Ruminations: "We Are All Suffering"

"I love you and miss you..." [final words of 24-year-old Eden Yerushalmi, one of six Israeli hostages murdered by Hamas in Gaza]. Neither she, nor the other five hostages that were murdered by Hamas operatives just prior to the IDF special forces entering a tunnel in Rafah with the intention of freeing them, will ever send another message to their grieving families. Their deaths resulted in a message to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that any further attempts to free Israelis from their ravaging captivity will result in further murders.

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Hamas released a video of slain hostage Eden Yerushalmi before her death, giving a message directed at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (credit: Screenshot/Hamas Telegram)

And the spillover from this carnage, this playing with peoples' fears and anguished hopes of deliverance from hell-on-earth is a raging population that disowns their government committed to the total annihilation of the psychotic evil force that threatens its survival and that of its Jewish population, demanding that the government cease its aspirational destruction of the death-cult that has slaughtered far too many Jews, in favour of suspending the response to Hamas's October 7 atrocities choosing instead to bring the remaining hostages back home to Israel.

A suspension that would meet the Hamas terms of disengagement to allow the terrorist group's pause to refresh; a time when it would rearm, regroup, retain a new influx of eager recruits anxious to prove their capacity to rape, maim, murder en masse in the name of courageous 'resistance' to a military tasked to protect its vulnerable population and secure the state against further deadly intrusions by terrorist mobs of psychopaths steeped in the mad heat of delivering death.

Eden Yerushalmi was at the Nova music festival not far from the Gaza border during the October 7 massacre. As chaos and slaughter broke out, she hid among the bodies of her dead friends, then sought to secure herself in nearby shrubbery. While there she communicated by cellphone with her sister: "Shani, they caught me"; the last words she spoke as she was captured and taken to Gaza, to a dread fate of vicious torture, starvation, fear and human deprivation, her freedom taken, her future uncertain.

After almost a year in captivity under inhumane conditions, she was freed from her nightmare. Found shot in the back of the head, in a tunnel under Rafah. Killed by Hamas operatives, with the anticipated near approach of Israeli forces. Shot at close range -- she and the five other young Israelis, all taken hostage on October 7, all from the Nova music festival site --several days before an autopsy revealed their conditions of death.

"We prayed. We wanted to believe this was not true."
"This is not how I imagined your end. I wanted you back alive."
"I apologize that we were not able to save you."
Eden Yerushalmi's mother, at her daughter's funeral

Hamas made videos for all of the six Israeli hostages they murdered. They tutored the hostages in delivering messages for their families. All the while planning to kill them, and through the videos to extract the ultimate pain and grief from bereaved families, and from the horrified Israeli population at large. In effect, telling the Israeli government that there is no hope for appealing to the humanity in people without any.