I will save the best for last.

Today, a special committee set up by the IDF to investigate the tragic accidental shooting of three hostages presented their findings. What they found was predictable. It was a tragic accident. The troops had been barraged for days by terrorists. Fighting was fierce. Visuals were poor, and so the white flag wasn’t visible by the shooters. The voices speaking Hebrew were considered by soldiers as a Hamas ruse to draw soldiers inside the building to their deaths. After two hostages were already shot, and only one remained, the IDF commander asked for the shooting to stop, but because of the noise of nearby tanks, not everyone heard the order. And so the third hostage – mistakenly considered a Hamas terrorist and a threat – was also killed.

It is heartbreaking. But as Irit Haim, the mother of one of those tragically killed, told the devastated soldiers involved: “You must do everything to protect yourselves. Don’t hesitate. Hamas is the one responsible for these deaths.”

I put the following post up as a Facebook story. I’m going to repeat it here because I feel so strongly about it:

I don’t want to be in any relationship with Hamas. Even killing them is too much of a relationship. Having to listen to them lying and moaning and taking no responsibility. They are so vile and disgusting. It’s like stepping on roaches. I just wish we had less despicable enemies.

You don’t get to choose your foes, I suppose. But Jews always seem to attract the vilest of the vile. People who really hate God and every moral code. It’s no wonder. We are on this earth to remind people that there is a moral code, and a God. For a certain type of human being, that’s extremely annoying and inconvenient.

Matti Freidman’s very accurate and provocatively titled article “The Wisdom of Hamas” published on Dec. 28 in Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, makes several astonishingly good points. First, that far from miscalculating the reaction to their vile barbarism against Jews on October 7, Hamas was entirely accurate in its assessment, and it was the rest of us that couldn’t fathom what was going on. Hamas understood the West perfectly: the Western press would be co-opted or coerced into supporting their agenda and would predictably focus on civilian casualties among Palestinians “obscuring the cause of the war, portraying Israel’s military operations as atrocities, and thus pressuring Israel to stop fighting [claiming] that this war is one of the worst in history and that responsibility lies with Israel.”

“Hamas also knew that when faced with heartbreaking images of civilian deaths, some Western leaders would eventually buckle and blame the Israelis … It took about five weeks before this happened to Emmanuel Macron of France (‘These babies, these ladies, these old people are bombed and killed. So there is no reason for that and no legitimacy’) and Canada’s Justin Trudeau (‘The world is witnessing this killing of women, of children, of babies. This has to stop.’)”

The article goes on to pinpoint the real war that is going on, the war against the Jews. And this war is taking place all over the world, not just in Gaza, as our old enemies are joined by second generation Muslim immigrants to Western countries, who have the luck to be able to parade their parents’ hatred as free speech in order to destroy the Western democracies that swallowed their “refugee” sob stories and took them in.

As the war in Gaza rages on, the war in the North with Hezbollah is just hitting its stride. Not far from me, in Haifa, alarms went off and rockets were diverted. I have no doubt the war is coming closer to me every day. I’m not afraid. I’m grateful. Israel needs to deal with all our enemies in order for our people to live in peace.

I began this article by saying I was going to save the best for last. And this is what I meant. My grandson and others in his unit have been released. They are back home. God be blessed!! We are so grateful, and hope others will soon be going home as well. Inevitably, if the West butts out, Hamas monsters will realize that there is no way out of their tunnels. It’s surrender or die.