The Media Directive Is Clear: Israel Can Do Only Wrong

This weekend something quite surprising and wonderful happened, for a change: In a brilliantly daring and well-coordinated rescue, commandos from Israel’s counterterrorism unit, Yamam, raided two buildings in Gaza on Saturday morning and retrieved four hostages taken on October 7 — alive and well. In an eerie echo of the heroics displayed by the Israelis at Entebbe in 1976, they suffered only one casualty, that of Arnon Zmora, who died of wounds sustained while leading his extraction team on their successful mission.

Most media attention has focused on the return of young Noa Argamani, whose abduction — livestreamed by cheering GoPro-wearing jihadis — was one of the most traumatic videos from that day; the images of her reunited with her family were thus among the most moving from this weekend. But for those familiar with Hamas’s brutal hostage calculus, the rescue of the three men — Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv — unharmed is in many ways even more miraculous. (Kozlov popped the collar on his polo shirt as he stepped off the rescue transport, which is exactly what I’d be doing if I’d spent the last eight months expecting to be shot in the head execution-style yet walked away unscathed.)