Don’t Forget the Hostages

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, December 14, 2023

 

For a brief period, Westerners who cling to a psychological investment in Israel’s perfidy tried to convince themselves, if not everyone else, that the captives Hamas seized during the 10/7 massacre had it pretty good.

 

Within a week of the attack, Hamas operatives conveyed to Western sources their deep regret over the non-Israelis in their custody, many of whom they claimed were being treated as honored “guests.” “I think that changes the story,” NBC News reporter Richard Engel observed. Shortly after some of the hostages were separated from their families and returned to Israeli custody, those former captives dutifully related tales of Hamas’s hospitality (lest something happen to their loved ones). Social media erupted in an orgy of naïveté after the first round of hostages were released. The outpouring of gullibility was so profound that professional journalistic enterprises lowered themselves to the task of fact-checking popular posts alleging that the hostages “look like people finishing a vacation and saying goodbye to the resort staff.”

 

These rationalizations reflected poorly on their postulators even at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, they have become even more morally repugnant — at least insofar as they constituted an effort to craft a redemption arc for a ghoulish, terroristic death cult.

 

The rumors that the dreamy expressions on the faces of some of Hamas’s hostages were drug-induced have since been confirmed. “One of the girls was given ketamine for a few weeks,” Renana Eitan, a physician who treated the hostages at a Tel Aviv hospital, told reporters. Others were dosed with “benzodiazepines and sedatives like Valium and Klonopin.”

 

That chemically induced placidity was not sufficient to relieve the hostages of the horrors they endured. “They became psychotic, they had hallucinations,” Eitan added. The “physical, sexual, mental, psychological abuse” they endured results in recurring flashbacks for those who are still reintegrating into daily life.

 

Some in Western media attribute — well, imply obliquely, really — that the Israeli bombing campaign is what traumatized the hostages who were held underground in the tunnel network Hamas maintains beneath the Gaza Strip. Maybe. Or perhaps it was the regular beatings that Hamas administered to its captives, some of whom were as young as twelve years old. Who knows?

 

The number of captives who have testified to the rape and sexual assault they endured in Hamas’s custody is now in the double digits, and that’s only those who were fortunate enough to make it out. U.S. officials believe the women who are still in the terrorist group’s possession are being held back so they cannot testify to the sexual violence they’ve endured at Hamas’s hands.

 

It’s reasonable to wonder if Hamas will ever let them go – especially given reports indicating that Hamas has begun murdering its hostages. “Tal Chaimi, a resident of Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak, and Joshua Luito Mollel, a resident of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, were murdered while being held hostage by Hamas in the Gaza Strip,” the Jerusalem Post reported this week.

 

This isn’t old news. The hostage crisis is ongoing. American citizens are still among the captives. And if their past conduct is any indication, the hostages still in the terrorist group’s control are subject to unspeakable torture. Why anyone tried to convince themselves that the architects of the 10/7 massacre retained the capacity for human decency is a mystery.