More released

Aaron David Miller, a Middle East analyst and negotiator at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, comments on the release of two more hostages.

I hear people on the news saying that this is being done for "humanitarian" reasons. That is not true. These are the people who tied up children and burned them alive, who cut off living people's limbs, who raped women and shot babies in their cribs. If they really were humanitarian, they would release all the hostages now. In fact, they would never have kidnapped them.

Hamas is releasing some hostages, a few at a time, to save their own skins. They want to delay so that the families of the hostages will put pressure on the Israeli government to delay a ground war and stop air strikes. They want to delay while protests build in other countries, hoping political pressure from abroad will make the Israelis give up on a militray solution.

From The Atlantic today: A Record of Pure, Predatory Sadism

This afternoon, at a military base north of Tel Aviv, the Israel Defense Forces held a grisly matinee screening of 43 minutes of raw footage from Hamas’s October 7 attack. Members of the press were invited, but cameras were not allowed. Hamas had the opposite policy on cameras during the attack, which it documented gleefully with its fighters’ body cams and mobile phones. Some of the clips had been circulating already on social media in truncated or expurgated form, with the footage decorously stopped just before beheadings and moments of death. After having seen them both in raw and trimmed forms, I can endorse the decision to trim those clips. I certainly hope I never see any of the extra footage again.

It was, as IDF Major General Mickey Edelstein told the press afterward, “a very sad movie.” Men, women, and children are shot, blown up, hunted, tortured, burned, and generally murdered in any horrible manner you could predict, and some that you might not ...