You can believe me or not believe me, but this is the truth. This Friday I started to feel, for the first time, a sense of real despair. And as I lit candles Friday night, I decided to have a long conversation with God. “Look,” I said, “your people need some help. Some encouragement. We can’t go on like this. Please, please help us find our hostages.”

Little did I know, that at that very moment the government had given the green light to the most daring hostage rescue operation of the entire war.

The joy in Israel was palpable. Life guards announced it at the beach to cheering crowds. An Arkia pilot told his passengers. Even the usual disgruntled Saturday night Hostage Square protestors in Tel Aviv smiled and cheered before going back to protesting.

It took those of us who keep Shabbat a while to get the news, although some thoughtful secular Israelis were kind enough to tape up posters on synagogues with the joyful news to cheer the worshippers inside.

We spent Saturday night looking at the videos of Noa Argamani hugging her Dad, and going to visit her poor mom who is in the last stages of brain cancer. Noa was brought to the same hospital for her medical care so they could be together, and her mom’s last wish could come true. Tragically, Yossi Jan, father of rescued Israeli hostage Almog Meir, died on Friday, only hours before his son was freed from Hamas captivity. 

Apparently, the IDF knew weeks ago where these hostages were being held: Noa –  the famous young woman seen kidnapped on a motorcycle by some Hamas degenerate at the Nova Festival , Almog Meir (21), Andrey Kozlov (27), and Shlomi Ziv. The army had even built models of apartments for soldiers to train in for the operation. But only now had the IDF deemed such an operation possible.

The location was Nuseriat, a crowded refugee camp where you can’t put one foot in front of the other. They knew Noa was in a ground floor apartment and the three men 200 meters away in another apartment building on the third floor. While they discussed rescuing Noa alone, it was decided that her rescue without including the men would be a death warrant for them. So the decision was made to do a daring simultaneous rescue in the middle of the day.

Rolling into Nuseirat with a truck disguised to look like a typical conveyance for wandering Gazan refugees, complete with mattresses and Gazan refugee outfits, the soldiers – which included both men and women to make the refugee story more plausible – apparently told curious locals that they had rented an apartment in the building they were heading towards because where they had been staying Rafah was too dangerous.

Then they stormed the apartment. The family holding on to Noa for the last eight months included an Al Jazeerah journalist, his wife and kids, his sisters, and his father, a doctor. All of them resisted. All of them died. But unlike Hamas, the grandchildren weren’t shot (Hamas would have burnt them alive). At the very same moment, a second force was storming the apartment with the men. Its heroic commander, and the person after whom this operation will forever be known, Arnon Zemorah, was fatally wounded by terrorist fire. Nevertheless, the Israeli commandos rescued all the hostages, shielding them from heavy gunfire with their own bodies and successfully retreating back to the vehicle they had come in,

By this time, hundreds of Hamas terrorists in Nuseriat had come running through the narrow alleyways with Kalashnikovs, RPG’s, and other weapons. A direct hit put the soldiers’ vehicle out of commission, making them all sitting ducks. It was then that the magnificent coordination of fire from Apache helicopters, ground troops, and navy vessels protecting them and decimating hundreds of terrorists and the people who gave them shelter kicked in, allowing them to take the hostages to a helicopter waiting at the beach for the flight back to Israel.

That this operation succeeded is nothing short of a miracle. God was certainly involved, the difference between spectacular success and disastrous failure a hair’s breadth apart at every moment.

The IDF didn’t go into Nuseriat to kill Hamas terrorists or uninvolved civilians (if they even exist) and would have gladly taken the Israelis they had rescued from torture back home without firing a shot if they had been allowed to. But as it was, as on October 7, Hamas decided on war. Now they are dead and everybody in the world is crying for them.

Not me. We didn’t go in there to kill. We went to save lives. But a few hundred dead Hamas is the cherry on top. I don’t know why anyone is crying. Haven’t Gazan mothers told us time and time again how much they love death and martyrdom? How much they want it for their kids? So here, we gave you both. Say thank you. As for the Europeans crying for them, you are all idiots.

I guess I’m not surprised at the reactions from places like Turkey, or Egypt, or Jordan. But then, there are these: The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the European Union, Josep Borrell: “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.” And Norway’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Andreas Motzfeldt Kravik, who strongly condemned Israel for what he defined as “another massacre of civilians in Gaza.”

Today I read an article about a poor villager in Indonesia that went missing and who was later found, swallowed whole, in the belly of a python. I can’t help thinking that the python of Islam is well and truly on its way to digesting whole certain European countries; places where the doors were opened wide to bring in the murderers and rapists of their women and girls and whose entire culture, economy and educational system is being undermined by backward, violent, ignorant, racist, misogynists who will soon take over and turn the clock back to the Middle Ages. Rome let in the Barbarians, and that was the end of it. The same thing is coming the way of all those who side with Hamas. They are no longer part of the civilized world. They have been swallowed whole.

I rejoice that little Israel is showing the world how civilized people behave, and that Jewish lives aren’t cheap. Hamas was asking for the release of 50 murderers for every hostage. So we’ve shown them each hostage is worth the death of 65 Hamas terrorists. The math works for me. There will be no cease fire without the release of all the hostages and the banishment or death of Sinwar, Deif, and the rest of the Hamas barbarians. Don’t give us advice when you have done nothing to help us fight this war against the barbarians. Just sit back, watch, and shut up.

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