Four more women are soon expected to be released, and Israel has but a few days to safeguard them from having to straddle similar, unfathomable danger.
Benjamin Anthony
(JNS)
Throughout the Israelites’ journey from captivity to redemption, the water in the Nile was turned into blood, but only once. The plague of locusts was cast, but only once. The parting of the Red Sea occurred, but only once.
By their very nature, miracles tend to be unique.
On Jan. 19, the world witnessed another miracle, one that Israel’s leaders should never assume will be repeated. In the heart of the Gaza Strip, walking from one Red Cross vehicle to the other, three young Israeli women—Romi Gonen, Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher—undertook and completed a perilous march for their freedom surrounded by thousands of Gazans.
All three have now been reunited with their families, but surviving such a journey was far from assured.
While Israelis rightly wrestle with the implications of the hostage-release deal, the nation’s leadership must urgently improve the machinations of the agreement to which they have signed.
Four more women are expected to be released on Saturday, and Israel has but a few days to safeguard them from having to straddle similar, unfathomable danger.
The sole partition that stood between the hostages and the throngs of Palestinian-Arabs who had flocked to the site of their convoy to witness their release, was a one-man-deep picket-line of gun-toting, black-and-green clad Hamas terrorists who, if the mob had decided to swarm the hostages, would have been woefully outnumbered and ill-equipped to fend them off, assuming, that is, that they would have wished to do so.
Had the crowd ridden a whim to attack, those three hostages, having endured and survived captivity for so very long, may well have met their end in a slaughter by the masses.
What they were required to navigate through en route to freedom rendered a walk through a literal minefield as a mundane and unremarkable journey by comparison.
Israel’s leadership and defense establishment must do better.
Consider that it is from among those same Gazan crowds that Hamas is actively, regularly and swiftly recruiting. Within those same Gazan crowds are the people who cheered by their thousands as the bodies of dead Israelis, murdered on Oct. 7, were paraded through the streets of their cities. It is those same Gazan people who, when last granted the right to vote for their leadership, voted for Hamas and still proclaim their readiness to do so again. They voted for terror, knowing that the Hamas charter enshrines a genocidal mandate for the murder of all Jews, thus endorsing murder by the ballot papers they cast.
After Oct. 7, Israel’s leadership claimed to have internalized the lesson that Gazans must never again be permitted to approach Israel’s borders. If so, Gazans must also not be allowed to be so proximate to Israel’s hostages during future releases.
If Israel permits the recurrence of a scene such as what happened on Jan. 19, then it will be outsourcing the safety and security of the very captives it failed to protect on Oct. 7 to a terrorist organization sworn to the destruction of all Jews.
This ceasefire agreement has thrust the Jewish people into a most macabre lottery. For the first 42 stomach-churning days of the deal, the identity, status and timing of those scheduled for release are known only hours before the captives are returned.
Israel’s leadership must not add to the collective national anguish by permitting such scenes of utter vulnerability and danger to be repeated; lest the Gazans decide to escalate from a scene of chaos to a scene of murder, dismemberment and unimaginable horror.
Israel’s leadership should recall that the Gazans, heading to the north of the Gaza Strip as they now are, are confronting scenes of unimaginable, and wholly justified, destruction, brought about because of their decisions and the actions of the leadership they elected. In the coming days, assuming the deal holds, those same Gazans will be looking on as Hamas releases not civilian women, but Israel’s “men of age” (males aged 18 to 50, categorized by Hamas as technical “enemy combatants”) and female soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces.
The surrounding masses are liable to assess the dystopian scenes that surround them and draw a direct, short nexus of culpability and vengeance between those and the Israeli “combatants” being released. If again allowed to come within touching distance of Israel’s captives, the lives of the abductees will be in utter jeopardy.
An enfeebled Hamas cannot be trusted to safeguard the hostages in the face of a baying crowd. Israel’s leaders must do more to secure them.
The sights of the hostages being flanked by terrorists and frog-marched into Gaza remain among the most chilling memories of this war. But even those images would be outstripped were the world to witness the massacre of hostages on their journey toward freedom.
This generation of captives—so tragically forsaken on Oct. 7—must not be led to the edge of their liberation only to be engulfed by the sea of human hatred with which so much of Gaza is awash.
The Israelites’ journey from captivity to redemption required the crossing of the seemingly uncrossable. Three Israeli women made a similar, miraculous crossing earlier this week, but only the most foolish among us would wager that the miracle of Jan. 19 will reoccur again.
Miracles do happen, but usually, only once.
Image: Israelis watch live on a large screen on “Hostages Square” in Tel Aviv, the release of three Israeli hostages from Hamas captivity on Jan. 19, 2025. Photo by Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90.
