Israeli Soldiers Free Four Hostages from Terrorist Captivity; CNN Claims The Hostages Were "Released" While Progressives Seethe That Israel Fought to Get Her People Back

Terrorist outlet the Washington Post cries about how many Poor Palestinians Israel killed in rescuing the people held hostage for 245 days and counting by the government elected by the Poor Palestinians.

Inside Israel's hostage rescue: Secret plans and a deadly 'wall of fire'

Oh no! A "deadly wall of fire"!

While Hamas terrorists fired on Israeli soldiers attempting to rescue hostages.

They should have just brought Social Workers.

#DefundTheIsraeliPolice

JERUSALEM -- It was a busy weekend morning in the market at the Nuseirat refugee camp, Osama Abu Asi recalled. Fighting could be heard in the distance, but it didn't keep away the shoppers, who perused the few bags of flour and sugar he had spread on his blanket.

Abu Asi said he did not know that nearby, in an apartment one floor above the street, sat a young, dark-haired woman known around the world -- last seen in a viral video clip being driven into Gaza on the back of motorcycle on Oct. 7, screaming, "Don't kill me!"

She was Noa Argamani, one of about 250 Israeli hostages taken captive by Hamas.

I'm suuuure he "didn't know."

Her 245th day in captivity had started like most others until, shortly after 11 a.m., she heard a knock at the door, followed by yelling. Suddenly, the room was filled with Israeli soldiers. "You are being rescued!" they shouted in Hebrew.

"They simply came, just like that," Argamani, 26, would tell her close friend Yan Gorjaltsan hours later.

The rescue operation on Saturday that freed four Israeli hostages and killed more than 270 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, was one of the most dramatic and deadly episodes of Israel's war against Hamas. This account is based on more than a dozen interviews with former and current Israeli military officials, family members of hostages, and Palestinian eyewitnesses, as well as analysis of verified video footage.

Once again citing "Gaza health officials" without pointing out that these "health officials" are controlled by Hamas and permit Hamas to build its military bases and hostage prisons beneath their hospitals.

Argamani and three other Israeli hostages would be extracted from central Gaza and reunited with family in a complex daylight operation involving thousands of troops, technicians and analysts.

It was planned for weeks and executed smoothly, Israeli officials said, until the tight commando raid turned into a firefight with militants. The Israeli military responded with a massive aerial assault on the crowded streets of Nuseirat.

The crowded streets.

Well, that's where Hamas chose to keep its hostages. Should Israel have gone to a less-crowded spot, where no hostages were being kept?

You know what was crowded? The youth music festival Hamas killers machine-gunned and stole women from.

The bombs kept falling and the streets echoed with screams, Abu Asi said.

It was like "doomsday."

And yet he lived.

A lot of Pallywood actors claim all kinds of things. I've seen the same 25 year old Terror Influencer killed about ten times.

Since Oct. 7, Israeli intelligence units, with help from their U.S. counterparts, have studied digital clues, drone footage and intercepts to locate the hostages. Recently, they locked in on Nuseirat as the current location for four captives who had been taken from a desert dance rave just outside the border fence with Gaza.

Among them was Argamani, whose wrenching pleas for mercy were among the defining images from the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel. Officials from the Israel Defense Forces said they knew she had been moved around Gaza more than once during her in time in captivity. Analysts confirmed she was now being held alone in a first-floor apartment; three other hostages -- Almog Meir Jan, 22, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41 -- were on the third floor of a building nearby.

Planning began in tight secrecy. Mock-ups of the two buildings were constructed for troops to rehearse in, officials said. It mirrored the preparations undertaken by Israeli commandos before their famed rescue of more than 100 hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976.

For weeks, members of Yamam, a special counterterrorism unit; Shin Bet, the country's internal security agency; and the IDF drilled over and over for a rare daylight mission.

"We understood that in those apartments with those guards, daytime will be the ultimate surprise," said Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, an IDF spokesman.

It would mean greater risk getting into and out of the buildings. And it would mean more Palestinian civilians on the streets.

...

Thousands of personnel were involved in the operation, IDF officials said. It took about 25 minutes for special forces to drive from Israel to Nuseirat. How they got there is still unclear.

Palestinian witnesses described some troops arriving in two undercover vehicles, one of which resembled the trucks used by Israel to bring commercial goods into Gaza. The other was a white Mercedes truck, piled high with furniture and other belongings, a common sight in a camp that's home to thousands of displaced families.

"The IDF made no use of any civilian trucks," the military said in a statement.

Two videos verified by The Washington Post show a box truck marked with a brand of dishwashing soap traveling in the company of Israeli armored vehicles on a road about a mile west of the raid. The vehicles head west, away from Nuseirat, and it is unclear whether the videos were filmed before or after the raid.

Oh no, the Israeli special forces used subterfuge to get close to the hostages before Hamas could start killing them. That's a War Crime they must be prosecuted for!

The white Mercedes is visible in a third verified video filmed from the balcony of a residential building in the center of the camp. Two ladders can be seen resting against the side of a house, leading to an upper floor next to the truck. "Here they have arrived," says the voice of the woman who furtively filmed the six-second scene.

No worries about Hamas using ambulances to move troops and weapons, of course.

But those cheating Jews used furniture trucks.

This aggression must not stand.

Hussam al-Arouqi, 33, was returning from the bakery with his brother Issam, he recounted, when two men in plainclothes and about 10 heavily armed soldiers poured out of the back of the Mercedes. The soldiers opened fire, hitting his brother three times, he said.

"He fell to the ground and started bleeding" and tried to crawl away, Hussam said, adding that Apache helicopters were flying low overhead.

It was more than an hour, he said, before it was safe enough to reach Issam and take him to the hospital in a donkey-drawn cart. Issam remains in critical condition.

He was totally innocent. The Israelis fired on this innocent man for no reason at all!

He wasn't a Hamas guard or anything. Gaza health officials and his family members say so.

Israeli troops succeeded in reaching Argamani's apartment without tipping off her guards, according to Hagari, who was watching video feeds from drones circling above and soldiers' helmet cameras. Almost simultaneously, other units entered the building holding the three male hostages, about 220 yards away.

"In Noa Argamani's building, we surprised them completely," Hagari said.

The stunned young woman was bustled down the stairs into a vehicle and driven to a helicopter waiting nearby.

Soldiers relayed the good news with a coded phrase: "We have the diamond in our hand."

The Washington Post is trying to sell the idea that because Israeli troops got close to the hostages using disguised vehicles, they were therefore "illegal combatants." It is against the rules of war for fighters to not wear visible uniforms.

Here's the reason Israel might feel that that rule should be suspended:

Hen Mazzig
@HenMazzig

Hamas terrorists have issued "standing orders" to kill hostages if they suspect an imminent IDF rescue mission, Israeli officials told the New York Times.

The NYT writes that if other hostages were killed on Saturday, as Hamas has claimed, it is because Hamas puts hostages in civilian areas as human shields - a heinous war crime that must be condemned.

The US & UK assisted the IDF rescue op with drones, comms monitoring & widespread UAV deployment to track hostages.

Israel goes to great lengths to avoid harming civilians, while Hamas exploits their suffering for PR. The world must recognize Hamas' depravity & hold them accountable for these atrocities against Israelis & Palestinians alike.

The Crybully Nonsense Network continues sh*tting the bed.

CNN came in for sharp criticism Saturday after running a segment that said Israeli hostages rescued in the daring morning operation in Gaza had been released.

Network anchor Victor Blackwell and Ian Bremmer, founder of the Eurasia Group, were both discussing the dramatic mission to save the four hostages when the word "release" appeared in a chyron.

Critics pounced, pointing out that Hamas did not willingly release these hostages.

"Come on @CNN the four hostages were RESCUED not released. Do better," said the account StopAntisemitism in a posting to X.

Yaari Cohen, an Israeli student called the chyron "disgusting, adding that the network "should be ashamed."

"Hamas didn't "release" these Hostages, the IDF rescued them after Hamas held them for 8 months!!" Cohen said on X.

Neither man said the word "release," during the interview, which was about how Israel's war cabinet minister Benny Gantz would hold off on a press conference in which he was widely expected to quit the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Leftwing Hamas supporter Krystal Ball (seriously) seethed that the IDF killed some of Hamas' human shields in affecting a rescue of its people:

Krystal Ball
@krystalball

274 Palestinians killed in a bloody massacre to rescue 4 Israelis (and possibly kill others) and this is being celebrated by US politicians as a win. Depraved.

274? Is that what the totally-independent and credible Gaza Ministry of Health says?

And how many of those killed were Hamas fighters? Zero, right? The IDF went in to rescue its citizens from terrorist captivity and somehow killed 274 women and children and zero armed men?

And what do you mean by "and possibly kill others"? You mean that Hamas will murder its other hostages in retaliation, yes?

But they're the good guys you're fighting for, right?

Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.today
@JordanSchachtel

I'm sorry that your terrorist friends kidnapped civilians. Maybe tell them to surrender and free the hostages?

David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense
@davereaboi

What'' happening here is that the people who'd hold Israeli hostages in their homes are outing themselves. They only feel sympathy for the terrorists because they identity strongly with them--knowing Hamas gets to do to the Jews what they hope they'd do, if given the chance.

Kyle Shideler
@ShidelerK

We've gone from the left insisting "I'd hide Jews in my attic" to the left insisting "I'd hide Jews in my attic" in the space of a decade.

He means the left used to claim they'd "hide Jews in the attic" to protect them from Alt-Right Nazis. Now they say they'll "hide Jews in the attic" on behalf of Hamas, to keep the IDF from finding them.

Let's remember who is to blame for any deaths caused in freeing hostages: the hostage-takers. Or is this too complex a notion for the leftwing radicals to undertand?

Terrorist propagandist Mehdi Hasan, formerly of MSNBC (but don't worry, Jake Tapper has him on as a guest so he'll still be in the American leftwing media) has thoughts:

Update: Get ready for Hamas to claim that 75% of the casualties are "women and children," as usual.

People die in war--it's unavoidable. The death toll is also unknown since these figures are being fed to us by Hamas, who quietly revised the death toll. The United Nations also did that, reducing the number of women and children killed by half. Now, the AP has analyzed the numbers and found that the figures handed down by the terrorists don't fit. They also noted a sharp reduction in civilian deaths since the war began, something that Biden officials should probably catch up on as they stall arms shipments due to overblown reports of mass slaughter (via AP):

The proportion of Palestinian women and children being killed in the Israel-Hamas war appears to have declined sharply, an Associated Press analysis of Gaza Health Ministry data has found, a trend that both coincides with Israel's changing battlefield tactics and contradicts the ministry's own public statements.

No, the proportion of "women and children" being killed didn't go down due to "changing tactics." It went down because Hamas' numbers were so absurd that its allies, including in the Biden White House, told them to not put out such ridiculous propaganda and to stop claiming such absurdly indefensible figures.

So Hamas reduced its claims of women and children being killed from an absurd 75% to an also false but more plausible 40%.

The trend is significant because the death rate for women and children is the best available proxy for civilian casualties in one of the 21st century's most destructive conflicts. In October, when the war began, it was above 60%. For the month of April, it was below 40%. Yet the shift went unnoticed for months by the U.N. and much of the media, and the Hamas-linked Health Ministry has made no effort to set the record straight.

Israel faces heavy international criticism over unprecedented levels of civilian casualties in Gaza and questions about whether it has done enough to prevent them in an 8-month-old war that shows no sign of ending. Two recent airstrikes in Gaza killed dozens of civilians.

[...]

The Health Ministry announces a new death toll for the war nearly every day. It also has periodically released the underlying data behind this figure, including detailed lists of the dead.

The AP's analysis looked at these lists, which were shared on social media in late October, early January, late March, and the end of April. Each list includes the names of people whose deaths were attributable to the war, along with other identifying details.

The daily death tolls, however, are provided without supporting data. In February, ministry officials said 75% of the dead were women and children -- a level that was never confirmed in the detailed reports. And as recently as March, the ministry's daily reports claimed that 72% of the dead were women and children, even as underlying data clearly showed the percentage was well below that.

[...]

The ministry said publicly on April 30 that 34,622 had died in the war. The AP analysis was based on the 22,961 individuals fully identified at the time by the Health Ministry with names, genders, ages, and Israeli-issued identification numbers.

The ministry says 9,940 of the dead -- 29% of its April 30 total -- were not listed in the data because they remain "unidentified." These include bodies not claimed by families, decomposed beyond recognition or whose records were lost in Israeli raids on hospitals.

An additional 1,699 records in the ministry's April data were incomplete and 22 were duplicates; they were excluded from AP's analysis.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 01:08 PM

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