“We cannot forget the hostages who are still in Hamas captivity,” Noa Aramani said in her first words after her rescue less than a month ago by the Israeli army. An operation in which Netanyahu’s men rescued four hostages from Hamas and killed almost 300 Palestinians.

He Successful rescue of four Israeli hostages On June 8 in the Nuseirat refugee camp, in the center of the Gaza Strip, it took place in an “unexplored area by Israeli forces,” which required months of gathering intelligence information, he explained in an interview. with EFE retired Major General David Tzur, specialized in this type of operations.

“The main challenge in such an operation is to keep the intelligence up to date and alive. That was a huge effort because the army had never touched the area of ​​that refugee camp before,” said Tzur, who was commander of the Yamam Force, a special anti-terrorism unit of the Israeli police, the same one that was responsible for removing the captives Noa Argamani, Almog Meir-Jan, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv from Gaza.

Tzur, who participated in the rescue planning consultations, considered the operation “a great success,” although Palestinian sources, including the Islamist group Hamas, considered it a “massacre” in which some 270 Gazans died.

“It was not easy to find the hostages, because at first they moved them all the time. And once we knew that they had been on the same side for several months, we had to study the environment, the exact location of the houses, who was protecting them…”, he explains.

The operation had the complication that The hostages were in two different locations: Noa in one house and Almog, Andrey and Shlomi together in another about 200 meters away.

“It was very important to enter both homes simultaneously and without much noise to avoid that once the Hamas men detected that the forces were entering one house, they would kill the captives in the other.”

The plan, which Tzur knew in advance and helped devise, was risky: “It was chosen to do it in broad daylight, passing through a popular market on a Saturday morning, when there are normally many people, precisely to be able to reach the heart of Nuseirat camouflaged among the people.

He explains that these types of operations are usually carried out at night, with stealth – as occurred in the previous rescue of two Argentine-Israeli hostages in Rafah last February or the soldier rescued in October – but in this case it was almost impossible to infiltrate such a densely populated area. populated and go unnoticed, even in the dark.

fire response

Another challenge that this rescue operation presented was the certainty that there would be a strong fire responsesince the hostages were in civilian homes but heavily guarded by “armed Hamas terrorists.”

“Once the Yamam forces reached the hostages without being seen, the key was again to open fire simultaneously at both locations, because once the noise broke out, the response would be forceful and the main objective was to protect the hostages and extract them. “, says Tzur, surprised by the intense response of fire from Hamas that day.

Videos released by the army show how hostages Almog and Andrey held hands and sheltered behind their pillows when they saw Israeli forces entering, at which point dressed as Palestinian women.

“They thought they were going to kill them“, their families have revealed. “Everything took place in 20 minutes, from when the shooting began until they reached a safe area and were evacuated to Israel in helicopters.

“It was a success“says Tzur, who has extensive experience both in the field and in planning rescue operations for kidnapped people in the 1980s and 1990s.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, who gave the green light to the rescue on Thursday, June 6, although it was not carried out until two days later, when the intelligence was mature, praised it as the most successful operation of its kind since the legendary Entebbe Operation in 1976, when the Israeli army recaptured a hundred people kidnapped on a commercial plane in Uganda.

Israel has so far carried out three rescues of hostages alive in the Gaza Strip and Tzur says that the intelligence services are still gathering information in order to carry out similar operations, although he does not believe it is possible to return the 116 hostages still inside the enclave in this way. “It is very difficult to carry out operations like this and the risks are very high,” he stressed.

After participating in the security arrangements for the Atlanta 1996 or Athens 2004 Olympic Games, or the visit of John Paul II to Israel in 2000, Tzur was also appointed general commander of the Police in Tel Aviv in 2004, and later gave He jumped into politics in 2013 as a deputy for Hatnua, a liberal party led by Tzpi Livni.