Haaretz | Israel News
Palestinians carry their belongings following Israeli strikes on residential buildings in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Saturday.Credit: AHMED ZAKOT/ REUTERS
Opinion | Israel Has Turned Its Back on the Hostages in Favor of Destroying Gaza
Gideon Levy
Dec 2, 2023 11:42 pm IST
Israel’s resumption of the war is its biggest mistake since October 7. A war “heavy in days, heavy in blood,” in the wondrous words of Moshe Dayan regarding another war, has become a war that is even heavier in days and blood, with its goals receding and its crimes accumulating.
Returning once again to the awful scenes in Gaza – the first two days of the renewed phase looked horrible – is tantamount to a return to a loss of humanity. On Saturday, children were again dying on the filthy floors of Gaza’s hospitals, with their parents bent over them crying out in anguish. People with head injuries, covered in dust from collapsed buildings, were brought to clinics where no help could be provided.
Gaza can’t take it anymore, and after the pause, human suffering is even more unbearable. Go tell a family that has already fled for its life, finding a puny shelter for itself, a scrap of a tent, to move south again. Go tell that family to move south while the south is being bombarded indiscriminately, almost like the northern part of the Gaza Strip.
The interactive escape route map, the glory of the IDF’s technology and ethics which was disseminated in Gaza over the weekend, cannot save even one soul. It’s dubious that it was even meant to.
Israel is not interested in punishing Gaza, only in attaining its goals. In resuming the war in Gaza, Israel has admitted that it prefers one goal over all others. Gone is the talk about liberating the hostages at any price, before anything else.
The die has been cast and there is no way of obscuring this. Israel clearly prefers to “pulverize” Hamas, whatever that term means, over saving the hostages. No word games will help here, this is the naked truth. In resuming the war, Israel is not only endangering the lives of the hostages, it is also thwarting any attempts to free them. And all of this while the process of exchanging hostages for prisoners was going better than expected.
After long days of celebrating the return of hostages, with TV panels and newspapers squeezing out every possible drop of emotion, with news broadcasts becoming reality shows, in which every distant cousin of a released hostage repeats the story over and over; when a horrifying reality is turned into a telenovela, with a happy ending that becomes kitsch – after all that, the negotiations blew up, and with them went the myth of freeing the hostages at any cost.
According to some reports, Hamas was interested in moving to the release of male hostages, whose price was higher, and Israel wanted to complete the release of women first. To scuttle negotiations over this issue while returning to full-blown war is a clear statement of Israel’s priorities, which even before that showed signs of preferring war over releasing hostages.
Israel’s moment of truth arrived, and the choice was made. It is an infuriating one. Israel should have no goal more important than securing the release of hostages. There is nothing more grave than severing the unwritten pact between a civilian (or soldier) and his state, abandoning the hostage to his or her fate.
From now on, we can no longer talk about releasing them at any price. Israel is for releasing hostages, obviously, but not at any price. In its perception, there are more important issues. It will not agree to a deal of exchanging all hostages for all prisoners, including a permanent cease-fire, in order to save 136 Israelis.
In the TV panels of death and kitsch they tried to blur this choice. Only some family members of the hostages, not all, dared oppose the renewal of the war, while armies of commentators and correspondents continued to recite hollow slogans supporting this choice.
There is nothing more justifiable than this war, but there are very grave questions that no one is raising regarding its horrific methods. Israel embarked on a just war using patently unjust methods. Even in just wars, not everything is permissible, certainly not the killing of 15,000 people and then continuing without end, only in order to achieve goals that may not be attainable. Even if they are achieved, nothing will be solved.
Let’s set aside the justice of this war and its methods for a moment. It’s imperative to return the hostages, before anything else. It’s still possible, on condition that the war stops.
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