Throughout the Israelites’ journey from captivity to redemption, the water in the Nile was turned into blood - but only once. The plague of locusts was cast - but only once. The parting of the Red Sea occurred - but only once. By their very nature, miracles tend to be unique.
This past Sunday, the world witnessed another miracle - one that Israel’s leaders should never assume will be repeated. In the heart of the Gaza Strip, walking from one Red Cross vehicle to the other, three young Israeli women; Romi Gonen (24), Emily Damari (28), and Doron Steinbrecher (31), undertook and completed a perilous march for their freedom, surrounded by thousands of Gazans.
All three women have now been reunited with their families. Surviving such a journey was far from assured.
While Israelis rightly wrestle with the implications of the hostage-release deal, Israel’s leadership must urgently improve the machinations of the agreement to which they have signed on.
Four more women are mooted to be released this Saturday and Israel has but a few days to safeguard them from having to straddle similar, unfathomable danger.
The sole partition between Sunday’s returning hostages and the broader throngs of Palestinian-Arabs who had flocked to the site of their convoy, was a one-man-deep picket-line of gun-toting, black and green clad Hamas terrorists who, if the mob had decided to swarm the released hostages, would have been woefully outnumbered and ill-equipped to fend them off, assuming, that is, that they would have wished to do so.
Had the crowd ridden a whim to attack, those three hostages, having endured and survived captivity for so very long, may well have met their end in a slaughter by the masses.
What they were required to negotiate rendered a march through a literal minefield a mundane and unremarkable journey by comparison.
Israel’s leadership and defense establishment must do better.
Consider that it is from among those same Gazan crowds that Hamas is actively, regularly and swiftly recruiting. Within those same Gazan crowds are the people who cheered by their thousands as the bodies of dead Israelis, murdered on October 7th, were paraded through the streets of their cities. It is those same Gazan people who when last granted the right to vote for their leadership, voted for Hamas and proclaim their readiness to do so again. They voted for terror, knowing that at the core of the Hamas charter a genocidal mandate for the murder of all Jews was enshrined, thus endorsing murder by the ballot papers they cast.
After October 7th, Israel's leadership claims to have internalized the lesson that the Gazans must never again be permitted to approach Israel’s borders. If so, nor must the Gazans be so proximate to Israel’s hostages during future releases.
If Israel permits the recurrence of such a scene, it will be outsourcing the safety and security of the very captives it failed to protect on October 7th, to a terrorist organization sworn to the destruction of all Jews - criminally so!
This ceasefire agreement has thrust the Jewish people into a most macabre lottery. For the first forty-two stomach churning days of the deal, the identity, status and timing of those scheduled for release will be known only hours before the captives are returned.
Israel's leadership must not add to the collective national anguish by permitting such scenes of utter vulnerability and danger to be repeated; lest the Gazans decide to escalate from a scene of chaos, to a scene of murder, dismemberment and unimaginable horror.
Israel’s leadership should recall that the Gazans, heading to the north of the Strip as they now are, are confronting scenes of unimaginable - and wholly justified - destruction, brought about as a consequence of their decisions and the actions of the leadership they elected. In the coming days, assuming the deal holds, those same Gazans will be looking on as Hamas releases not civilian women, but Israel’s "men of age" (males aged 18-50 categorized by Hamas as technical "enemy combatants" by dint of age and gender), and female soldiers of the IDF.
The surrounding masses are liable to assess the dystopian scenes that surround them and draw a direct, short nexus of culpability and vengeance between those and the Israeli ‘combatants’ being released. If again allowed to come within touching distance of Israel’s captives, the lives of the abductees will be in utter jeopardy.
An enfeebled Hamas cannot be trusted to safeguard the hostages in the face of a baying crowd. Israel’s leaders must do more to secure them.
The sights of the hostages being flanked by terrorists and frog-marched into Gaza remain among the most chilling memories of this war. But even those would be outstripped were the world to witness the massacre of hostages on their journey toward freedom.
This generation of captives - so tragically forsaken on the seventh of October - must not be led to the very lip of their liberation, only to be engulfed by the sea of Human hatred with which so much of Gaza is awash.
The Israelites’ journey from captivity to redemption required the crossing of the seemingly uncrossable. Three Israeli women made a similar, miraculous crossing this past Sunday; but only the most foolish among us would wager that the miracle of this past Sunday will reoccur this weekend. Miracles do happen - but usually, only once.
The writer is a co-founder and CEO of The MirYam Institute and an IDF combat veteran.
Photo Credit: The Sun Newspaper