For weeks, each return of kidnapped bodies has become a foundational event for Israel, such as the more than honorable funerals of two boys, Omer Nutra and Itay Chen, accompanied along the long road to the cemetery by citizens with flags and tears at their throats. Memories, government advantages and disadvantages, US intervention… everything follows the particular path of Israeli emotions, the Lilliputian dimension of the country, the closeness of citizens even to very different ideas, values, the fact that no family has remained unchanged in some way during these two years of war. However, the return of Hadar Goldin is different, even though there are still 4 bodies in the hands of Hamas, it is actually a milestone in the history of the war which is seeking a conclusion and must enter the second phase, namely the disarmament of Hamas and an independent Gaza, while Hamas adheres to its terrorist determination. The mechanisms are ready, Turkey is out, Egypt is on alert, the Ibrahim pact is being expanded, the US ordered a new CMCC (Civil-Military Coordination Center), all the humanitarian mechanisms. Trump can’t wait.
Goldin is a bright and smiling soldier of the Givati division, the son of an intellectual. In Gaza at the start of the 72-hour Tzuk Eitan (Protective Edge) ceasefire, in August 2014 Hamas opened fire on soldiers chasing terrorists into tunnels. There three soldiers would be killed and Hadar’s body dragged into the darkness of the tunnel. Hadar disappeared into thin air. Now, in one of the terrible games that Hamas plays with death, Hamas wants to exchange Hadar’s body for 250 terrorists trapped in the Rafah tunnel, but Israel insists on this: the exchange has taken place, 2000 Palestinian prisoners are enough.
Things were not simple and we are still trying to understand how it happened: Hadar’s parents put up an indefinite resistance, that’s the semantic change from the word “body” to “missing” in the restitution movement, their soldiers “missing in action” instead became a living symbol of Israel’s loyalty to its soldiers, dead or alive. Leah and Simcha, alone for many years, were the forerunners of a whole movement of kidnapping alive and being killed: any twenty-year-old Israeli boy could become Hadar, and the Goldin couple never supported a priceless truce, but supported the path of forcing the surrender of hostages by love or by force.
He always knew that Hadar’s return showed Israel’s strength, not its weakness. Their 4118 day war is now also Netanyahu’s strategy supported by Trump; of course Witkoff and Kushner arrived in Israel also to align Israeli desires with American desires. Perhaps Hamas received, as is rumored, a price in exchange for Hadar, but if this is combined with arms deliveries, Netanyahu will achieve everyone’s dream, the return of the hostages, while the neutralization phase of Hamas will soon begin (“voluntarily or by force” Trump said) combined with the expansion of the Ibrahim pact.
A difficult path, with a character that is still vague, Hamas will still do everything to delay the moment, but this is happening in the program of Israel, America, Saudi, Egypt… the alliance aims to achieve the same results. Hadar Goldin has returned to his homeland, Israel is in good spirits and back to work.
