Over the weekend, news broke that brought tears to my eyes and sparked celebrations not just among Jewish and Israeli communities, but among anyone still clinging to any sense of morality.

In a daring daytime mission named “Seeds of Summer,” specialist Israeli commandos raided two apartment buildings in Nuseirat and rescued four of the hostages dragged into Gaza like trophies during Hamas’s terrorist attack of Oct. 7. Thanks to these military heroes (one of whom gave his life for the mission), 26-year-old Noa Argamani, 41-year-old Shlomi Ziv, 27-year-old Andrey Kozlov and 22-year-old Almog Meir Jan are now free.

But while celebrations erupted as images and video footage of the rescued innocents flooded social media, the predictable counter-response appeared like clockwork.

“Is killing more than 200 Palestinian civilians worth 4 Israeli hostages,” Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali asked.

“How many innocent Palestinians killed is acceptable to rescue Israeli hostages,” MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin posed.

“To celebrate an operation that kills hundreds of Palestinians to save 4 Israelis is to openly say Palestinian lives are worth less than Israeli ones,” Omar Baddar wrote.

And, of course, there were the headlines, including “More than 200 Palestinians killed in Israeli hostage raid in Gaza” from The Washington Post.

Setting aside several important points — including the fact that this number is another concoction of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry that has become a bizarre source of truth for the ignorant and the insidious alike, despite being caught lying about casualty rates time after time after time — let’s focus on one word: civilian.

Because it’s this word that has been abused by Palestinian terrorists and their useful Western idiots to disastrous effect.

What is a civilian? In simple terms, a civilian is someone who is not directly involved in violence or hostilities, with non-civilians usually identified by open membership to some military group. In the West, it’s usually pretty easy to tell civilians and non-civilians apart. Just look for a uniform!

But this filter doesn’t apply to modern urban warfare, and it certainly doesn’t apply to environments where civilians and so-called military groups work hand-in-hand to achieve their horrific objectives.

And Gaza under Hamas rule is one such environment.

Yes, there are certainly innocent Palestinian civilians who have been killed during Israel’s response to Oct. 7, despite having no connection with Hamas’s activities. This is the unfortunate reality of war. But it’s also absurd to accept Palestinian propaganda that everyone they define as a civilian is, therefore, a civilian.

And this isn’t related solely to majority civilian support for Hamas and its stated goal of mass genocide of Israeli Jews — support for Hamas went up among Gazans following Oct. 7 — or the undeniable fact that Hamas intentionally embeds its operations within civilian areas to use civilians as human shields in the hope that their inevitable deaths can be used as a propaganda tool.

No, I’m talking about active involvement in physical violence while hiding behind the false shield of civilian life.

Were the “regular” Gazans who stormed into Israel alongside Hamas on Oct. 7 “civilians”?

Were the “regular” Gazans firing upon the Israeli commandos with machine guns and RPGs as they left with the rescued hostages “civilians”?

What about the “regular” Gazans holding Israelis hostage, like the Al Jazeera “journalist” Abdallah Aljamal who — despite his trusty press vest — reportedly kept three of the rescued hostages captive in his family’s home?

The brutal fact is that Palestinian terrorists have discovered that a simple costume change is all it takes to use the West’s own naive squeamishness against them, and until we wake up to this fact, we’re simply willing victims of their all-too-effective propaganda war.

Time for us to remind ourselves what “civilian” means.

And if you’re holding hostages, you’re not a civilian.

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