Yair Mozes, whose mother and father are among the 240 hostages kidnapped by Hamas, is trying to describe what it feels like. ‘It is hell,’ he says. ’You don’t go to sleep properly, then the minute you wake up, you’re bolt upright. I’m just about managing at present… then every now and then I fall apart and sleep for ten hours straight, as my body can’t handle it anymore.’
I suspect even those words don’t really do it justice. But they sound familiar. My own relatives suffered that same ghost-like half-life when I was kidnapped for six weeks by Somali pirates while working for the Telegraph back in 2008. Sleepless nights, visits to the GP for tranquillisers, and terrible paranoia. My brother wondered if perhaps I hadn’t been kidnapped, but bumped off by the CIA after discovering that they were sponsoring the pirates. Fat chance that I would ever unearth a story as good as that. But I had vanished into thin air, and overnight he felt like he was in a lurid airport thriller. In that situation, conspiracy theories seem normal.
Grim as it was, though, my family had far less to worry about than Mr Mozes. I was being held by pirates, whose only interest was getting money, and who didn’t generally kill folk if things didn’t go their way. Mr Mozes’ parents are being held by Hamas, who, judging by last month’s massacres, seem to relish it. The pair are also in their late 70s and somewhat frail: his mum Margalit is a diabetic.
I met Mr Mozes last week, when he and other hostages’ families were on a five-day march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Well-wishers lined the route, and there were stop-offs for speeches and snacks. The march ended up outside Prime Benjamin Netanyahu’s house last Saturday, trying to persuade him that freeing the hostages should be as big a priority as destroying Hamas.
Historically, Israel has always gone to extraordinary lengths to get hostages back. The 1976 Entebbe raid in Uganda, in which Israeli commandos snatched 102 passengers from Palestinian hijackers, is up there with the SAS’s storming of the Iranian Embassy. When Ron Arad, an Israeli airman, fell into the hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1986, Israel offered a $10 billion aid package to Tehran, and kidnapped an Iranian general in Syria. Following Hezbollah’s abduction of Corporal Gilad Shalit in 2006, Israel freed more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to get him back.
Indeed, given that one of the freed prisoners was Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader behind last month’s massacre, some Israelis feel that hostages have become their country’s weak spot, and that Mr Netanyahu should just tough it out. Last month, his finance minister, the hard-right settler leader Bezalel Smotrich, demanded that the army ‘hit Hamas brutally and not take the matter of the captives into significant consideration.’
The prime minister has his intimate experience of hostage showdowns. His brother, Jonathan, commanded the Entebbe raid, and was the sole Israeli fatality. But with the Hamas hostages like dispersed in tunnels all over Gaza, a repeat of Entebbe would stretch even the modern IDF’s capability.
Instead, the strategy is to keep the military pressure on Gaza. An agreement has now been reached whereby 50 captives, all women and children, should be exchanged from today, in return for a four-day pause in fighting and the release of 150 Palestinians in Israeli jails.
The swap was part-brokered by Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, the prime minister of Qatar, who has acted as a go-between. Don’t expect many Israelis, though, to be singing His Highness’s praises. Many are livid about Qatar hosting Hamas’s leadership in exile, and have not forgotten how they cheered last month’s attacks from their offices in Doha.
The polite term for what the Qataris are doing is ‘diplomacy’. The less polite term is that they are acting as ‘chewers’, as they’re known in kidnapping circles. These are people who pose as neutral, disinterested intermediaries, but in fact have connections to the kidnapping gang. I had one in my own case, a shadowy man called Ali. He claimed to be acting in ‘a humanitarian capacity’ but was on suspiciously good terms with my pirate captors.
The Qataris aren’t the only intermediaries that Israelis are less than happy with. They are disgruntled with the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has failed to get welfare access to the hostages. Its officials have visited detainees of terror groups in the past, such as the Afghan Taliban, and has extensive contacts in Gaza, where it operates humanitarian programmes. So far, though, it says Hamas has refused its requests.
This has angered many Israelis, who point out that the welfare needs in this particular hostage crisis are almost unique: there are babies, children, pensioners with dementia, people with injuries. It has also prompted acid comments from Israel’ foreign minister, Eli Cohen, who suspects that like many foreign aid organisations, the Red Cross harbours an institutional sympathy towards the Palestinians. (The ICRC says: ‘From day one, we have called for the immediate release of all the hostages, and for access to them… But we are not the ones making the decision and creating the conditions for access to materialise. We wish we had that power, but we don´t.’)
Last month, Cohen told Mirjana Spoljaric, the ICRC’s president, that ‘The Red Cross has no right to exist if it does not succeed in visiting the hostages.’ He criticised it for focusing on Israel, ‘which is bound by international law and acts in accordance with it,’ instead of the humanitarian crisis created by Hamas.
The ICRC insists it is speaking direct to Hamas at the highest levels, and says that ‘while it may feel like we are silent’, it makes more progress if works discreetly behind the scenes. Israelis wonder, then, why it continues to issue a running commentary of Tweets and press releases, which focus as much, if not more, on the humanitarian impact of the Gaza invasion.
The ICRC’s ‘Facts and Figures’ webpage on the crisis, for example, refers to ‘renewed hostilities’ between both sides – a somewhat anodyne term for a war sparked by one of the worst terror attacks in modern history.
This kind of studied, BBC neutrality might be suitable for the ICRC’s wider international audience, and yes, it may avoid upsetting Hamas. But if you want to win the confidence of hostages’ families – who, as per my own experience, often feel the world is conspiring against them anyway – then it may not help. The 240 abductees, after all, aren’t PoWs in a war between two nation states, they are civilian victims of criminal kidnappings.
Israelis have not forgotten, either, the Red Cross’s notorious failure to speak out on behalf of Holocaust victims during the second world war. Red Cross representatives visited Hitler’s death camps, but chose not to publicly condemn what was going on for fear of upsetting the Nazis and losing welfare access to allied prisoners of war. They also feared compromising the neutrality of Switzerland, where the Red Cross is based. In 1997, the organisation admitted to ‘moral failure’ for keeping silent.
If the exchange of 50 hostages begins later today, it will of course be a welcome start. But it goes against the best-practice rule for hostage negotiations, which is to get everyone out at the same time. The more they’re released in dribs and drabs, the more those still in custody assume a greater value to Hamas, who may keep them back as an insurance policy.
Those left behind will probably be the adult males, most likely the younger, fitter ones. Their families, however, may not be as robust as they are. And as I know from my own spell as a hostage, families are the victims of a kidnapping as much as the captives are. Israel has already had its share of Ron Arads and Gilad Shalits. It doesn’t deserve any more.
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