"Were you there when they crucified my Lord...?" America Reacts:

I think the big "winner" yesterday was B. Netanyahu who remains in power another day... This too will come to an end, but sadly it seems the Israeli people have given him another reprieve, again. This too will change in days to come. Not enough "success" stories will come because there simply are not enough hostages still alive to make the numbers positive overall... Strategically, the way this war has been waged seems the hostages were valued as sacrificial collateral from the beginning, like a good number of unarmed Palestinian persons. The faces of the dead children on both sides makes most of the world particularly saddened, so much promise of new life lost so soon because grown adults cannot adjudicate and negotiate their greivances and disagreements and find a way to a livable peace... yet.

In time, all wars like this peter out after decades of killings because the people, exhausted of losing loved ones in the killings, force their leaders into peace. See Northern Ireland, or a lot of the other partitioned places in the world, say. Parity plays a role, but mostly it's sheer exhaustion of never-ending tit-for-tat killings like we are seeing play out in Israel and Palestine today.

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While the families of the evacuated hostages rejoice; the rest of hostages families/friends get more perturbed by the scale of violence. There're no winners in this war; the harsh truth!

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How do you define ‘non-combatant’? Does that include the family that was holding Noa hostage in their house?

If the husband and wife "holding" the hostages had no choice, and were tasked with this involuntarily by terrorists -- and managed to keep their charges in good shape physically: safe and well fed -- then no, I would not classify them as combatants. Were the House Slaves any less slaves than the ones who worked the fields in America's Civil War? To me, a lot of non-combatant, non Hamas Palestinian people are comparable to that. I understand the need to kill them to free the Israeli hostages, but I surely would not classify them as Hamas terrorists. And ALL children are innocents, on both sides and no matter where they are located. They simply have no choice in the matter, as do most of the unarmed Palestinian people, but cmon... cheering children's deaths and classifying them as combatants? Listen to yourselves?

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Strategically, one had to honestly ask if Israel was is ready to go-it-alone as an independent country. Not being able to defend their borders, and responding so slowly to an attack on their own by outside terrorists on Oct. 6 and then killing so many in a belated effort to pursue the terrorists taking prisoners... Killing two of their own shirtless "surrendering" hostages waving a white flag... the huge death toll of women and children as the IDF pursued a scorched-earth strategy by bombing with American-made munitions and fighter jets... instead of declaring an "all in" homefront policy with the Israeli civilians laboring overtime in war factories on materials to protect their lands, they sun themselves on Tel Aviv beaches and go on with a "business as usual" mentality...

I don't think the Israeli people are ready to overthrow the corruption of the Netanyahu government, and celebrating the safe return home of only four hostages -- while so many others are known to be dead likely because of months of Israeli bombings and the lack of aid, food and medical supplies going into Gaza while aid agencies are also being attacked... I don't have a great deal of faith that these are an independent people who will ever exist without US intelligence or taxpayer aid.

Maybe peace-loving Christian and Muslim people the world over could be pursuaded to step in and oversee these Biblical lands, providing equal opportunity and due process to all people -- Israeli and Palestinian -- who claim the lands as their own? Maybe that is the only way for the world to know peace now, to stop trying to help provide help as the United States has since 1948 and before, and to acknowledge that the British transfer of lands via the Balfour declaration in 1917 was a well-meaning but woeful plan, whose aims have not yet come to fruition and have created more imbalance and destruction in the region as colonizers in history are wont to do?

#PrayForPeacePeopleEverywhere

Surely America with its porous southern border today does not consider its own citizens safe in the decades to come if the Middle East problem continues to fester? Wiser minds must prevail. Human life depends on it.