How Israel saved a hostage rescue mission that nearly failed
Amid a full on fire fight, Israel’s rescue operation had a thin line between being a huge success and a huge failure; new video shows the moment three hostages were freed by Israeli commandos | WATCH
The two Israeli commando teams had just pulled off a historic rescue mission, freeing four hostages from homes where they were held captive in central Gaza. Now came the hardest part: getting out of Gaza alive.
A shootout that started Saturday in one of the homes expanded into a full-on gunbattle on the packed streets of Nuseirat between the commandos and responding Israeli forces and militants, the Israeli military said. With the teams’ cover blown, the Israeli Air Force began striking dozens of militant targets in a bid to divert Hamas’s attention and give the hostages a fighting chance to get out.
In the crossfire, a vehicle packed with special forces and hostages was hit and disabled, said David Tsur, the former commander of Yamam, the Israeli police team that carried out the extraction. An Israeli armoured vehicle then swooped in to rescue the rescuers, but it too was disabled by fire, so another force arrived to deliver the hostages to helicopters waiting to take them to Israel, reported Army Radio, an independent news organisation run by the Israeli military.
“There was a thin line between being a huge success and a huge failure,” said an Israeli military official.
The raging firefight almost prevented the hostages and the commando team from making it out alive. It also prompted a ferocious response from the Israeli military that helps explain the high casualty count among Palestinians, Israeli officials said. The officials also said they estimated Hamas fire killed Palestinians in the chaotic shootout. An Israeli commando was killed.
Palestinian health authorities said 274 Gazans were killed and almost 700 injured from air strikes, shelling and gunfire in one of Gaza’s most crowded places. The Israeli military said most of the dead were militants. In either case, it was one of the deadliest moments in a war that has claimed more than 37,000 lives, say Palestinian health authorities, who don’t say how many were combatants.
Tsur compared Saturday’s events with the street battle between American forces and Somali militants portrayed in the book and movie, “Black Hawk Down.” The air strikes and shelling were intended to “lay down fire so that people don’t come near the vehicles.”
“Only with a ring of fire can you extricate them,” said Tsur, who received an informal briefing on the mission.
Some Palestinians said the operation drove home again the perception that their lives mean nothing, including to Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist organisation that carried out the Oct. 7 attacks, killing about 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and taking about 250 hostages.
“More than 200 were killed, hundreds injured, for the sake of four Israelis. This is crazy, and I am really furious,” said Ahmed Wael, 26, who had sought shelter in Nuseirat during the war and described a rain of bombs falling along the streets near the city’s busy market.
“I am also angry because Hamas chose to hide these people among us,” he said. “Why?”
Israeli officials said the operation had been planned for weeks after Israel discovered in May that Noa Argamani, who was taken hostage at the Nova music festival, was in a low-rise apartment block near the Nuseirat market. About 200 yards away, Israeli officials said a Hamas militant, Abdullah Al-Jamal, kept three male hostages — Almog Meir Jan, Andrei Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv — in his home alongside his family.
Raiding only one building would alert captors at the other location, so the Israelis decided to raid both buildings simultaneously, said the military’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari. The Israeli security forces trained for the raid on models of the two buildings, Hagari said.
The environment was one of the most dangerous imaginable for Israeli forces. Nuseirat is one of the largest refugee camps built in Gaza after the 1948 war displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. It is among the few places in which the Israeli military hasn’t operated extensively during its ground invasion, and it still hosts intact Hamas fighting units.
The military decided to act when the captors least expected it — in broad daylight around 11.30am — in hopes of gaining an advantage, Hagari said.
Hamas said the Israeli forces wore civilian disguises. Hagari declined to comment when asked, but it is a tactic that Israeli special forces have previously used. The commandos reached the apartment entrances undetected, Tsur said, and “then broke in.”
One Yamam team stormed the first-floor apartment where Argamani was held and took the captors by surprise, the military said. On the third floor of the other building, a gunfight with the guards broke out. The Yamam squad leader, Arnon Zamora, was hit and later died of his wounds.
The hostages were ferried to waiting vehicles and were soon handed bulletproof vests. “We have the diamonds in our hands,” the commandos radioed to the command centre.
The outbreak of gunfire alerted Hamas to the presence of Israeli forces in its stronghold. Militants blasted Israeli troops with gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades. “It became a real, intensive combat zone,” said an Israeli military official.
The team carrying the three male hostages got pinned down under fire. An Israeli plan to extract them kicked into place, officials said. The air force had pre-planned a bank of militant targets, dozens of which the military said they hit as part of Israel’s efforts to provide cover.
An Israeli helicopter came rushing toward Sarah Tahrawi’s shelter in Nuseirat before noon. Suddenly there was shooting from all sides. Her children screamed, white smoke filled her house, and she could see people running for their lives.
“I was sure I would not survive,” she said. “The sound of bombing was all around us.”
Wael said his aunt was in an upstairs room baking bread and came yelling down the stairs, saying she saw a body flying through the air. His family lives near the Nuseirat market, where witnesses said there were many civilian casualties.
In eight months of war, Wael said, “we never witnessed anything like this before.”
The Israeli military had trained for a situation in which the hostage-extraction teams come under fire, Tsur said. Israeli paratroopers were sent to lead efforts to rescue the commandos and hostages. The heavy shelling, helicopters, air bombing and drone strikes were all part of a careful plan, Tsur said.
“Of course reality is more dramatic, more complicated,” Tsur said.
Filled with the three pinned-down hostages, commandos and paratroopers, Israeli armoured vehicles raced for the Mediterranean coastline, where the military controls a seaside road. Former hostage Argamani was already in flight. The military released a video of the freed men stepping out onto the sunbaked beach and walking toward helicopters waiting to take them to Israel.
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