One Year Later: The Hostage Nightmare Continues
The dead must be brought home for burial. The living should not be sacrificed on an altar of hubris.
Dave Schechter is a veteran journalist whose career includes writing and producing reports from Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Today is October 7, 2024.
Or, as the families of the hostages in Gaza know it, the 367th day of October 2023.
On this date last year, as some 2,500 rockets rained into Israel, Hamas-led terrorists attacked kibbutzim, towns, and an outdoor music festival in the “Gaza envelope” of Southern Israel, slaughtering 1,200 men, women, and children and kidnapping 251 more.
It was, as has been repeated often, the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
I said on Oct. 7 that Israel would have the world’s sympathy for 48, maybe 72 hours, but after that the narrative would change.
And it did.
In some quarters, the murders and killings were cheered and justified. In others, they were denied or down-played. Posters of the kidnapped were defaced and torn down almost as soon as they went up.
Rallies were held throughout the Jewish world, including in Atlanta, where a few thousand lustily cheered a local politician who declared that “Israel is going to do what Israel is going to do.”
“Bring Them Home” dog tags and yellow ribbon pins became fashion accessories. Mention of the hostages became part of worship services. Thoughts and prayers were offered. What more could we do?
This column has been my way of keeping the hostages front and center.
Some of you may have tired of my recitation of how three members of my extended family were murdered and seven were kidnapped when Kibbutz Be’eri was attacked. One remains a hostage in Gaza.
I knew that a few hundred descendants of my great-grandfather’s twin brother lived in Israel. Oct. 7 made it all the more important to put names to the individual leaves on that branch of the family tree.
At this writing, 101 hostages remain in Gaza, one-third of them believed to be dead; 97 kidnapped on Oct. 7, two kidnapped in 2014, and the bodies of two killed that year.
The attacks came as Sukkot ended and Simchat Torah began. The “Black Sabbath” happened despite warnings to Israel’s military apparatus and its government that not only was such a thing possible, but that Hamas was training for an operation.
The brutality of Oct. 7 cannot be underestimated.
Human beings burned to death when their homes were set on fire, some by incendiary grenades capable of generating temperatures of 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Parents watched as their children were murdered. Children watched as their parents were murdered. Children in their pajamas were shot in cold blood. Family members were bound together and then murdered.
Not long after Oct. 7, I watched a briefing conducted by forensic pathologists, who labored for weeks to identify bodies.
A doctor displayed a photograph of charred flesh, pointing out the parts of a body. Another photo showed an adult, likely a parent, tied with wire to a child, the doctor pointing out two spinal cords, what remained discernible after flames fused their flesh.
In the weeks after Oct. 7, it was possible to find online images even more horrific than what the Israeli army edited into a 47-minute video, belatedly shown to foreign correspondents in Israel and then screened for invited audiences abroad by Israeli consulates.
Hamas fighters wore body cameras to record their “heroic” acts. On that video, we hear a Hamas fighter call his parents, telling them to watch television, bragging that he had killed 10 Israelis, whose blood literally was on his hands.
The people who most needed to see that video were not invited and, had they been, likely would not have come or dismissed the content.
Oct. 7 did nothing to advance the Palestinians’ national aspirations, but that was not Hamas’ aim. The Iranian-backed group has been willing to sacrifice any number of Palestinians to see Israel made an outcast in the global community and to dissuade Arab countries (Saudi Arabia in particular) from entering into diplomatic relations with the “Zionist entity.”
Israel did what Israel was going to do. Had Oct. 7 not happened, tens of thousands of Palestinians would be alive and Gaza not reduced to rubble.
President Harry Truman famously displayed a sign on his Oval Office desk that declared “The Buck Stops Here.”
While a handful of senior Israeli military and intelligence officers have resigned or announced their intention to resign, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies have resisted calls to establish a national commission of inquiry.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis continue to protest, in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and elsewhere, demanding accountability from the government — and the prime minister’s resignation.
Netanyahu has made clear that prosecuting the war against Hamas takes precedence over a ceasefire deal. After the bodies of six hostages were found on Sept. 1 in a filth-ridden Gaza tunnel, each executed with bullet to the head, it was reported that their potential release had been part of negotiations weeks earlier.
The hostage families deserve an end to their nightmare.
The dead must be brought home for burial.
The living should not be sacrificed on an altar of hubris.
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