Thursday, February 20, will always be remembered in Israeli history as a day of unimaginable emotional pain. It is a pain that should be felt by every civilized human being on this planet.
Hamas is releasing the bodies of four kidnapped victims. Let's be clear: these are not hostages. A hostage is someone who has been kidnapped and is alive. These are murder victims. They include the corpses of a mother, her toddler, and a nine-month-old infant who were kidnapped on Oct. 7 — 16 months ago — are being returned to Israel in coffins or body bags. In exchange for these bodies, hundreds of convicted mass murderers and terrorists will be released on Saturday.
Israel confirms that the Shiri Bibas and her two baby boys Ariel and Kfir were murdered in Palestinian captivity. Their bodies will be returned tomorrow from Gaza in exchange for Israel releasing Palestinian criminals.
— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) February 19, 2025
Every emotion you feel — I feel that and then some. pic.twitter.com/5gUYEg5VAS
There is a huge distinction between seeing emaciated hostages returned and seeing a child's coffin. The evil that is Hamas is demonstrated even more clearly with the heinous villainy that they are showing regarding dead bodies. Prime Minister Netanyahu is attempting to prepare Israel and the world for the trauma that is about to occur. “All of the world’s heart should be torn, because this demonstrates who we are dealing with, what we are dealing with — with such monsters.”
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Channel 12 in Israel has reported that the U.S. and Israel will decide together what they will do within the next 48 hours after six living hostages are returned on Saturday. Given that Hamas has repeatedly violated the ceasefire agreement, it is predicted throughout Israel that the war will soon restart, as the only reason to keep any sort of ceasefire going is to get back living hostages, and that seems more and more unlikely every day. Israel has also made it clear that there will be no governance by Hamas or the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, and Hamas has made it clear that they will not leave the governance of Gaza to anyone else. Those conflicting imperatives, in combination with the diminishing chances of regaining live hostages, create a scenario that many see can only be resolved through military conflict.
While Hamas is the manifestation of pure evil in our world, news also came in recent days about its “allies” in the Biden administration — and given the many ways the last administration supported Hamas, “ally” is an appropriate term. Before Oct. 7, 2023, and despite incontrovertible evidence that UNRWA was using United Nations facilities to support Hamas in its attacks on Israel, Biden released $720 million to the organization. The Biden administration insisted on giving hundreds of millions of dollars of “aid” and, to quote Ted Cruz, “In a very real and direct way, the Biden-Harris administration funded the October 7th terrorist attack, which was the one day largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.” Thank God, there is now a President in the White House who is committed to the betterment of Western civilization, and who refuses to support terrorists who wish to destroy our nation and Israel.
We will soon see how President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu choose to respond to the recovery of these four victims, two of whom are small children. Depending upon the amount of outrage upon seeing the bodies of the Bibas family, there seem to be three choices:
1, Israel continues negotiations for phase two of the ceasefire in hopes of regaining any living hostages;
2, Israel goes through the motions of negotiating for phase two of the ceasefire while simultaneously preparing to attack Gaza and Iran in the coming days or weeks. Israel has just received last week the weapons that they had bought from the United States, but that the Biden administration had refused to release for months. With these new weapons, the military strength of Israel will increase exponentially; or
3, Israel decides that ceasefire negotiations are not helping retrieve any of the remaining hostages but rather are making the entire region more dangerous. As a result, they launch strikes against Gaza and Iran shortly after Saturday's exchange.
Whichever choices are ultimately made, we will all be immersed in pain with the delivery of the dead bodies, especially of the children. We all need to feel emotional pain and sadness for the evils that Hamas has done. And then we need to be conscious of the justifiable anger at Hamas that every compassionate human being feels when this type of evil is recognized.
And in the midst of our anger, we must heed the old advice to pause and count to ten … if only because it helps us aim better.
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