GNITN - Special Edition

Israel At War – Day 692

Only God

Fueling The Fire

One hostage mother has advice for Israel for how to defeat Hamas as we read in an article from the Jewish News Syndicate:

The fuel that Israel lets into the Gaza Strip likely powers the ventilation systems that bring air to the hostages in Hamas’s tunnels, Ditsa Or, the mother of one of those hostages, told JNS during an interview last week. All the same, she wants Israel to stop supplying the fuel.

She makes sense of the move:

“Maybe it will force Hamas to take Avinatan and the other hostages up to the surface, making them easier to track down,” she said. “Maybe supplying the fuel only entrenches Hamas and furthers the hostages’ release.”

Or also wants the IDF to get tougher on Hamas even though it may mean endangering the hostages:

Her family has advocated firmer military action against Hamas, even as other families of hostages demand that the government give in to the terrorist group’s demands.

It is a political quandary that Hamas loves and planned on when they took the hostages:

These competing approaches reflect a broader disagreement in Israeli society. After simmering for months, these tensions have been brought to the fore in recent weeks, as Israel simultaneously pursues talks with Hamas and a military operation in Gaza City. Israel has allowed more humanitarian aid and fuel to enter Gaza last month following disputed reports of starvation in the area.

Or also feels that a partial hostage release only makes things worse for those not let go:

The fuel, said Ditsa Or, was an example of the uncertain impact surrounding any course of action vis-à-vis Hamas. A partial deal that would result in the liberation of only some hostages may doom the rest, she added. Given these uncertainties, Israelis “need to stand firm and defeat their enemies while keeping up faith that doing this is also the most promising course of action for freeing the hostages,” she continued.

Her son is one of 20 hostages still being held. And she and her husband know that there are dangers to rescuing them:

Avinatan Or, who recently turned 32, and the other 19 hostages presumed to still be alive in Gaza “entered a state of grave danger to their lives the minute they were abducted on Oct. 7, 2023,” she said. “No one has a path to freeing them that eliminates that danger. There are very dangerous implications to any course of action.”

In this reality, she added, “I can only try to take actions that I believe will safeguard his life, and at the same time not endanger others from our People. So that’s what I’m trying to do.”

Differing Views

Avinatan’s parents are part of a hostage forum that supports military pressure on Hamas:

Ditsa and her husband, Yaron, who have seven children and live in Shilo in Samaria, belong to a group of parents called the Tikva Forum, who believe military pressure on Hamas is the surest way to free their loved ones.

Others want Israel to cave to Hamas’s demand if it means getting their loved ones back:

Another, larger group, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, believes that the best way to get the hostages back is to give in to Hamas’s demands.

Those demands will only prolong the war and yet Hamas makes them:

Hamas is reportedly offering to release some of the hostages in exchange for a 60-day ceasefire, a partial Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip, the release of some 200 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails and a return to the U.N.-led humanitarian aid distribution process that it had controlled for years before the outbreak of war on Oct. 7, 2023.

Recent protests are pressuring Israel’s leaders to take the deal:

Last week, hundreds of thousands of Israelis participated in a series of nationwide protests demanding that the government take the deal. Universities and many businesses declared a one-day strike in solidarity with the protests, which the Hostages and Missing Families Forum endorsed and helped organize.

Others don’t see the protests helping at all:

To Ditsa Or, these were empty gestures.

“Besides making some of the participants feel good for a while, I don’t see what the strike and protests achieved. They showed Hamas that the government is under pressure. They disrupted the lives of many thousands of families, many of them with husbands serving in the reserves and mothers struggling to take care of children at the end of the summer school vacation. And they didn’t do a single thing toward getting Avinatan and the other hostages back home,” she said.

Or also thinks indecisiveness as is also wrong:

She has also been critical of the government. In a speech in Tel Aviv last month, she compared the government’s dual approach to the indecisiveness that the Prophet Elijah decried in the Book of Kings.

“Elijah saw the People of Israel as going back and forth from paganism to the belief in God. He told them to commit to one option, preferably the good one, but otherwise the bad one. This was preferable to their sitting on the fence,” she said.

Still the hostage forums support each other in spite of their differences:

Despite the differences of opinion and worldview that separate her from some of the other hostages’ parents, she feels emotionally connected to them, she emphasized. She regularly visits the Hostages and Missing Families Forum families at Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square, and has attended many events with the Forum parents.

“When we meet, we don’t talk geopolitics. We speak about what unites us, which is almost everything,” she said. “I’ve made it a mission to stay connected with them because we share the same fate, just like the rest of Israel.”

All the hostage families know that there isn’t an easy answer, but there is only one who can help:

Neither she nor they “have the key out of the terrible labyrinth we find ourselves in. If we look around us, it’s an equation without a solution, a riddle without an answer.”

This is why “we need to look upwards. To God. To faith. That’s the missing dimension that we need to constantly remember as we look for a way out of this situation,” she said. “It’s our only way out.”