the hostages has profoundly shaken Israelis, and the rescue in densely populated Rafah briefly lifted the spirits of a nation still reeling from Hamas’ cross-border raid last year that started the war. Israel has described Rafah — a city on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip where 1.4 million Palestinians have fled fighting elsewhere — as the last remaining Hamas stronghold in the territory and signaled that its ground offensive may soon target the city.
In Gaza, the operation unleashed another tragedy in a war that has killed 28,340 Palestinians in the territory, displaced over 80% of the population, and set off a massive humanitarian crisis.
More than 12,300 Palestinian minors — children and young teens — have been killed in the conflict, the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Monday. About 8,400 women were also among those killed. That means minors make up about 43% of the dead and women and minors together they make up 73% of the dead.
As Messrs Jobain, Federman, and Magdy lament the “at least 67 Palestinians” killed in this operation, the 28,340 Arabs killed overall, and the “73% of the dead” being women and children, I am reminded of what would have saved their lived, namely Hamas not launching the October 7th terror assault in the first place!
The Wall Street Journal already documented how Hamas were using civilian facilities as shields:
Subterranean complex had air-conditioned room with computer servers, office space
by Dov Lieber and David Luhnow | Saturday, February 10, 2024 | 3:52 PM EST
GAZA CITY—Hidden deep below the headquarters of the United Nations’ aid agency for Palestinians here is a Hamas complex with rows of computer servers that Israel’s armed forces say served as an important communications center and intelligence hub for the Islamist militant group.
For those who are stymied by the Journal’s paywall, you can also read the article here, for no charge.
Part of a warren of tunnels and subterranean chambers carved from the Gaza Strip’s sandy soil, the compound below the United Nations Relief and Works Agency buildings in Gaza City appears to have run on electricity drawn from the U.N.’s power supply, Israeli officials said.
A Wall Street Journal reporter and journalists from other news organizations visited the site this week in a trip organized by Israel’s military. A tunnel also appeared to pass beneath a U.N.-run school near the headquarters.
Gosh, I’m shocked, shocked! that the Hamas facilities were drawing power from the UNRWA’s building power. Are we supposed to believe that no one at UNRWA noticed the power drain?
The location of a Hamas military installation under important U.N. facilities is evidence, Israeli officials say, of Hamas’s widespread use of sensitive civilian infrastructure as shields to protect its militant activities. Tunnel complexes have also been found near or under some of Gaza’s largest hospitals.
Israel’s discovery of the Hamas operations below Unrwa offices is likely to put further pressure on the agency, which is facing international scrutiny after Israeli allegations that at least 12 of its employees had links to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which authorities say killed 1,200 people.
Israeli military officials assert that people working at Unrwa would have been aware of the tunnel complex, either from activities during its construction or by what they said would have been a jump in electricity usage when the complex started operating.
I’m trying to figure out just how Hamas could construct concrete-lined tunnels and excavate the material as they dug those tunnels with nobody noticing? The answer, of course, is that they couldn’t. It took a great deal of effort, mostly by hand, to excavate and line those tunnels, and the obvious question is: if the work effort put forth to construct those tunnels had instead been put to use building Gaza’s housing and infrastructure, how much better would that miserable place have been?
Next to the room with computer servers, which was air-conditioned, was an electricity-supply room fitted with massive batteries, apparently to serve as a backup if power was disrupted.
The electricity room and server room were beneath the Unrwa compound’s own electrical supply room, the officer said. He said wires snaked down into the underground base from the Unrwa compound, allowing Hamas to steal electricity from the U.N agency to power its underground facility.
If Hamas had computer servers in the tunnels, then the odds are that they were also stealing internet services from UNRWA, even though such is not mentioned in the article.
The three Associated Press reporters who wrote this article were certainly aware that Hamas were using the civilian population to shield themselves and their facilities from the IDF, but never mentioned that. They did, of course, have to give us a oh-the-poor-Palestinians bit:
In Hamas’ cross-border raid on Oct. 7, an estimated 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed, and militants took 250 people captive, according to Israeli authorities. . . . .
Mohamed Zoghroub, a Palestinian living in Rafah, said he saw a black jeep speeding near the Shaboura refugee camp in the town followed by clashes and heavy airstrikes.
“We found ourselves running with our children, from the airstrikes, in every direction,” he said, speaking from an area flattened by the heavy strikes overnight.
Footage circulating on social media from Rafah’s Kuwaiti hospital showed dead or wounded children. The footage could not immediately be verified but was consistent with AP reporting.
A young man can be seen carrying the body of an infant who he said was killed in the attacks. He said the girl, the daughter of his neighbor, was born and killed during the war.
“Let Netanyahu come and see: Is this (infant) one of your designated targets?” he said.
When the fighters use the civilian population as shields, civilians will get killed. This is all on Hamas!
The three Hamas-sympathetic reporters seem to want you to believe that Israel should not defend itself, and should not carry the fight to its enemies. They want you to believe that the IDF’s response is wholly disproportionate, in that 28,340 Palestinians have been killed compared to roughly 1,200, as though this ought to be a matter of competing body-counts rather than a war against enemies. They want you to believe that the lives of 67 Arabs were far too high a price to pay to rescue two Israeli citizens, two Joooos! Stories like this are designed to further inflame passions in the civilized West against the Israelis.
Hamas have made their goals clear: they want to destroy the Jewish state. And Prime Minister Netanyahu has made Israel’s policies clear: they must destroy Hamas. In the end, one has to destroy the other.
Why do the left support the Palestinians, and the Arabs in general? The Advocate is a very leftist homosexual rights publication, but even they can’t stomach the idea of “Queers for Palestine”:
