Worst Failure in Israeli History: Netanyahu Abandoned the Very Heart of Israel

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty ImagesOver the last few days, many videos have become symbolic of the disaster that has befallen Israel. Two of them draw special attention. In the first, the viewer is blinded by a striking orange: Shiri Bibas and her two ginger sons, wrapped in a blanket, are videoed while being kidnapped into Gaza. The second shows an elderly woman, also wrapped in a blanket, wary, surrounded by a group of euphoric young Palestinians driving a golf cart of the sort usually utilized by old kibbutzniks.“That’s my grandmother! Kidnapped into the Gaza Strip with no one there to stop it,” wrote her granddaughter, Adva Adar, the day after. “Her name is Yaffa Adar, she’s 85 years old! My grandmother, who built this kibbutz with her own two hands, who believed in Zionism, who loved this country that had forsaken her to be snatched away. Probably stowed away somewhere, suffering from terrible pain, with no medication, no food and no water, dying of fear, alone.”Bibas and Adar are members of Kibbutz Nir Oz, one of the settlements located on the border of the Gaza Strip in an area called “the Gaza Envelope.” The true magnitude of the disaster in these small, old settlements is not yet widely known. What is clear, even now, is the total devastation. Hundreds of kibbutz members, along with their children, were murdered in their homes, among the paths and on the lawns; many were killed while trying to prevent the terrorists from going door-to-door in their murder spree. When they couldn’t be stopped, the terrorists butchered and dismembered adults, children and babies, and burned down houses with the residents still inside. Dozens of people from these settlements were taken away, their fate still unknown.Read more at The Daily Beast.