Hamas Special Forces

[Ling Kliment]

Israelispecial forces were disguised as Palestinian refugees looking for a place to live when they entered the buildings where hostages were being held during the Israeli rescue operation this weekend, two Israeli security sources told ABC News.

The Shin Bet, Israel's internal security forces, Israel Defense Forces and Israeli SWAT team members, called YAMAM, participated in the rescue operation, now called \"Operation Arnon\" by the Israeli military. The name of the operation was given to honor the one security officer who was killed during the operation.

Physically the hostages were \"in less severe condition\" than the Israeli hospital and doctors treating the hostages \"prepared for,\" Professor Itai Pessach, head of the medical team who has been taking care of the hostages at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv, told ABC News' Tom Soufi Burridge on Monday.

The hostages were rescued from two separate locations in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, the IDF said. The three male hostages were rescued from one location, and Argamani was rescued from a separate location. That camp has become home to thousands of refugees who've fled fighting throughout Gaza.

Luis Har, shown here in Tel Aviv, Israel, on March 27, was taken hostage during the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and freed by an Israeli special forces operation in February. In captivity, he says, "Every time we fell into depression, we overcame it with stories. We started to say, where are we going to travel to today in our minds?" Tamir Kalifa for NPR hide caption

More than 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 hostages were taken captive in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, according to the Israeli government. About half the hostages were released in a November cease-fire deal. More than 130 remain. Many of them are still presumed to be alive.

Originally from Argentina, he lived in a kibbutz near the Gaza border. He was with his partner and her brother, sister and niece on Oct. 7. As the rocket fire intensified, they turned on the TV and watched coverage of Hamas attackers entering towns and kibbutz communities nearby.

"We all gathered in the safe room and we said, a few minutes and we'll get out," he says. "We heard pounding at the door, breaking glass windows. Suddenly, we heard Arabic. They broke into the house ... We were in total shock."

A view of the house from where Israeli hostages Luis Har and Fernando Simon Marman were kidnapped during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, in the Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak, Israel. Marman and Har were freed in a special forces operation in Rafah, Gaza, on Feb. 12, the same day this photo was taken. Dylan Martinez/REUTERS hide caption

Armed men forced all five of them onto the back of a pickup truck, making them sit on a pile of weapons. They were driven away and led on foot through a tunnel for hours. Then they climbed up a ladder to daylight in Gaza.

Har says they were moved from one home to another, and eventually brought to an apartment, where they were all kept in one room. Four armed men guarded them. His partner's 17-year-old niece had brought along Bella, her Shih Tzu.

"One of the guards fixated on her and would tell the girl all the time he wanted to marry her," he recalls. "And we told her to turn around, to pretend she was sleeping. She was very tense and stressed and cried several times, quietly, so they wouldn't hear. We tried to calm her. We didn't say it out loud, but each one of us, within ourselves, was worried."

The five captives didn't have a radio or TV. Their captors would tell them bits and pieces about the war, like when the Israeli army mistakenly killed three other hostages. It was true, but they didn't know whether to believe what they were told.

Every evening, it would grow dark before the guards turned on the light, and the captives had a ritual: Har's partner's niece would ask him to tell a story. He's a folk dancer, so he'd talk about dance. He acts in musical theater. He drew on his experiences and did his best to amuse his loved ones.

"Once, we were in a show. And one of the girls lifted her leg, and her shoe flew off her foot. And it did this in the air, boom, and fell on the audience. We burst out laughing," he says. "Stories like that, usually funny things to pass the time."

After 53 days, Har's partner and her sister and niece were freed, along with Bella the dog, as part of a November cease-fire and hostage deal. Har was overjoyed that his family back in Israel would learn he was alive. He and his partner's brother, Fernando Simon Marman, were told by their captors that they'd also be freed in a few days. Then the cease-fire broke down.

"Every time we fell into depression, we overcame it with stories. We started to say, where are we going to travel to today in our minds? So today we are in Argentina. And we're doing this, and we're doing that."

On Feb. 12, 129 days into their captivity, Har and Marman were woken up in the middle of the night by a huge explosion. Har thought the Israeli military, known as the Israel Defense Forces, was bombing the building they were in.

During the rescue raid, the Israeli military carried out large-scale airstrikes in Rafah as a diversion to provide cover to the special forces. More than 70 Palestinian men, women and children were killed in those strikes, and more than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war began, according to Gaza health officials.

"I don't know," Har says, when asked about Palestinians killed in the rescue raid. "It's not my business. The military can answer you. I see that most of the people there are Hamas. They don't intend to pet us and to love us, and I have no mercy toward them at the moment."

"An exchange," Har says. "Our people for their murderers. Because even if they're murderers, the main thing is to return all the hostages to their homes. They need to be here and be given treatment here."

The Houthis are not listed as an official target of the U.S. special forces mission in Yemen, but the Pentagon has used its authorities under the war on the Islamic State to strike at Iranian-backed groups elsewhere. Last week, the U.S. bombed two facilities linked to Iranian-backed militias in Syria in retaliation for attacks on U.S. installations in the region by militant groups supported by Iran.

A senior military officer that served in SFY, granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, told The Intercept that, during the beginning of the Trump administration, he oversaw plans to train a 300-person Yemeni tribal fighting force in order to conduct long-term unconventional warfare and counterterror operations.

On October 7, Hamas launched a multipronged assault on southern Israel, killing hundreds of people and taking as many as 150 hostages. Israel responded with airstrikes that have also killed hundreds, a full blockade of the Gaza strip, and a declaration of war. So far, more than 1,600 people have been killed and thousands more wounded in the fighting. According to Israeli and Palestinian authorities, more than 900 Israelis and foreign nationals have been killed in Israel, and more than 700 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank.

The more than 3,200 rockets the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed Hamas launched on October 7 and 8 surpassed the total number of rockets fired in any year since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip, except 2014 and 2021. The number of rockets launched in the initial barrages on the 7 is still an order of magnitude greater than the number launched during the opening stages of the 2014 and 2021 conflicts.

The size of the infiltration is especially unprecedented. Hundreds of militants crossed into Israel on October 7 along multiple axes, entering roughly 20 towns, effectively taking control of several communities, and attacking at least one large gathering of civilians. It took IDF forces more than two days of fighting to regain control of the settlements closest to Gaza.

Hamas has also taken hostages before, but never anywhere approaching this number, which remains unknown but is likely around 150. Israel is extremely sensitive to hostage-taking, as demonstrated by its decision to trade more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for IDF soldier Gilad Shalit in 2014 and the fact that negotiations over two Israeli civilians and the bodies of two IDF soldiers held by Hamas have remained unresolved for almost a decade. The hostages taken also include an unknown number of foreign nationals, further complicating the situation.

Alexander Palmer is a research associate with the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Daniel Byman is a senior fellow with the Transnational Threats Project at CSIS and a professor at Georgetown University.

Critical Questions is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).

In response, according to current and former U.S. government officials, JSOC conducted one of the biggest deployments in its history. But since those forces arrived in the Eastern Mediterranean, the command has seen its chances of launching a hostage rescue mission wax and wane, based on both the quality of the intelligence available and the shifting priorities of the Israeli and U.S. governments. In the meantime, no U.S. military personnel are known to have entered Gaza.

When Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer said Oct. 12 on MSNBC\u2019s \u201CMorning Joe\u201D that the Biden administration was \u201Cnot contemplating\u201D putting troops on the ground in Gaza to rescue the dozen or so American hostages captured during Hamas\u2019 Oct. 7 raid into southern Israel, Joint Special Operations Command was already planning a rescue operation.

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