Last night, before the IDF announced the death of reservist Efi Feldbaum, my son asked me: "What happened in Gaza?"
The protective mother in me, the one who still tries to let him encounter the news in small doses so he is shielded from the world's horrors, wondered how he even knew.
"I hear warplanes overhead, so I figured something happened." Smart boy, you have to admit. Soon he will also understand the unbearable ritual we so often fall into and are sucked into like into a black hole, the ceremony by which the State of Israel only responds when its best fall, and not to Hamas's daily attempts to harm our soldiers, attempts that end with improvisation bordering on miracle, with headlines stating there are no casualties.
It does not respond to other violations of deals by the terrorists from Gaza.
These lines are being written seven minutes before 10 a.m. on Wednesday. In seven minutes the ceasefire is supposed to come into effect. The shooting lasted only a few hours and its gains are unclear, but it is apparent the response is again measured, deliberate, restrained, or in less refined language: derdala. Even symbolically it is a disgrace: the ceasefire takes effect before the funeral, before we bury Efi Bargabi in the ground he fought for.
From 10 a.m., Hamas will again be free to kill soldiers, to taunt and toy with us as if looking for the bodies of our abducted, and to continue building its rule in peace. On our side we will continue to wait for the 13 fallen who were supposed to return within 72 hours, continue to ignore fire directed at our forces and continue to respond only if, heaven forbid, there are fatalities.
The state of Israel allowed Egypt to bring heavy engineering equipment in to help Hamas search for the bodies, but there is a very bad smell to this staged and filmed performance. Nothing demonstrates this more than the video showing Hamas operatives throwing a body and re-burying it, and then proudly calling the Red Cross teams as if they had found another kidnapped body. This week they once again duped us, when they handed over remains of an abductee who had already been buried.
Yes, there is an agreement, but for some reason the Israeli government is not insisting with full force that it be implemented, and it is not properly presenting those filmed performances to the world and to the US to prove once again which human monsters stand opposite us.
But we must not fall asleep and sink into a policy of attrition and delay.
The only real advantage of the ceasefire agreement achieved, aside from, of course, the release of living hostages and some of the dead, is that we are holding territory.
More than 50 percent of the Strip is still under our control, a gain that must not be taken lightly.
However, violations of the deal by Hamas, which is using the time to consolidate its rule, cannot be met with the ritual of a few hours of airstrikes.
Another bite of territory for every day they do not return hostages, or even an entry by our forces into locations we know hold the bodies to search for our brothers, could be a step in the right direction.
The main thing is not to idle by, and fall asleep.
