If Hamas kidnaps a soldier, ‘then they win’

1 August 2014, 2:51 pm

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A platoon sergeant who recently completed a week of duty in Gaza discusses the army’s focus on preventing the abduction of a soldier. Sitting in a staging area a few kilometers east of the Gaza border, he says that dead soldiers are a natural outcome of war, “but an abducted soldier — no such thing.”

He describes all soldiers is his platoon as permanently linked to a buddy, in a system the army calls “steel pairs,” saying that “no one goes alone anywhere, not even a meter.”

He adds that officers have told the soldiers repeatedly that Hamas’s goal is to kidnap a soldier. “If we kill 100,000 and they kidnap one,” he says of Hamas’s apparent calculus, “then they win.”