David Young – War Diary – Partial Hostage Release
Today, and for the next few days, Israel will be undergoing a period of national joy and national sorrow. The joy will be caused by seeing thirteen Israeli hostages(together with ten from Thailand and one from the Philippines) being returned to Israel after spending seven traumatic weeks in the Hamas-Dash-ISIS underground bunkers in Gaza. The sorrow will be because more than another 220 Israeli men women and children, soldiers and civilians, are still being held in these same terrible subterranean bunkers. It should also be remembered that the ‘lucky’ civilians who were released this evening (Nov. 24) represent less than five percent of those hostages still being held in captivity. In other words, Hamas are still holding 95 (!) percent of the people they grabbed from their homes bordering on the Gaza Strip on that murderous Shabbat seven weeks ago.
Those who have been released will be wrapped up in all the love and attention the Israeli army and the country’s social and medical services can give them. Each returnee will have an army officer, a social worker and a psychologist to look after them – people who have received detailed instructions on how to ease them back, physically and mentally, into a ‘normal’ life. However, for many of them, they will not be returning to the homes that they were kidnapped from by Hamas-Dash on Saturday 7 October. These homes do not exist anymore. They are now burned out shells of buildings on the kibbutzim and other settlements that border the Gaza Strip. There is no doubt that their friends and families as well as the kibbutzim from where they came from will also do their best to help them rebuild their lives, but until these returnees feel ‘normal’ again, much time will pass.
Those we saw re-entering Israel tonight looked, despite our great concern, that they were in decent physical condition. But what of their mental condition? How do you explain what happened to a four-year old girl about what she has just been through? How do you help an eighty-plus year old Holocaust survivor restart her life once again? How do you tell the children that their parents were brutally murdered and that they will never see them again? How do you rebuild these people’s confidence in life and faith in humanity? These and many others are very real questions that must be dealt with, immediately and sensitively.
In order to bring about this hostage/prisoner exchange, after negotiating with the US, Egypt, Qatar and Hamas, Israel has agreed to release three Palestinian terrorists now held in Israeli prisons for every hostage we will receive. This lop-sided exchange rate is not new. In the past, so as not to leave any Israeli soldier behind in an enemy prison or on the battlefield, this country has gone to extreme lengths to bring back all its citizens and soldiers. As it says in Jeremiah 31:16, ‘the children [shall] return to their borders.’ With this Biblical command in mind, Israel has carried out such prisoner exchanges as in 2011 when it released 1,027 Palestinian terrorists in exchange for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. He had been abducted while serving on the Israeli-Gaza border over five years earlier. One of those released terrorists was Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas–Dash leader who had organized this latest round of murder and bloodshed. Thirteen years earlier, in May 1998 Israel exchanged sixty-five Lebanese prisoners together with the bodies of forty Hizballah terrorists in exchange for the remains of IDF soldier, Itamar Ilyah. These are only three examples of the various ‘uneven’ prisoner exchanges that have taken place since the 1940s.
As we sit and wait here for the remaining two hundred plus hostages to be returned, perhaps the best we can do is hope and pray that they too will also rejoin their families very soon. We must also hope that they too will also learn how to cope with their new post-hostage afterlife without too many problems and to learn to adjust to their new lives. Even though I am not a very observant Jew, I think one of the most appropriate prayers for the above is: The Lord will give strength unto his people; the Lord will bless his people with peace.
*** Since writing the above, two more groups of thirteen Israeli and several foreign hostages have been released. Hamas-Dash are supposed to release one more group of a similar size. At the same time, this terrorist regime hopes to extend the temporary cease-fire so that they can consolidate their own positions in Gaza. In addition, they will try to persuade the world that the wicked Israelis will be to blame if the latter set out to eradicate them, this evil ISIS-style entity, from the face of the earth. I hope the rest of the world will not be suckered in by Hamas’ false sugary words.
David Lawrence-Young
Historian & writer
Jerusalem
