Netanyahu Delivers: All 251 Israeli Hostages Returned After 843 Days

Israel Has Prevailed

Every single Israeli, taken hostage by Hamas, dead or alive, has finally been brought home. The body of the last one remaining- Master Sargent Ran Gvili, was recovered yesterday and handed over to his family.

Benjamin Netanyahu has delivered on his promise. It took #IDF, and him, 843 days after the cataclysmic carnage of October 7, 2023, to bring back each one of the 251 citizens abducted.

It says something about Israel as a nation, as a state and as a people. The political leadership refused to flinch in its pursuit of discharging its responsibility. There was no dearth of pressure, domestic as well as international, even from the staunchest of its allies.

Hamas miscalculated big time. They invested too much in the orchestrated spectacles staged by rent-a-cause activists across the campuses of Ivy League universities. Hamas perhaps had an exaggerated view of the Qatar-funded #AlJazeeraEnglish’s ability to airbrush their image, from a virulent #Jihadist terror machine to a legitimate resistance movement. They knew well that the IDF’s response was inevitable. 

Hamas’ strategy was to bait the IDF into targeting hospitals and schools, which they used as a camouflage for their bases and staging points. They hoped that the resulting civilian casualties would persuade the high priests of the hallowed global media to manufacture enough of an outrage to deter a long drawn operation by the IDF. 

They relied on the formidable hypocrisy quotient of the well-heeled bleeding heart liberals in the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, several governments in Europe, and in the Biden administration. They fantasised that all the Muslim rulers across the world would unite and intervene. They had an enormous faith in Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, acting in concert to overwhelm a tiny Israel. They believed that the left and liberal formations, bitterly opposed to Bibi in a fractious Israeli polity, would prevail. They hoped that the families of the hostages would force the Israeli government to its knees, to compromise and reconcile.

None of it worked. Not because most of this didn’t happen. Of course it did, and how! But the biggest factor, without any doubt, was the leadership of Prime Minister Netanyahu. He didn’t respond with platitudes and tokenism. He didn’t play a pathetic victim seeking a global consensus. He didn’t search for a refuge in virtue signalling, like a “calibrated, measured and proportionate response, with a control over escalation ladder and an easily accessible off-ramp”. 

He sent no delegations to the far-off unconcerned capitals. He didn’t leave those ogres even an iota of an opportunity to claim victory. Instead, he extracted such a price for the October 7 misadventure of Hamas that this business model for jihad in reference to Israel has been rendered thoroughly counterproductive.

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