Israeli Hostages in Gaza : The World Urging a Ceasefire

"It seems one of the reasons they don't want to turn women over that they have been holding hostage and the reason this pause fell apart is that they do not want these women to be able to talk about what happened to them during their time in custody."

U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller

"[All the while, Hamas's leadership was working on a plan that would] change the entire equation."

"Hamas's goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such."

"This battle ... did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation."

Khalil al-Hayya, senior Hamas official

"[Hamas knew it would] pay a price [for its actions and was] ready to pay it."

"We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs."

"Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country because it constitutes a security, military and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation."

"[October 7 was] just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth."

Ghazi Hamad, senior Hamas leader

Palestinian terrorists drive back to the Gaza Strip with the body of Shani Louk, a German-Israeli dual citizen who was murdered at the Supernova music festival on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Ali Mahmud)

 

A week ago, Hamas's chief representative in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, a member of its politburo stated: "A war of liberation is coming, not just another October 7". With all of this, obvious evidence of Islamofascists prepared to continue their attacks against Israel, looking to future opportunities once the current conflict has settled down in whichever way it will, the world still demands that Israel cease its advances toward its goal of destroying the terrorist group Hamas.

The alternative is, of course, returning the Israel Defense Forces to Israeli territory, and allowing Hamas to regroup and continue its ongoing deadly war against Israel. The great minds that are busy petitioning Israel to think of the massive destruction it is forced to engage in, with its determination to destroy the Hamas infrastructure which has enabled it to give shelter to its operatives while launching attacks against Israel and its citizens from the tunnels used as weapons depots, think no further than halting a conflict, unconcerned over the security of the state of Israel.

Mobs of shouting, disruptive, violent and threatening Palestinians and other Arab Muslims who have infiltrated the West, march in displays of raging hatred, inciting against Israel as a 'genocidal' nation destroying the lives of Palestinians, and in the process threatening the lives of local diaspora Jews, calling for a 'ceasefire', their raging ire resonating with the politicians who depend on their votes and who in turn do nothing to insist that a conflict half a world away should not be brought to the cities of Europe and North America.

 

A State Department official says the U.S. suspects one reason Hamas is refusing to release its remaining female hostages is to prevent them from revealing the horrors they experienced in captivity. (GIL COHEN-MAGEN/AFP via Getty Images)

And in view of the influence of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation of the United Nations and the penchant for both the General Assembly and the Security Council to hold Israel solely accountable for all that goes wrong in the Middle East and in particular between the Palestinians and Israel, strenuously call for restraint, proportionality and a ceasefire, finding Israel guilty on all counts of accusations as an 'apartheid', oppressive state, an 'occupying' authority. In truth a country and a nation defending its right of existence.

There was a temporary truce to enable humanitarian aid to reach the dire needs of the Palestinians, and to allow civilians with citizenship in other countries to exit Gaza. Israel was loathe to agree to it in the certain knowledge that Hamas terrorists would find opportunities to exit Gaza, and sure enough the mastermind of the October 7 atrocities, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar managed to find help in smuggling himself out of Gaza City where his house had been surrounded by IDF troops with a mission to find and arrest him.

The truce enabled Israel to forge an agreement with Hamas for the return of Israeli abductees, and over a period of almost a week Israeli hostages, mostly women and children and foreign agricultural workers were released in exchange for three times the number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons for crimes against Israel. For the last exchange representing several extensions, Hamas refused to return ten women and two children. And then Hamas "violated the framework" by resuming hostilities.

Worse, it failed to "meet its obligation to release all hostage women" and children; an estimated twenty women remain hostages in Gaza; speculation that releasing them would release to the world at large the sight and sound of women who were forced to endure brutality of a depth most sane minds could never envision. Aside from torture and sexual depravities, some may be near death, or have been murdered, as many others have been. 

Released hostages and families of hostages held in Gaza meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the war cabinet on December 5, 2023. (Hostages and Missing Persons Families Forum)