The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, an umbrella volunteer group formed by relatives, friends, and experts soon after the October 7th attack in Israel, maintains a ticking clock on its Web site, to count the days, hours, and seconds since Hamas and allied militants seized what the Israeli military believes to be more than two hundred and thirty Israeli and international hostages, who are presumably being held in Gaza. The more the clock ticks, the more urgent are the pleas from the hostages’ families and their allies that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet prioritize the hostages’ safe return. Over the weekend, protesters—including many family members—camped outside the defense ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv. On Saturday, Netanyahu met with family members, and on Sunday, the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, held his first official consultation with hostage relatives since the crisis began more than three weeks ago. “We are not waiting any longer,” Malki Shem-Tov, a protester whose son Omer was seized on October 7th, said, according to the Associated Press. “We want you, the Cabinet, the government, to imagine that these are your children.”
That pleading captured the pain and the moral complexity that often permeates hostage crises. Israel, tragically, has had experience with many such cases in Gaza and Lebanon, as well as with international hostage crises arising out of hijackings and other terrorist attacks, such as the seizure and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, in Munich. At times, Israel has negotiated lopsided prisoner exchanges to free its captives. In 2006, Hamas kidnapped Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier, and held him in Gaza; five years later, the militant group freed him in exchange for more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners who had been held by Israel. Yet none of these past cases can offer easy guidance for how to handle the unprecedented mass kidnapping of October 7th. Never before has Israel sought to rescue so many hostages from a territory where it is also waging an unbridled aerial war that has already claimed thousands of civilian lives—a campaign that Israel is now apparently escalating with a ground invasion.
The newspaper Haaretz weighed in over the weekend with an impassioned editorial arguing that “there is no question more burning” than whether Israel’s attacks on Gaza will endanger the hostages. “The state does not have the mandate to sacrifice” the hostages, the editorial said, and “no one would give it that mandate. Nor can it be allowed to consciously, for tactical reasons, make these people collateral damage in the war against Hamas.” It urged Israel to “release all its Palestinian security prisoners”—who are thought to number about forty-five hundred—in exchange for the captives seized by Hamas and its allies, or to do “whatever it takes to bring the hostages home immediately.”
On Saturday, Gallant told a news conference that the problem was “very complex” and argued that only intense attacks by Israel would force Hamas to negotiate. “The more military pressure, the more firepower and the more we strike Hamas, the greater our chances are to bring it to a place where it will agree to a solution that will allow the return of your loved ones,” Gallant said. The oxymoronic strategy of bombing enemies to the negotiating table does not often work as designed, and, in the case of the Gaza war, Gallant’s logic seems especially strained. An obvious reason is that intensifying combat may directly kill or injure hostages, or provide a ready cover story for Hamas to execute captives while claiming that they died under Israeli bombs. (According to Gaza’s health ministry, which is controlled by Hamas, more than eight thousand people have been killed by Israel in Gaza so far, including thousands of children.) Last Thursday, according to the BBC, Abu Ubaida, a spokesman for Hamas’s military wing, said that about fifty hostages had already been killed in air strikes. More broadly, the coercive part of coercive diplomacy would seem to already be well established: as Israel decimates Gaza in one of the most intensely concentrated air attacks ever seen in the Middle East, Israel has repeatedly stated that one of its war aims is to destroy Hamas and kill the group’s commanders. We can assume by now that they have got the message.
So far, only five hostages have been freed: two Americans and three Israeli women, one of whom, Yocheved Lifshitz, an eighty-five-year-old grandmother, told reporters that she “went through hell” as she was beaten with sticks while being marched toward the vast network of underground tunnels built by Hamas. Necessarily, the international diplomacy under way to release more prisoners is opaque; Egypt, Qatar, and the International Committee of the Red Cross appear to be involved as mediators or facilitators. The United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, is among the world leaders who have called for a ceasefire in Gaza, in order to deliver humanitarian aid, and for the release of the hostages.
The relatives of the hostages, while maintaining consensus within their ad-hoc coalition of the traumatized, have been careful not to tell Netanyahu or the Israel Defense Forces how to resolve the kidnappings—only to get the job done. On Saturday, Abu Ubaida demanded the release of all Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli custody, in return for “the large number of enemy hostages in our hands.” That would be a hard call, politically and militarily, for the Israeli war cabinet. (Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, was released as part of the exchange that freed Shalit.) Yet, as has often been observed during past crises, for many Israeli Jews, the fate of prisoners and hostages has involved more than the suffering of individuals and families—at issue, also, are ideas about collective sacrifice and the state’s moral duties. As Haaretz argued directly, “The government must declare the hostages’ return to be its most important goal.”
The United States has faced its own such dilemmas with a rising frequency in the past decade, as state-sponsored hostage-taking increased in countries such as Russia and China, and kidnappings soared in areas beset by armed conflict involving Islamist radicals and criminal gangs, such as in Syria and Afghanistan. After 9/11, as Al Qaeda-linked groups emerged in Africa and the Mahgreb, kidnappings forced Western governments to rethink public policy. For years, some European governments routinely paid ransoms to groups such as Al Qaeda, but the United States firmly refused, and the U.S. government even warned the families of kidnapping victims that if they themselves paid the ransoms, they might violate antiterrorism laws. The Obama Administration undertook reforms to better prioritize the interests of families, yet these carefully balanced policies can have an air of think-tank abstraction about them. The crisis now facing Israel and its allies, including the Biden Administration, belongs to its own category.
It is unclear whether the leaders of Hamas, which has already been designated as a terrorist group by the U.S., the United Kingdom, and the European Union, have come to think that their cruel and indiscriminate mass hostage-taking may be a potential liability, as they maneuver for political survival under Israel’s assault. As a practical matter, would Hamas even accept the release of all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention, or is its offer only intended as a salvo in the information war, to further divide Israeli opinion about how to conduct the war? If Hamas did seek a deal, could it actually deliver the safe release of all of its captives? Even the trading of small numbers of prisoners in contested territory during war can present a daunting problem of trust, communication, and on-the-ground execution, as armed parties to the deal stand by, alert to any sign of betrayal. Managing such a release in Gaza now, even if Israel were to declare a temporary ceasefire to facilitate it, would be an extraordinary feat.
Yet such an exchange might turn the Gaza war away from its catastrophic, dead-end course, at least for a time. Among other things, it would salve at least some of Israel’s trauma and strengthen international political negotiation as an instrument in conflict. It might create greater space—including political space within Israel—to support other managed humanitarian interventions, to relieve the suffering of Gaza’s trapped civilians.
“Why this offensive? There is no rush. Hamas wasn’t going anywhere,” Zeev Scherman, one of the family members who was protesting near Israel’s Ministry of Defense, told the Guardian last weekend. Another protester nearby held up a handmade sign: “Life matters.” ♦
