Extract from ABC News
A mission that required the precision of brain surgery – that's how Israel's military described the complexity of Saturday's operation to rescue four Israeli hostages after 246 days in captivity.
The four hostages had been held in two apartment buildings, 200 metres apart, surrounded by Hamas gunman and thousands of Palestinian civilians in a busy central Gaza neighbourhood.
Noa Argamani was in one building, and the three men Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv in the other.
They were all inside locked rooms being guarded by an armed militant.
Just outside the door, Israel says, were the families of the militants, including wives and children, living together with their captive.
Daylight would give the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers and members of the Israeli police the element of surprise — a raid like this would typically take place at night.
It also increased the danger to the special forces getting in and out, and the risk to thousands of Palestinian civilians who packed the busy area.
The military says it had considered trying to rescue the hostages in just one building, knowing the complexities of trying to storm two at the same time, but they felt it would have increased the risk of those held in the second building being killed.
They had to storm both buildings at exactly the same time. The teams had to work completely in sync with each other.
Senior IDF leaders have called it a "surgical operation" involving hundreds of personnel.
For weeks they had practised different scenarios that could play out, building full-scale models of the buildings to drill every step of the plan.
And then, under the cover of air strikes and on-the-ground gunfire, the rescue began.
The military says the extraction of Noa was relatively straight forward given the circumstances, but says major gun battles erupted at the home where Ziv, Meir Jan and Kozlov were being held.
Later their vehicle also came under fire and was held up before other forces reached the scene to complete the extraction and airlift them to a hospital in Israel.
"We called the hostages diamonds," IDF Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said, as he described the moment he knew they were safe.
"They said, we have the diamond in our hands," he said.
"It's a very emotional, happy day for the state of Israel."
Left behind in Gaza were scenes of chaos, destruction and death.
Gazan health authorities say more than 270 Palestinian civilians were killed in the area during the Israeli operation, including women and children.
Israel says it knows of less than 100 Palestinian causalities, including Hamas militants, who it claims fired RPGs at Israeli forces from street corners.
The rescue effort has been described by the military as the most complex and daring hostage mission to date in the Israel-Gaza war. Israeli leadership considers it as a success.
It took weeks of military planning and intelligence gathering, reportedly with the help of the United States, to rescue four people.
But about 120 remain – and even the army admits it cannot perform similar operations to rescue them all.
The operation echoed Entebbe
The self-described daring operation echoed the legendary 1976 Entebbe rescue mission — an event that gave Israel a reputation that it gets hostages back, no matter what.
Rear Admiral Hagari said the preparation for the Gaza hostage rescue mission was on a "scale like Entebbe".
During the 1976 incident, Palestinian and German extremists highjacked a plane with 250 hostages and held them captive at Uganda's Entebbe International Airport.
While some were let go, 103 Israeli and Jewish passengers and crew were kept hostage, prompting Israel to launch an extraordinary rescue mission to get them back.
Elite units of Israeli commandos stormed the airport grounds and in less than a hour, had rescued the captives, blowing up 11 fighter jets to make their escape.
Three hostages were killed along with one senior Israeli officer — Yoni Netanyahu, the brother of now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Entebbe rescue has since become so famous, it's been made into books and movies that to this day serve as an beacon of hope — and expectation — that sheer military force can rescue the hostages inside Gaza.
But the conditions in Gaza are vastly different, and the Entebbe threshold cannot be replicated across the Palestinian enclave.
Military says this cannot be the strategy
During a briefing with journalists just hours after the hostage rescue, Rear Admiral Hagari detailed the complexities of the operation, and how the conditions had to be near perfect to secure the release of the four captives.
The air strikes and gunfire used as cover for the mission resulted in a death-toll inside Gaza more than 65 times the number of Israeli lives saved in the mission, according to numbers reported by the Gazan Health Ministry.
Still, 116 hostages remain, both dead and alive, inside Gaza.
And with that assessment came a significant admission from Rear Admiral Hagari.
"We know we cannot do operations to rescue all of them," he said, voicing what many in Israel have been thinking, and saying on the streets, for months.
In recent days, the military leader has been more vocal about the limitations of his forces inside of Gaza, openly telling the public that sheer military power alone will not bring the hostages home.
He has reiterated that the best hope of securing their release is with a diplomatic deal.
"We saw it in the past, what brought the biggest number of hostages was a deal," Rear Admiral Hagari said.
"What will bring most of the hostages back home [now] is a deal."
Although Rear Admiral Hagari was keen to stress the army would keep looking for opportunities to rescue more hostages, the statements sought to moderate public expectations that a purely military strategy would bring all the hostages home.
And the numbers back this up.
In the eight months of war that have passed since October 7, only seven hostages have been rescued in three separate operations.
The military is also investigating whether its own actions have killed several of those who remain there.
Rear Admiral Hagari's statements have increased the pressure on Israel's government to keep negotiating with Hamas to secure a ceasefire and hostage-release deal.
The problem for Netanyahu now
Within hours of news of the hostage rescue being made public, tens of thousands of Israelis were back on the streets of Tel Aviv, protesting and demanding the government make a deal with Hamas.
"This evening, the families of the hostages, supported by tens of thousands of people, united to demand the return of all the hostages through the purposed deal," hostage families said.
"A deal that can bring them all back — the living for rehabilitation and the murdered for burial."
Aviram Meir, the uncle of freed hostage Almog Meir Jan, also backed calls for a deal as the way forward.
"We want all the other hostages to come back with the deal. We need the deal to bring everybody back," he said.
But an elusive deal is still stuck in negotiations.
Attempts by the United States and regional countries to forge a deal that would release all remaining hostages in return for a ceasefire have repeatedly failed as Israel presses its assault in Gaza.
Among the crowds on the streets of Tel Aviv, are some who believe Prime Minister Netanyahu's reluctance to make a deal at any cost is an attempt to appease his right-wing coalition partners.
Those partners have threatened to quit and bring down the government should a deal be made.
Washington's top diplomat Antony Blinken maintains "the only thing standing in the way of achieving this ceasefire is Hamas".
But both Israel and Hamas seem to be stuck at the same obstacle that has seen previous attempts at a deal scuttled.
Hamas demands the war ends and Israeli troops to be completely withdrawn from Gaza. Israel says it will not agree to those terms and maintains the goal is to destroy Hamas.
Saving four hostages may have delivered Netanyahu a brief moment of good news, but even his own military knows it will take a far more complex operation in diplomacy to bring the rest home.
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