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Arab media focus on Gazans killed in hostage rescue, counting Hamas fighters as civilians

Dr. Mordechai Kedar’s review also showed they fear a full IDF incursion into Rafah.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

While the rescue Sunday night of two Israeli hostages from an apartment building in Rafah in southern Gaza made headlines all over the world, the Arab press mostly ignored that aspect of the pinpoint raid, focusing instead on Hamas’ casualty count as if those the IDF killed in the operation were non-combatants instead of armed fighters.

Speaking to Channel 14 News Monday, Arab culture expert Dr. Mordechai Kedar said that very little mention was made of the IDF success in liberating Fernando Marman and Louis Har from over four months in Hamas captivity.

Instead, he said, “Jihadist” media sites and channels such as Qatar-funded Al Jazeera talked of “63 dead” in the IDF operation as if “all of them were civilians. The Hamas men were civilians too, because they don’t wear uniforms.”

“This is the crazy thing in the Arab rhetoric that is so anti-Israel, [saying,] ‘You are fighting against civilians.’ The fact that these ‘civilians’ have RPGs, machine guns, Kalachnikovs, is not important,” he noted, adding that in contrast, all Israelis are called ‘soldiers.’

During the IDF operation, the many Hamas forces who were in and around the building where the hostages were found fiercely engaged the Israeli troops. The elite IDF teams on the ground shot back, with support from heavy fire both from the air and the sea so the rescuers could bring the two hostages to the safety of a nearby helicopter, to be taken back to Israel.

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Rafah is the only city left in the Gaza Strip where there are significant numbers of Hamas combatants. The IDF estimates that there are four intact battalions there of the original 24 that the terrorist organization fielded. (Eighteen battalions have been “shattered,” according to a press briefing given Monday by government spokesman Eylon Levy, while two others are “on their last legs in Khan Younis.”)

Rafah is also very close to the Egyptian border, and holds over a million Gazans whom the IDF told to go south so they would not be caught in the war, which began at the northern end of the Strip. Egypt fears a mass influx of Gazans overrunning their heavily guarded walls if Israel attacks this last stronghold as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to do.   Al Arabiya reported Monday that Cairo has threatened to downgrade its relationship with Israel to merely “security ties” if the IDF goes full force into Rafah.

According to Kedar, the Arab media supporters of Hamas greatly fear such an incursion.

“Al Jazeera spent long minutes right before this interview,” he said, “presenting bits and pieces from Israeli media – Channels 11, 12, 13 – translate[d] into Arabic, how analysts and news presenters and everyone who appears there says how Israel shouldn’t enter Rafah. The entire purpose is to show how the Israelis are afraid, and don’t want, and are being forbidden by all sorts of instructions coming from Washington and other places from going into Rafah.”

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The U.S., Great Britain and other Israeli allies are putting heavy pressure on Israel not to carry out a major military operation in the town due to the resulting danger to its large numbers of civilians.  While Jerusalem has said it will not act until a way has been found to vacate them safely, Levy made an “urgent appeal to the international community” at his briefing to help protect the civilians “from the Hamas terrorists who are trying to use them as human shields.”

“Cooperate with Israel!” he requested. “Don’t say it can’t be done, work with us to find a way.”

To Kedar, the Al Jazeera report shows “how afraid they are of an operation in Rafah … and in my estimation, just because they’re afraid, just because they don’t want it, Israel must go forward and take action in order to destroy Hamas and free the hostages.”

In the longtime Arab expert’s personal opinion, “Israel must, must, must destroy Hamas’ military capability,” as well as its civilian power.   If not, “a Hamas state will rearm in the future and do the same thing,” referring to its October 7, 2023 surprise invasion of Israel, when the terrorists slaughtered 1,200 people, including the elderly and infants, and abducted 253 back to the Gaza Strip.