Nine months after the Iranian-orchestrated October 7 Hamas massacre of 1,200 mostly Israeli civilians, 116 hostages remain in Gaza, including at least 42 whom Israeli officials estimate were murdered by Hamas, after suffering unfathomable mental, physical and sexual abuse.
On June 8, Israel rescued four hostages in a heroic mission, in which Israeli special forces entered the private Gazan homes where four Israeli hostages -- three men and one young woman -- were held by "ordinary" Gazan civilians, one an Al-Jazeera "journalist."
What should have been hailed worldwide as an amazing rescue operation that finally brought some hostages back from their daily torture was instead condemned as "disproportionate" -- further proof of how normalized Jew-hatred and support for terrorism have become when political and media elites root for terrorist organizations instead of hostages. The EU's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell even called Israel's rescue operation of people who had been kidnapped a "bloodbath."
"Reports from Gaza of another massacre of civilians are appalling. We condemn this in the strongest terms," Borrell said on X. "The bloodbath must end immediately."
If you do not want a "bloodbath," do not take hostages, hide them among civilians, try to prevent a rescue, then if they are rescued, profess shock at the fallout that you yourself have teed up.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres voiced his "condemnation" for what he claimed were the deaths of "hundreds of Palestinian civilians" -- as usual unquestioningly parroting whatever figures Hamas tossed out.
General Onno Eichelsheim, Chief of Defense of the Dutch Armed Forces, said that Israel, "in its operation to rescue the hostages," had used "disproportionate force to achieve its objectives." The comment drew immediate criticism from Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom. Wilders, on X, called the comments "incomprehensible, inappropriate, incorrect."
As is usual for Hamas, which uses its civilians as human shields, the rescued Israeli hostages had been held in family homes in high-rise buildings in a densely populated part of Gaza. It apparently never occurred to either the heads of the UN or the EU to consider that if you are a terrorist organization that commits war crimes, you do not get to choose how a war that you started is waged against you.
There were even some who suggested that Israel should be put on trial for rescuing its own citizens. "The international criminal court should investigate Israel's hostage rescue raid," wrote former executive director of Human Rights Watch and currently visiting professor at Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs, Kenneth Roth, reportedly the owner of an "immoral anti-Israel obsession."
There were also "questions about its necessity," Roth added. Oh, so, according to him, it is not "necessary" to rescue Jews who are being raped, starved and tortured for nearly a year. Good to know. Estimates are that a third of the 120 hostages who remain in Gaza are no longer even alive.
BBC news asked with a straight face if, to spare the lives of the Gazan "civilians" who were keeping the hostages locked up in their homes, Israel had given prior warning before launching its rescue operation. The Israeli spokesman, also keeping a straight face, politely answered that a warning might have endangered the hostages and made the rescue more difficult.
The irony of all this seems completely lost on the political and media elites, who kept insisting that the Israeli rescue operation was somehow immoral. By condemning Israel's rescue operation, they suggest that massacring and kidnapping 240 people is moral, and an act that should not require a military response.
Meanwhile, the hostages that have returned to Israel -- those who were freed in an agreement with Hamas and those that were rescued -- spoke of starvation, beatings, rape, slavery and unfathomable torture. In contravention of the Geneva conventions, Hamas has refused to allow the Red Cross to check on the welfare of the hostages. One can imagine why.
To this day, there seems little-to-no interest in the fate or condition of the hostages still in Gaza. Instead, there is denial that the October 7 atrocities even took place, compared to an almost obsessive regard for the safety of, and humanitarian aid for Gazans. When the UN is unable to deliver the aid, Israel, not the UN, is blamed.
Meanwhile, the main condition set by Hamas, Iran and Qatar to free the hostages -- apart from releasing an infinite number of terrorists, whom they get to choose, from Israeli prisons -- has been a "permanent ceasefire" and "permanent Israeli withdrawal from Gaza." The new purported Hamas agreement to a ceasefire apparently comes with "a major hurdle: The Iran-backed terror group is now demanding 'written guarantees' that mediators will continue to negotiate a permanent truce, once the first phase of the plan goes into effect, the Hamas rep said."
Essentially, this demand means that Hamas and its handlers, Iran and Qatar, would like to start wars and then have someone else stop them when they do not like how they are going.
The UN, with main inciter-in-chief Guterres at the helm, has made it clear that Israel deserved the slaughter and had it coming, The October 7 massacres "did not happen in a vacuum," he said, thereby justifying them.
The Red Cross, which has not sought to gain access to the hostages since their abduction, presumably could not care less about their fate, and are being sued for neglect by families of the abducted.
The Hamas murders, rapes, burning alive of babies and abductions – all the reasons why Israel was forced to go to war with Hamas to begin with -- have retreated into the background. The October 7 atrocities have been squeezed into a small parenthesis, left largely unmentioned for months by mainstream media outlets and Western elites. What seems to matter instead to those who set the political and media agendas is to use the Hamas war once again to demonize the Jews as the world's most inhuman people for wanting to live peacefully on their historical land without daily massacres from Iran and its proxies -- Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and the Houthis -- which apparently plan to encircle them in a "Ring of Fire" -- "six fronts of aggression against Israel" -- as part of Iran's attempt at hegemony in the Middle East.
"Israel is a country that has no place on our land," said Ghazi Hamad, a leading Hamas terrorist, in an interview with Lebanese TV channel LBC.
"We must remove that country, because it constitutes a security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation, and must be finished. We are not ashamed to say this, with full force. We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again. The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight."
Recently, a former senior member of the PFLP, Khaled Barakat, wrote in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar, "The extinction of the Zionist project is only a matter of time thanks to armed struggle, Jihad in Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen."
Western elites seem happy to assist them in that fight.
Robert Williams is a researcher based in the United States.
Sandra Smith