Overview:
As the world awaits the Israel-Hamas hostage deal and temporary ceasefire, it bears remembering how complex political and wartime kidnappings always are.
Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in Febrary 2022, the first round of war crime atrocities became public. In Bucha especially, civilians had been tied up, tortured, shot at point blank range in their homes and left for dead in the streets, in what Russian soldiers expressly referred to as a “cleansing”. Women and girls throughout the war have been raped while homes were raided, spouses murdered. After a systematic rape of two dozen in one basement in Bucha, in which victims reported being told but Russian soldiers that they were being assaulted so they would never want to be touched again and have Ukrainian babies, nine became pregnant.
In the first throes of war, amid these horrific events, denialism came swiftly from Russia’s supporters, as many also raised Ukrainian actions as a counterpoint. This was war. This is just what happens in war, many argued. Meanwhile, many Ukrainians and their supporters started sharing stories of how barbaric acts like those seen in Bucha were simply in the nature of Russians. Russians were trained from young ages to be cruel; it was in their culture to be imperialist, to refuse to live in peace with their neighbors, and they could not be redeemed. Don’t pity the Russian soldier thrust by Putin into this war: he’s a monster, his whole people are complicit if they don’t take over the Kremlin, and it will be a good death when he and his ilk are put down to save Ukraine.
This is the work of collective trauma in wartime. We reduce, we essentialize, we what-about. For many, it’s the only way to go forward, and to face the cruelties intrinsic in fighting back.
It also makes us terribly comfortable with armchair analysis in general.
That, too, though, is a longstanding phenomenon. In Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), when a German soldier is cycled home on leave from the frontlines of the Great War, he endures civilians lecturing him on how the army “should” be conducting its affairs: overconfident assertions well removed from war’s horrors.
So it is today, as the world witnesses a complex deal between Israel and Gaza-authority Hamas, with the assistance of Qatar, Egypt, and the US, among others. Hamas said from day one that it was taking hostages for future prisoner swaps. After six weeks of hostilities, with a death count of over 13,000 Palestinians after over 1,200 people were killed in Israel on October 7, Hamas will be receiving at least 150 Palestinian women and children currently in Israeli prisons. In exchange, it will release some 50 women and children in terrorist custody, over four days of ceasefire that could be extended with the release of more hostages.
This is a situation in progress, which means that at any point the deal could break down. Lives could be lost at the eleventh hour. Saboteurs could come from most anywhere.
Instead of fixating on the details, then, we might do well to remember the human behaviors that emerge whenever our species is faced with spectacles such as these. Even though the war crimes at Bucha are only a year and a half old, public consciousness struggles to remember and connect the widespread nature of unacceptable atrocity across two active wars. To remember the context of much older crimes on a governmental scale can seem almost impossible in the heat of 24/7 news.
We have no idea what will happen in the coming days.
But we know, more broadly, how humans and whole states react to hostage scenarios.
On the kidnapping of civilians, in general
During Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there have been kidnappings, too. Since the first attacks in February 2022, Ukraine has reported anywhere between 19,000 (the documented number) and 300,000 (the feared number) missing children as captured by Russia and Belarus. Many of these children are believed to be housed in re-education camps to indoctrinate them as Russians. When the International Criminal Court formally charged Vladimir Putin with war crimes this year, it was with these charges: the unlawful deportation of population (children) and unlawful transfer of population (children), under articles 8(2)(a)(vii) and 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute.
When whole states seize members of a population, we talk of unlawful detention. In China, this systemic action targets the Uyghur, Kazakh, and other Muslim minorities: ostensibly for re-education and deradicalization, but with a brutal track record of rape, torture, and death in custody. In Buddhist Myanmar, for over a decade, it’s been a mass detention of Rohingya Muslims, on top of the slaughter of over 10,000 in a 2017 act of ethnic cleansing that drove hundreds of thousands from their homes, and razed over 300 villages.
But mostly, when we think of kidnapped people, the culprits are configured as guerrillas and other paramilitaries: each known somewhere but not universally as terrorist groups. Some are “freedom fighters”, but many are not tethered to a clear political cause.
While some countries have little direct experience with these societal ills, states like Nigeria are in the midst of a “kidnapping crisis”. Some of the most infamous attacks, like the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls by Boko Haram in Chibok, had a strong ethnoreligious component: done to deprive feminized people of their freedom and an education, under a brutal form of Islamic doctrine that views women as little more than domestic slaves. Nor was this an outlier; over 1,400 Nigerian girls have been kidnapped from their schools since that 2014 event, and fear has otherwise done the zealots’ work for them: when schools are closed for safety concerns, girls are sold into marriage sooner and become pregnant faster.
But it’s not just about religion, or politics. It’s also about money.
In documentaries like BBC’s 2019 Inside Nigeria’s Kidnap Crisis and 2022 The Bandit Warlords of Zamfara, perpetrators do not shy away from talking about their financial motives. In one interview, a man who takes drugs to stay sharp and lower inhibitions in the violence of his work explains that this trade is how he puts his children through school.
In South America, too, armed groups are open about the fact that kidnapping is a trade. This past year in Colombia, President Gustavo Petro has been trying to pull off a “total peace”, a ceasefire with a slew of local paramilitaries and faux-political narcotrafficking outfits, by offering social welfare investments in exchange for no more kidnapping and killing, and by offering Colombian youth peacetime alternatives to mandatory military service.
Reception has been mixed, among civilians and armed groups alike. Most recently, one of the most notorious paramilitaries, the ELN, kidnapped the father of a professional soccer player. Upon his release, ELN’s spokesperson doubled down on how kidnappings would continue out of economic necessity. “We are a poor organization,” its leader argued. “We don’t finance ourselves with narcotrafficking.” Proposals to stop the violence have included the possibility of putting the paramilitary on state salary during the ceasefire, as a pathway to reintegrating combatants with civil society: an idea that some consider ludicrous, and others, the only practical step toward future stability.
The country has, after all, tried the “total war” approach for decades.
Colombia is not the only country to struggle between the carrot and the stick when dealing with groups that kidnap, rape, torture, and murder civilians. But it does have one of the longest track records, involving a 50-year war with FARC that only entered a new phase after the peace treaty in 2016. The problem is that too many people in the country were not ready for a peaceful resolution; many FARC were assassinated after agreeing to lay down arms, the killing of civilian social leaders continued in many rural districts, and government officials dragged their feet on fulfilling peace-deal investment in rural regions, in part because many urban citizens viewed them as complicit in past guerrilla action. The lack of wholehearted commitment to the peace left power vacuums in impoverished sectors, which were easily filled by violent actors, and stirred dissident FARC to take up arms anew.
In other words, although there are many “easy” answers, there are none that work.
Peace is not an end. It is a demanding process, which requires ongoing consensus among the governed (by paramilitaries and states alike) to see any better results.
Famous hostage scenarios in war
The one and only time that Canada enacted the War Measures Act outside a formal war, under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the spark was two kidnappings. Canada is home to many nations: First Nations, Inuit, Métis, Anglo-Canadian, and French-Canadian. One of our federal parties only runs candidates in Québec, a province with many politicians whose central aim is separatist. Will elected members of the Bloc Québécois work with the rest of Canada? Yes, but only until that day when secession is achieved. And don’t ask them, or First Nations, to always respect the overarching sovereignty of Anglo-Canada in the process.
In Canada’s weird history of accommodating dissident approaches to peace, order, and good governance, a more radical version of separatist, the FLQ, caused mayhem in the 1960s. It was responsible for over 200 bombings in its fight for the national cause. Then, on October 5, 1970, members kidnapped British trade comissioner James Richard Cross, and demanded the release of 23 FLQ members they considered political prisoners. They also wanted to air their manifesto on national television. Five days later, Deputy Premier Pierre Laporte of Québec’s Liberal Party was kidnapped, too. On October 16, Trudeau, leader of the federal Liberal Party, deployed a law that suspended civic rights: allowing arrests and searches without warrants, without access to a lawyer, and for longer spells in detention.
The next day, Laporte’s body turned up, strangled. Cross was released two months later. The grand scare of the FLQ turned out to have been minor: the group consisting of under three dozen members. But the whole country lost its rights for the episode, to the immense criticism of Canadian leaders like Tommy Douglas, who accused the government of “using a sledgehammer to crack a peanut”.
In the United States, a more recent, brutal kidnapping was the case of Daniel Pearl, son of an Israeli-American and an Iraqi Jew, who was in Pakistan to uncover al-Qaeda connections for the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid. In January 2002, Pearl was kidnapped in Karachi by Islamic jihadists, who had a list of wartime demands for his release. They beheaded Pearl nine days later, and released the video for added terrorist impact.
The situation with Pearl is particularly noteworthy because the demands were not only untenable, but also reflected an inaccurate understanding of key military conflicts. How does one negotiate with incoherent asks from terrorists? And even if their demands had reflected an up-to-date set of grievances, the sheer scale of the ask was a death sentence. The US was not going to massively transform military operations for a single life, however dear that life was to Pearl’s family, friends, and colleagues.
In the case of Daniel Pearl, the complexity of concession, of “negotiating in good faith with terrorists”, quickly became clear to the world.
With today’s nightmare of Israeli hostages, that clarity has unfortunately taken longer.
Israel’s ceasefire and the hostage swap
In the initial chaos of October 7, no one knew how many people had been taken by Hamas and other forces. Estimates kept growing, and many loved ones had to hope for a missing person to end up on a hostage list, rather than turn up as a body on Israeli soil.
What we did know, right away, was that Hamas was claiming these hostages as bargaining chips for the release of Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
We also knew that Israel’s government was absolutely not going to negotiate.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Day One:
“Since this morning, the State of Israel has been at war. Our first objective is to clear out the hostile forces that infiltrated our territory and restore the security and quiet to the communities that have been attacked.
The second objective, at the same time, is to exact an immense price from the enemy, within the Gaza Strip as well. The third objective is to reinforce other fronts so that nobody should mistakenly join this war.
We are at war. In war, one needs to be level-headed. I call on all citizens of Israel to unite in order to achieve our highest goal – victory in the war.”
PM Netanyahu’s Remarks at the Start of the Security Council Meeting, October 7, 2023
Within days, Hamas claimed that hostages had been killed in the shelling, and threatened to kill more if the attacks without warning did not cease. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant then doubled down on the state of affairs in Gaza: a “complete siege” was underway, and there would be no relief until Israel’s demands were met.
READ: Two democracies in time of war
To suggest that civilian response has been divided ever since is an understatement. Global protests attest to a widespread desire to see an end to a war with massive civilian casualty counts. (For contrast, the second-largest bombardment of Gaza, in 2014, yielded around 2,200 Palestinian casualties, 1,400 civilians, after 49 days. This year, the war has seen over 13,000 Palestinian casualties, an estimated 70% women and children, after 47 days.)
Although the majority of Jewish Israelis support the war (the numbers are lower for Arab Israelis, some of whom were also slaughtered on October 7), even victims’ families have been torn between a desire to present a united and strong front against terrorism and a reasonable fear for the safety of their loved ones over six weeks of bombing. The region also has a fraught history with past attempts at negotiating prisoner swaps.
One of the most painful recent episodes happened in 2006, when IDF soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were kidnapped by Hezbollah, a terrorist group operating on the Lebanese border with Israel. This raid prompted the Second Lebanon War, which had among its objectives the release of these two soldiers. In 2008, the countries finally reached an exchange deal… but primarily for bodies: the remains of 200 Lebanese and Palestinian fighters for the remains of Goldwasser and Regev, along with five living Lebanese and Hezbollah combatants.
Years on, during the 2014 Gaza War, Hamas turned down a ceasefire negotiated by Egypt, then proposed a 10-year ceasefire on three conditions: the opening of Gaza-Israel border crossings for goods and workers; international oversight of Gaza’s seaports instead of IDF; and the release of prisoners who had been promptly re-arrested after release in a 2006 exchange. Israel turned down this offer, ostensibly because it did not serve state security.
As Yossi Mekelberg told Time Magazine, “There is a view that in the past … Israel released more than a 1,000 prisoners for one soldier, including the head of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, and look what happened.” Mekelberg’s argument, that Israelis did not want an exchange that would release new fighters for future combat, was echoed in the results of polling earlier this month, by the Israel Democratic Institute. Survey 4, on November 5 to 6, found that 17% of Jewish Israelis did not want the government to negotiate, 12% wanted the government to negotiate only after the fighting, and 44% wanted negotiations while the fighting went on. Conversely, a resounding 75% of Arab Israelis wanted negotiations immediately, even if it meant a cessation of fighting.
On October 20, Hamas released two US citizens, a mother and daughter from Illinois, citing “humanitarian” reasons.
On October 23, Hamas released two elderly hostages, also on humanitarian grounds.
When 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz came home, she went on in interview to describe good treatment by her captors after the initial violence of October 7. This was met with outrage: not at her, a woman whose husband remains in captivity, but at the media outlets, under the argument that they were advancing Hamas propaganda, which would only demoralize Israelis and their allies amid an active war with skyrocketing civilian casualties. Similar criticism faced Yasmin Porat, whose experience of Hamas assailants on October 7 differed markedly from the brutality endured by other civilians. Hospital spokesperson Avi Shushan would later lose his job in the wake of the Lifshitz press conference.
Both incidents speak to the difficulty of making space for nuance in war. It is entirely possible for Lifshitz and Porat to have had better experiences with Hamas, and for those experiences to be received in a way that dismisses the verified horrors visited upon hundreds of others, leading to delays in the recovery of human beings from ongoing peril.
READ: Disembodied grief, and the challenge of remembrance
As of Thursday, at least three hostages had been confirmed to have died in Hamas custody: Cpl. Noa Marciano (19), Yehudit Weiss (65), and Hanna Katzir (77). A fourth, Arye Zalmanovich (86), is still presumed dead after video released by Hamas, claiming that he died from the trauma of the shelling. Marciano and Weiss were found near the al-Shifa hospital complex, where Hamas had entered on October 7 with wounded hostages.
Katzir was reported to have died just hours before the latest hostage deal was first reached, but would later be listed among the first group of hostages released. She was being held by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the Al-Quds Brigade had released a video earlier this month offering to release her and a 12-year-old boy on humanitarian and medical grounds. They claim that Israel stalled on accepting the offer.
One might see Israel’s refusal to accept this offer as proof of warmongering, but there are logistics involved in every transfer. A successful transfer requires the establishment of a release route, and a genuine guarantee that a release will happen if the route is secured.
There are war-morale politics to consider, too. A properly monitored transfer allows journalists, medical workers, and other international observers greater access to conditions on the ground. This in turn provides the world with more data on local devastation, which can create a narrative that impacts momentum for a country at war. In other words, a transfer is never an automatic net-positive for a wartime government, when it comes to messaging: even though the return of a civilian is absolutely ideal on humanitarian grounds, it can also serve as a propaganda win for Hamas at key points in military operations. For active combatants, the logic is that, even if the full narrative is more nuanced, and there is plenty to grieve with respect to on-the-ground brutality, hesitation now about the greater mission goals will only yield more harm in the future.
As such, hostage exchanges require extensive third-party intermediaries and internal agreement among intelligence and security agencies to ensure that there is no trickery afoot, and to lessen the chance of an enemy gaining media advantage. After all, Hamas would never be able to be praised for releasing hostages if it hadn’t stolen these humans from their lives in the first place, while slaughtering their neighbors.
For this reason, wherever possible (as in the recent case of Pvt. Ori Megidish), it is also even more optimal for IDF to rescue a hostage directly, during ground operations in Gaza.
Peace is not an end. It is a demanding process, which requires ongoing consensus among the governed (by paramilitaries and states alike) to see any better results.
The current prisoner and hostage swap
PM Netanyahu has confirmed that the war will continue after the ceasefire, which will run at least four days and up to 10, depending on Hamas willingness to deliver more hostages each day after the original agreement. Hamas will be securing the release of Palestinians from Israeli prisoners at a 3:1 ratio to people kidnapped on October 7, who will be released 12 or 13 a day. Israel will cease aerial operations in the south entirely for the pause, and restrict northern excursions to six hour windows. It will not detain persons in relation to the war, or introduce more military vehicles into the region during the time frame.
A list of names of 300 women and children held in Israeli prisons, and eligible for exchange for hostages, was released on Wednesday, November 22. Some 7,200 Palestinians are in Israeli prisons, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Society, but only 88 of those are women, and 250 children 17 years or under. At the current rate of exchange, women and children would cover any further prisoners released up to a 10-day maximum ceasefire. After that point, the Israeli government would have to consider the release of men, perhaps outside typical combat ages.
Most of the people set to be released have not been convicted. Instead, they are in “administrative detention”, an Israeli security limbo with flexible six-month extensions without formal charge or trial, for crimes ranging from stone-throwing, property damage, promoting Hamas, or otherwise having contact with “hostile organizations”. Some face charges as serious as making explosives and attempted murder. None have been convicted for murder, and almost all are from the West Bank and Jerusalem, to which they will be returned (not to Gaza) upon release.
The deal also allows more humanitarian aid and fuel to enter Gaza, which comes at a critical time for healthcare in the region. With meager access to clean water, the predictable rise in preventable waterborn and skin diseases has started. Gaza is also entering its winter, a cold and rainy season that further exacerbates poor sewage, without sufficient shelter.
The current deal has required the mediation of many third parties, each with its own level of unreliability in the eyes of one key actor. Just as Qatar, which houses Hamas leadership, is by no means a fully honest broker in the eyes of Israeli government, so too is the US a highly suspect and openly pro-Israel participant in the eyes of Hamas, PIJ, and other armed forces operating in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria. Qatar has, however, tried to de-escalate Iranian saber-rattling, which is key to ensuring that the region does not break out into broader conflict. It also played a major role in securing the release of earlier hostages.
While the ceasefire was originally set to start on Thursday, Israeli officials announced a delay until Friday, while details for the transfer are hashed out. This further prolongs a very painful, bated breath scenario for all involved, but especially for the families of the kidnapped, who have been tirelessly advocating for their release, and meeting with great hostility from some international observers who consider their active trauma a form of Israeli propaganda. When Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza on October 27, families also had to appeal for a meeting with the prime minister for assurances about how the IDF was going to proceed in relation to hostage safety.
There is nothing in our history of hostage scenarios to promise a smooth or successful outcome here. Too many have already died in the cruelty of this conflict. But there is plenty to learn from, with respect to honoring the complexity of such scenarios. Just as there is unfortunately nothing new about the brutalities endured by civilians when invaders arrive, whether at the hands of Russians in Bucha or Hamas on October 7, so too do the wide-ranging motives behind mass kidnapping only offer two guaranteed results:
Pain and helplessness, for those caught between political groups now in charge of all negotiations, whose priorities may or not be centrally dedicated to the hostages’ release.
And the rise of armchair analysts, who at distance can and do still act with such conviction, that they know better how to bring these loved ones home.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Two paragraphs, on the confirmed deaths of hostages in Hamas and PIJ custody, have been modified since initial publication, to reflect the happy correction that Hanna Katzir, initially reported dead, was listed by Israeli news as among the released hostages on Friday. Would that all corrections could contain such good news.