40 US soldiers who were in Israel on Oct. 7 narrowly escaped capture by Hamas

By Robert Spencer | October 10, 2024

Send them a few hundred million more, Joe! That will solve everything!

“EXCLUSIVE: US Soldiers Trapped in Israel on Oct 7 Narrowly Escaped Being Taken Captive by Hamas,” by Jennifer Van Laar, RedState, October 8, 2024:

Forty U.S. Army soldiers who were in Israel as the advance team for what they thought was a routine training exercise last October 7 suddenly found themselves in the middle of a war, unarmed, and being forced to beg reluctant Pentagon officials to send an Air Force plane to extract them.

Approximately a quarter of the soldiers were just miles from Gaza in off-base housing near the IDF’s Tze’elim base when the attack began. A group of local Israelis – IDF reservists, police officers, and ordinary citizens – got them to the base, which Hamas terrorists were quickly heading toward. With his men in mortal danger, the U.S. team leader requested permission to open the arms locker so they could retrieve their firearms but was denied at the US Central Command level and “denied and/or ignored” at a level above that, according to a military intelligence analyst with knowledge of the mission and exfiltration.

The rest of the soldiers had just arrived in Tel Aviv, where Hamas rockets were hitting near their hotels.

The military intelligence analyst told RedState:

“With everything going on, with all kinds of indirect fire, with rockets, for a good six, eight hours those [soldiers who were at Tze’elim] were in very mortal danger and the military and civilian leadership [at the Pentagon] was perfectly willing to not even worry about it.”

Approximately 40 hours after the attacks started, and only after lengthy “conversations at the 3-star HQ level,” a U.S. Air Force C-17 briefly touched down in Tel Aviv to exfiltrate the soldiers.

Hamas fired a barrage of 150 rockets at the airport shortly after the C-17 took off for Kuwait.

Without the quick assistance of Israeli civilians and reservists the unarmed Americans likely would have been taken hostage by Hamas and perhaps faced the same fate as those in Benghazi according to the analyst, who praised the Israelis’ actions…