In the confused hours immediately after the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion and amid that day’s ongoing massacre in southern Israel, several military and political leaders sought to exclude the issue of returning hostages from the official goals of the war, according to minutes from the first cabinet discussions.

Channel 12 on Tuesday published quotes from the closed-door meetings as part of a report on the second anniversary of the assault.

The first cabinet meeting of the war took place at 1 p.m., six and a half hours after Hamas began its attack, in which terrorists murdered some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages.

Then-IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi told those present that they must not “attach the hostages and missing to the (war’s) objectives. That needs to be our lesson from the Second Lebanon War,” he said, according to the Channel 12 report.

Halevi was referring to Israel’s second war with Hezbollah in 2006, which broke out after the Lebanese terrorist organization abducted soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser. One of the objectives of that war was to retrieve the hostages, but Israel failed to do so, and their bodies were returned two years later as part of a deal in which Israel released 10 Palestinian and Lebanese terrorists and returned the bodies of 199 Hezbollah terrorists.

The quotes also revealed the fractured and confused picture that the military and politicians had as the IDF struggled to clear the thousands of terrorists from the overrun border communities and bases.

Shas leader Arye Deri asked how many hostages there were at that point and was given different answers by the Shin Bet and the IDF.

According to then-Shin........

© The Times of Israel