Israeli joy at hostage rescue undiminished by regret over Palestinian casualties

Eight months after the horrors of 7 October, Saturday was a rare, joyful day in Israel after four hostages were rescued safely from Gaza in a special forces operation.

Street parties were held across the country; the weekly demonstration in Tel Aviv demanding that the government strike a deal with Hamas to release the remaining 120 captives was invigorated by the news. Israeli media celebrated the reunion of the Nova festivalgoer Noa Argamani with her terminally ill mother, and broke the sad news that the father of another freed Nova hostage, Almog Meir Jan, had died just hours before his son arrived home in a military helicopter.

Meir Jan is the only one of the four to have made any public comment so far, telling state broadcaster Kan Radio on Saturday: “Thank you, thank you to everyone. I am fine. I am with my supportive family.” Family members of the hostages said that their loved ones were aware while in captivity of the grassroots protest movement pressuring the government to bring them home.

The painstaking planning and intelligence gathering for the mission, the bravery of the ground troops and the accompanying morale boost for the public and army have been endlessly dissected: Saturday’s operation is likely to be remembered as one of the most daring rescues in Israeli history, drawing comparisons to the famous raid on Entebbe airport in 1976.

In the midst of such catharsis after eight months of a steady trickle of news that more and more hostages have died, there was little bandwidth in Israel for the renewed suffering in Gaza that the operation has caused. A total of 274 people were killed and another 696 were injured, according to medics in the devastated Palestinian territory, the majority in airstrikes that allowed the commandos to escape after one of their vehicles broke down when they under fire from militants.

Even a column in Haaretz – Israel’s leading leftwing newspaper – mentioned the Palestinian deaths only in the context of how they will further damage Israel’s image internationally, calling the operation a “dizzying success” in which “the price could have been much heavier” after one special operations officer was killed.

Gaza’s health ministry does not differentiate between civilian and militant casualties, but graphic images and videos from the scene in Nuseirat and a local hospital suggested dozens of women and children were among the dead and dying. Ben Saul, the UN’s special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, has suggested that the operation may be deemed a war crime if it was anticipated “that civilian casualties would be excessive”.

Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israel analyst at the International Crisis Group thinktank, said the Palestinian deaths during the rescue mission were unlikely to have much impact on the Israeli public.

“There’s been so much death and destruction, and no let-up from the crisis in Gaza and with Hezbollah … This is a major moment of relief. Everyone cried when they heard the news that four hostages were free,” said Zonszein.

“People have not cared about the Palestinian casualty count the whole time, and the media doesn’t really report it, so I wouldn’t expect them to start caring about it now, during of all things a rescue operation. As we have seen before, there is an Israeli narrative in the war, and an international narrative, and they don’t really meet.”

Saturday’s rescue of Argamani, 25, Meir Jan, 21, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 40, was not the first successful rescue of the conflict. The eighteen-year-old soldier Ori Magidish was brought home in October in an operation in which two Hamas militants were killed, according to the IDF, and a similar raid in Rafah in February freed two elderly men from the Nir Yitzhak kibbutz in a mission that reportedly left at least 67 Palestinians dead.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has long insisted that military pressure, rather than a hostage release and ceasefire deal, is the best way to bring the remaining captives home – a position widely believed to be politically motivated.

Public support for negotiations is still strong; polling from last month suggested the majority of Israelis prioritise a deal over military action. On Sunday, Hamas claimed without evidence that three other hostages had been killed during the rescue operation, including a US citizen.

“If anyone believes that yesterday’s operation absolves the government of the need to strike a deal, they are living a fantasy. The opposite is true. The joy over the successful rescue of the four only evinced the need for a deal. There are people out there who need to be saved, and the sooner, the better,” columnist Nahum Barnea wrote in the centre-right Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth.

Netanyahu has also been widely criticised at home for capitalising on the successful rescue mission, breaking Shabbat convention to meet the released hostages and pose for photographs. He is yet to meet or contact many hostage families whose loved ones are still missing or have been killed.

Avi Marciano, the father of the dead 19-year-old hostage Noa Marciano, wrote on his Facebook page: “When the ending is bad, the prime minister doesn’t show up. He doesn’t call, either.”