Nils A. Haug
Gatestone Institute, Aug. 7, 2024
“The administration has embargoed and slow-walked weapons transfers to Israel to prevent it from defeating Hamas or moving to offense against Hezbollah.”
“They are fighting like lions in these alleys, under constant threat. They are heroes. This is not a simple war,” recalled Lt. Col. Almog Rotem, a battalion commander in the Israel Defense Forces, about what is faced by his soldiers in the Rafah campaign, in Gaza. “This was a severe event that should never have happened but did. We’re in a grueling, challenging war…. My heart goes out to the families of the fallen; we will… complete the mission…. Not a single soldier has said, ‘I don’t want to continue.'”
The context is a desperate search and rescue operation for hostages from many nations taken into captivity by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and incarcerated in deep tunnels under the earth on that dreadful day. “[T]otal victory,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the US Congress, means that “we destroy Hamas’ military capabilities and its rule in Gaza and bring all our hostages home.”
Reportedly due to political concerns over Muslim voters in the US, the Biden-Harris administration has not only been vacillating on military support for Israel, but also endeavouring to micromanage Israel’s war operation. A tragic outcome of these haphazard policies is that they are resulting in more deaths, prolonging the war and delaying Hamas’s release of the hostages.
The IDF’s necessary assault on Rafah for its self-defense and attempts to determine the location of senior Hamas leaders were postponed time and again due to US and international pressure. These postponements not only put the hostages at greater risk of torture and death -– bodies of five murdered hostages were recently discovered — but increase the risks to soldiers come to rescue them. Some hostages were eventually rescued from Rafah; perhaps others could have been, except that during the interim period they had been transferred elsewhere.
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