A few days ago two hundred employees of the European institutions in Brussels protested against Israel, calling themselves “anti-genocide officials”. None of them called for the release of the Hamas hostages. “In the last eight months these people have been almost completely forgotten,” writes Jake Wallis Simons in the Telegraph. “Do you know their names? Would you recognize their photos if they appeared on posters in London?” In Milan, a month after October 7, an activist spoke at a pro-Palestinian demonstration: “Today I am very happy, because they thought they could take the hostages by force. And instead they did what the Palestinians wanted. They had to stop the bombing to get their prisoners of war.” Two hundred civilians captured as game had become “prisoners”. Strange fate, that of the Israeli hostages, twenty-five of whom were in possession of a foreign passport, which their respective countries seemed to have forgotten about. One of the most famous scenes in the Iliad is when Priam asks Achilles to return the body of his fallen son Hector. For Israel, the opposite is true: moral condemnation if it tries to bring home its abducted and fallen.
This week the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the European Union, Josep Borrell, condemned Israel for the raid in Nuseirat, in the center of Gaza, thanks to which four Israeli hostages (Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Shlomi Ziv and Andrey Kozlov) were freed after months of which Israel had only brought home bodies of hostages (dead). Borrell attacked Israel for “another massacre of civilians.” And Francesca Albanese, UN envoy for the Palestinian territories, welcomed the “released” hostages.
Who remembers the names of Marcel Fontaine, Marcel Carton, Jean-Paul Kaufmann and Michel Seurat? They were “the French hostages of Lebanon”, sociologists, journalists, diplomats, kidnapped by Hezbollah, the same Iranian auxiliary militia against which Israel is fighting. The fact that they were not abandoned to their fate, condemned to the abyss of oblivion, has a lot to do with the positive outcome of that story. The information instilled in public opinion a sense of the ordeal they were enduring. The media campaign was flawless and lasted two years, day after day, until their liberation in 1988, with the exception of Seurat, who died in captivity. The fate of the two hundred Israelis was very different.
Agam Goldstein-Almog is an Israeli girl who was in the hands of Hamas for two months. In Gaza she was forced to wear a full veil and a long dress, she was forced to always look at the ground, she was forced to recite Islamic prayers and the terrorists gave her a name taken from the Koran: “Salsabil” . Hostages rescued in the Nuseirat operation in Gaza also reported being subjected to “brainwashing”, with the terrorists forcing them to read the Koran and study Islamic norms. Amit Soussana had it worse. Once freed, Amit said she was held hostage in a child’s bedroom in Gaza with a chain around her ankle. The terrorist assigned to surveil her, “Muhammad,” would occasionally sit next to her on her bed, lift her shirt and grope her. Muhammad asked her about her menstrual cycle, whether she had bathed and when it would end. One morning, Muhammad untied her ankle chain so she could wash herself in the bathtub. Then he came back with a gun. “He put the gun to my forehead.” He dragged her into the baby’s room, which was covered in pictures of SpongeBob. “Then, at gunpoint, he forced me to commit a sexual act.”
Some were abducted in extremely violent conditions, others witnessed the massacre of family and friends, children were often separated from their parents or witnessed their killing. Their food depends on the guards. The women who were held with their children gave food to the children. They have no access to running water, according to the testimonies of the released hostages. Some were given polluted well water to drink, causing gastrointestinal problems, diarrhea and vomiting. Their sanitary conditions are terrible, with groups of hostages forced to share a bathroom without water. “We have returned to the times of the Jewish lists” writes Alain Jakubowicz in the Point. “In the end, who decides? Who draws up the lists? Who gives the thumbs up or the thumbs down, who issues safe conduct and residence permits? Those who have sown death.”
In a tunnel, the army there found drawings made by six-year-old Emilia Aloni, freed in November. And five cages where up to twenty hostages were held at a time, with little oxygen and a lot of humidity. Noa Argamani was held hostage by a journalist, her doctor father and the rest of the family (all killed during the raid). Abdullah al Jamal published articles in English in the Palestine Chronicle. For six months Noa and three men lived in a single dark room, on small mattresses spread on the floor. Their only contact with the outside world came from the guards who brought food and abused them. They could hear the Palestinian family living downstairs, including children, but never met them. CNN reported the assessment of one of the doctors treating them, Itai Pessach of the Sheba Medical Center, according to which they were beaten and suffer from severe malnutrition. “They had no protein, their muscles are extremely perishable,” Pessach said, adding that “there were periods when they received almost no food.”
A Sheba nutritionist who is treating them said they suffer from severe malnutrition and that a long rehabilitation awaits them. “They ate a tenth of what they should have.” Mittal Binyamin, clinical nutritionist at the Sheba Hospital in Tel Hashomer who treats them, explained in an interview with Walla: “What happens to the body in such a situation is that it has to break down the available reserves, the muscles. When they returned, they were very depleted in terms of muscle. There was no muscle left in the body, only loose skin; everything was gone. The consequences of this could be damage to internal organs; it is likely that if they had been held hostage for longer we would have seen injuries to the cardiac muscle and from a neurological point of view.” What will those who remain in the tunnels face?
Shlomi Ziv said his captors made him pray every day. Pessah, whose team examined many freed hostages, says: “We heard and saw evidence of sexual abuse in a significant portion of the people we treated.” Pessah said the hostages were subjected to psychological torture (such as being told that “Israel no longer exists”). “What really struck me was how prepared the Hamas terrorists were regarding psychological torment. It was structured and planned in advance. They constantly say, ‘No one cares about you. You are here alone. Do you hear the bombs falling? They don’t care about you. We are here to protect you.’ And that really played with their minds. There were some incidents where they separated two family members, and then put them back together, then separated them, then put them back together. We have heard stories that are beyond anything we can imagine. They were all mistreated, punished and tortured physically and psychologically in many ways.”
In eight months, the Red Cross has never managed to visit the hostages (Israel accuses it of not making much effort). Moran Yanay shared his Hamas experience with the Washington Post, recounting the terror of the kidnapping, the cruelty of the kidnappers and the toll of this ordeal on his mind and body. “Welcome to Gaza,” the leader of the group that had kidnapped her told her. Her guards said that her family had forgotten about her, that there was no country she could return to and that her neighbors would kill her if she made too much noise. When she was released she had lost seventeen pounds.
Emily Hand’s father, who holds dual Irish and Israeli passports, said his daughter spoke only softly after being ordered to remain silent in captivity. Emily is only nine years old. She had been kidnapped while sleeping on the kibbutz with her friend, Hila. They were locked in a room with other hostages. Only mattresses on the floor. There was no water, the physical needs remained there. Every four or five days they brought a full bucket and poured it into the toilet and, in turn, one of the hostages had to clean it. To wash themselves they used wet towels in a pan heated with a heater. “Most of the Israeli hostages suffered very serious physical and mental abuse,” denounced the head of the psychiatry department at the Ichilov medical center in Tel Aviv, Renana Eitan. The youngest were drugged, ketamine and benzodiazepines. A woman was kept underground in complete darkness. “She became psychotic, she started having hallucinations, which usually happen when you deprive people of all their normal senses. Two other women were kept in a cage measuring one meter by one and a half meters.” Aviva Siegel, Shir’s mother, who was held captive in Gaza and whose husband Keith is still held hostage, said: “The terrorists brought them doll clothes and made them into their dolls. Puppets with whom you could do whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted.” Then the horrifying testimony of Chen Goldstein Almog: “There are many girls who have not had their periods. Maybe that’s why we should pray, so that the body somehow protects them so that they don’t get pregnant.” Hamas released videos of the hostages, including one of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who had his left hand mutilated.
A Gaza vet has performed surgery on a French-Israeli girl, her aunt has revealed. After the release of her niece Mia Shem, Vivian Hadar said: “A vet operated on her arm.” Mia had appeared in a Hamas propaganda video in which she said: “They take care of me, they give me medicine, everything is fine.”
In several cases, Palestinian families held hostages in their homes. Schem said she was being held by a family in Gaza. “Entire families are at the service of Hamas,” she told Channel 13. Avigail Idan, the four-year-old girl whose parents were murdered, was also held in the homes of several families. When Russian-Israeli Roni Krivoi managed to escape during an Israeli raid, he hid alone for several days before being discovered by Gaza civilians, who returned him to Hamas. Meanwhile, in London and Amsterdam advertising companies removed billboards showing Israeli hostages, after protests and threats. And the faces of the hostages were torn from Western cities, from campuses, from subways. Since October 7, thousands of videos have emerged of students, passers-by and activists removing the hostage posters. Almost no actor took charge of their imprisonment. In New York, protesters this week also attacked the exhibit on the 360 deaths at the Nova Festival. Almog Meir Jan’s father, one of the four hostages freed in the raid, was found dead in his home a few hours before he could hug his son again. His heart couldn’t handle it. That of a piece of the West that does not fight for the people who ended up first in the gas chambers and then in the tunnels of Hamas, Blaise Pascal would have said, is empty and full of rubbish.
