2 Hamas hostages released isn’t enough! We need to bring them all back. With Israel distracted and diplomacy unlikely to work. US needs a military option to rescue hostages.
As we celebrate the news that two U.S. hostages have been released by Hamas we cannot not lose sight of at least 11 more American citizens who remain hostages in the Gaza Strip. We still do not know where they are being held, how they are being treated, or if they are still alive.
While Joe President Biden told the families of the hostages that he would do everything in his power to bring them to safety, his national security council has no plans for an American-led rescue operation.
Instead, the United States says it will rely on Israel and diplomacy to free captive Americans. This is unacceptable. American intelligence and military power are capable of more; the president should unleash our decades-long experience dealing with terrorists in combat zones and bring our American captives home.
With terrorists deliberately embedded within Gaza’s urban civilian populations, and Hamas operating out of an unmapped elaborate tunnel system, locating the hostages is extremely challenging, to be sure.
Moreover, as a number of experts have pointed out, Hamas has likely distributed the hostages to multiple locations in Gaza making a single rescue effort impossible. As a result, the Biden administration is pursuing a release via diplomacy working with the International Committee of the Red Cross and through countries, like Egypt and Qatar, that deal directly with Hamas.
This is a recipe for failure.
Egypt is preoccupied with managing the Gazan humanitarian disaster and the concomitant security risk of a million-plus Gazans building up on its border. The plight of American hostages will be used, at best, as leverage to help Egypt manage its border crisis; more likely, it views the hostages as a distraction from its core interests.
