“A 21-year-old Yazidi woman has been rescued from Gaza where she had been held captive by Hamas for years after being trafficked by ISIS.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Thursday that Fawzia Amin Sido was freed this week in an operation coordinated between Israel, the United States and other international actors.
Fawzia told CNN that she has been returned to Iraq after enduring years of captivity.
She said that she was initially kidnapped by ISIS as a child in August 2014 when the group captured the city of Sinjar in the Nineveh Governorate of northern Iraq, executing Yazidi men and boys and committing acts of sexual violence and rape against women and girls, among other crimes.
Over the next few years, Fawzia was trafficked to different locations across several countries.
“We ended up in Al-Hol camp (in Syria) before we were smuggled to Idlib in 2019, and from there, we went to Turkey. In 2020, they arranged a passport for me in Turkey so I could fly from Istanbul to Hurghada, Egypt, and then to Gaza,” she said.
She told CNN that she stayed in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip for a year, where life was “unbearable.”
“Hamas constantly harassed me due to my Yazidi background and contact with my family, even going so far as to format my phone [erase its contents] during their investigations. After a year, they moved me to a guest house.”
When the Israel-Hamas war broke out in 2023, she was again moved around frequently – until October 1, when she said an NGO rescued her.
The IDF said that her captor was killed, “presumably during IDF strikes” in Gaza, allowing her to flee to a hideout, from where she was rescued and taken to the Kerem Shalom border crossing.”
“A diplomatic solution, perhaps one in which Hezbollah agrees to remove its positions close to Lebanon’s southern border, is certainly possible. That would allow Israelis to move back to their homes in the north. Whatever the outcome, however, Israel will likely not be able to eliminate Hezbollah, just as it has failed at eliminating Hamas. And continued aggression could lead to more extreme outcomes in the future.”
“U.S. officials have in the past said that Israel and Hamas were in disagreement over just a handful of implementation issues, including the timing of a swap of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody and Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
Another flashpoint in the negotiations includes the status of the Philadelphi corridor, a buffer zone between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Israel has pushed to control the area in recent weeks as a security measure to deter future attacks into its territory from Hamas. The senior administration official said that the issue has been discussed with Egypt as part of recent talks and said it is “moving in the right way.”
Some Middle East analysts argued that Hamas’ reaction may not be a large setback in the grand scheme of peace talks. Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. negotiator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said in an interview that “nobody expected” a deal or anything remotely close to it coming out of this week’s cease-fire talks in Doha.
A bit more time, he added, might even be helpful, as neither side in his view is ready to close on a permanent cease-fire.
“At best, you’re talking about phase one, six weeks, because no one is prepared to go beyond that,” said Miller, who is now a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The region is still bracing for greater conflict, including a potential attack from Iran. And Israel ordered civilians today to evacuate areas in Gaza that had previously been considered to be “civilian safe zones,” alleging that Hamas militants were firing rockets from the civilian areas to fire rockets.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president at the Quincy Institute think tank in Washington, said pressure is likely to build inside Iran to take action “if it takes too long and it becomes increasingly clear that this is an exercise to hold off attacks and retaliation, rather than actually securing a cease-fire.””
“Israel mistakenly believed, the Times of Israel reported, that Hamas would never be able to get past its high-tech border security — an “Iron Wall” composed of concrete, tunnels, and razor wire, complete with remote-controlled machine guns, that was installed two years before the attack.
That oversight prevented top Israeli intelligence leaders from doing anything about the internal report detailing Hamas’ plans, Kan News reported.”