BBC presenter asks if Israeli forces warned Palestinians before hostage rescue mission

A former IDF spokesman responded to a BBC presenter who asked whether Israeli forces would have warned Gazans before a secret raid to free a handful of hostages so they could seek safety.

“Would there have been a warning for those civilians? [Gazans] “So they get out on time?” BBC presenter Helena Humphrey asked former IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus during a recent interview.

“Of course, we cannot anticipate Israel to warn in advance of a raid to extract or save hostages because then what the terrorists would do is kill the hostages, and that would defeat the purpose,” he responded.

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The exchange followed Humphrey’s report on the huge numbers of Gazan civilians who have died amid the conflict in the region. He asked Conricus whether the IDF could have anticipated such a substantial number of casualties occurring in the months since the war began in October.

“I think the whole civil issue here really needs to be impartially analyzed and understood,” he said, pointing to his Hamas sources and statements to support his suggestion that Palestinian civilians played a role in the situation.

“…the Israeli hostages were held and imprisoned by Palestinian civilians in a Palestinian civilian area, and as regrettable as any loss of life is, I think we would have to really investigate who are the people who imprisoned these Israeli civilians for eight months? Why did they do it? What was the role of the surrounding community and the hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians who were surely aware of the fact that these Israeli hostages were being held among them, and why were they complicit in it? Hamas? he asked.

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The exchange caught the attention of some on X, formerly Twitter, when a user shared a video from the channel.

Journalist David Collier, fuming in the comments, asked whether Allied forces should have called Adolf Hitler to warn him before the D-Day invasion during World War II.

Israeli hostages Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv, who were captured at the Nova music festival on October 7, were released on Saturday in two separate locations in the heart of Nuseirat, central Gaza.

Chief Inspector Arnon Zmora, an officer with Israel’s Yamam special counterterrorism unit, died after being seriously injured during the operation.

Despite their rescue, 120 Israeli hostages remain held captive by Hamas. Forty-three of them have been declared dead and their bodies are still in the hands of the terrorist group.

Conricus called Saturday’s rescues “a ray of light in a sea of ​​darkness and despair,” and insisted there was still much work to be done.

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“For the first time in months, Israelis have a moment to rejoice and [there are] happy scenes of families reunited. “I’m very happy to see it,” she added.

Conricus also participated in “Fox & Friends Weekend” on Sunday, where he spoke in more detail about the covert methods Israeli forces used to bring the hostages home and the role Palestinian civilians played in keeping the hostages captive.

“This is not the first time that Hamas has imprisoned hostages in a Palestinian civilian environment… by the way, the people who were guarding and forcing the Israeli civilians to stay there were Palestinian civilians. Everything is a civil situation here,” he said.

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