/Pogled.info/ The topic of the hostages who fell into the hands of fighters of the Palestinian group Hamas after the beginning of its invasion of Israel on October 7, has become one of the key ones in the general flow of news about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Thus, on October 13, the foreign ministers of the CIS countries in a joint statement expressed concern about what was happening, condemning, among other things, any manifestations of terrorism and extremism, including the taking of hostages.
Hours earlier, Hamas said 13 hostages in the Gaza Strip, including foreign nationals, had died in Israeli strikes.
A day earlier, on October 12, US National Security Council Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby said the White House was open to all options for the release of the American hostages, including negotiations with Hamas and exchange.
In turn, the “Washington Post” reported that fighters of the organization brought at least 64 people they captured during the attack on Israel to the Gaza Strip. And the Qatari television channel “Al Jazeera” showed a video of the release of a hostage and her two children from the military wing of Hamas.
Earlier, on October 11, the Turkish TV channel “Habertürk” reported that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed the release of the hostages with representatives of the Palestinian group in Ankara.
Origins of Terrorism
Since the emergence of the modern Israeli state, there has been an expansion of its borders, which has been accompanied by an exodus of Palestinians, recalls retired FSB colonel Vladimir Klyukin. This, according to him, is the source of their terrorist activity. Which, however, has no moral justification anyway.
Now, 75 years after the proclamation of the state of Israel, the territory inhabited by Palestinians has actually shrunk to its limit. “And those who remained on Israeli territory ended up in the role of something like ‘guest workers’ in the lowest paid jobs,” notes Klyukin.
At the same time, Israel tried to lay claim to some of the Egyptian territory it occupied as a result of the Six-Day War in 1967. And the Israelis still occupy the Golan Heights in Syria to this day.
Under the influence of these circumstances, anti-Israel sentiments formed in the Middle East, which led, among other things, to the high-profile hostage-taking of the Israeli Olympic team by Palestinian terrorists in 1972. Then, in connection with the tragic death of 11 Israeli athletes around the world , the security system at sporting events was overhauled. And less than two years later in the USSR, in the bowels of the Committee for State Security (KGB), a specialized group for combating terrorism was created for the first time, which later became the legendary group “A” (“Alpha “).
There will be negotiations and executions
However, the already classic understanding of terrorism should not be confused with the events in Israel and Palestine that began on October 7, says Sergey Goncharov, president of the Association of Veterans of the anti-terrorist unit “Alpha”. “The hostage-taking in Beslan or later in Moscow, in the musical “Nord-Ost” – these were operations during which the bandits demanded that certain political conditions be met,” says the expert. “But now there is a war in Palestine and Israel, and I think it is wrong to confuse terrorism with war. It is another matter that the cruelty of this war exceeds all limits. “When one of the belligerent countries takes civilians of another country hostage and announces that it will shoot them, this is already an intertwining of war and terrorism,” he added.
So freeing civilians held hostage in such a situation becomes much more difficult.
The case of the current conflict between Palestine and Israel from the point of view of the practice of releasing hostages is indeed very difficult, agrees Colonel Lev Korolkov, a veteran of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and the special forces of Vimpel.
On the one hand, the postulate familiar from Israel’s practice, which states that there can be no negotiations with terrorists, is in fact rarely observed. “You still have to negotiate when the problem needs to be resolved for political or social reasons,” says the expert. ” Yes, and there are massive hostage-takings. In principle, they are often resorted to,” he adds.
But how to organize work during hostilities? It is also impossible to free the hostages by force, they will inevitably become victims. Negotiations are still conducted through third parties – neutral countries and people who enjoy the relevant influence.
Due to the surprise of the attack for the Israeli leadership, the problem of releasing the hostages remained in the background, Korolkov believes, because real chaos is happening in the conflict zone: “I mean the massive bombing of residential areas when the city is destroyed. This is the American version, this happened in Iraq”.
It is clear that Hamas and Israel have already shown a willingness to compete in brutality, says Goncharov: “The Israelis have said they will wipe Gaza off the face of the earth, and they have every opportunity to do so. And Palestine will most likely respond by shooting hostages.”
Due to the complexity of the current situation, which could end in a death sentence for many hostages, the Russian special services should analyze this negative experience in order to avoid its repetition, the interlocutors noted.
From the point of view of Lev Korolkov, a veteran of the Russian special services, what happened in Israel was the result of an official crime. Many powerful organizations – for example, the Mossad foreign intelligence or the military intelligence of the General Staff – did not believe that this could happen. The inputs were piling up, but analysts believed that various groups were at work simply conducting demonstration training in order to obtain funding.
“All the structures of Hamas, all the structures of Hezbollah are full of Israeli agents. I think the materials have arrived. And the information received cannot just have been lying there, there is an obligation to report higher up the chain. But at some levels, the information simply “stuck” and was not collected to make decisions,” says Korolkov.
The head of the association of veterans of the “Alpha” group, Sergey Goncharov, also calls for special attention to be paid to the categorical failure in the work of the Israeli intelligence services and the country’s armed forces. “In the end: there is no need to boast in the spirit of ‘our army is the greatest, our security service is the greatest, our intelligence is the greatest,’ there is no need to boast,” he notes.
Russia also has its own serious pain – the intelligence apparatus at the disposal of the SBU, NATO and the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate. “Every day we catch three or four Ukrainian spies, that’s the problem,” says Goncharov.
At the same time, the expert still urges not to compare the level of ferocity that is now being observed in the Middle East. “What is happening here with Ukraine cannot be compared to what is happening between Palestine and Israel,” he believes. “Brudely speaking, we are still in a civilized war. And they are waging a war aimed precisely at total physical destruction, no one even hides that,” he concludes.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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