BRING BACK OUR BOYS

Eyal Yifrah, Gil-Ad Shayer and Naftali Frenkel are three Israeli youths that were abducted by Islamic members of the Hamas Terrorist Organization. The Talmud says we should not pay over-sized ransoms so as not to encourage people to kidnap Jews. Even for those who reject the binding nature of halacha, at the very least the Talmud would seem to have posited solid advice for communal administration in the face of a rash of abductions. Only four days after the kidnapping of Eyal Yifrah, Gil-Ad Shayer and Naftali Frenkel, a Palestinian Authority television station broadcast an video produced by the Abu Mazen’s Fatah movement promising Israelis “Death is near.” According to Palestinian Media Watch, the official Fatah Facebook posted the video, which promotes violence and destruction in the name of Allah, on June 16. The song calls on Palestinian youth to “smash the fortress of the hopeless” and “shout: ‘Allah is Greater’” and states that “the remains of our bodies and our blood are a song of rage.” Elite soldiers in the IDF unit Yahalom (‘Diamond’ in Hebrew) uncovered hidden weapons during their search for three kidnapped teenagers. Eleven days have passed since Hamas terrorists kidnapped three Israeli teenagers in Judea and Samaria. Since then, the IDF has conducted an extensive operation to find the abducted teens and weaken Hamas’ terrorist infrastructure. The search has led soldiers into buildings and underground tunnels where they have discovered massive caches of illegal weapons. Many of these forces are members of the elite IDF unit Yahalom, a name that means ‘diamond’ in Hebrew. Throughout the year, they train to locate smuggling tunnels, defuse bombs and use live ammunition to fight underground. During widespread searches, the forces have found tunnels connected to Palestinian households through washing machines and warehouses. The tunnels and other hiding places contain everything from grenades to improvised explosive devices and substances used to make bombs. In my opinion, all these buildings where the illegal weapons and explosives are found, must be razed to the ground and their inhabitants arrested for their cooperation as accessories before and after the fact. And also, Israel must institute the death penalty for when people are convicted for these types of crimes.