No End, No Bottom

A depressing hostage release that will have far reaching political consequences

It was never my plan to cover each and every hostage release here. But as the deal unfolded it became important to highlight them and to at least mention every single individual involved. And to demonstrate that under the weight of global machinations ordinary citizens were crushed and paying an exorbitant price. Each release I came to realize not only carried its own message, but also hinted at where things might be headed next.

When Eli Sharabi, Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami walked out to freedom yesterday it was instantly clear that something was seriously amiss and that we were looking at a very different release event. Compared to the previous ones, all three men looked terrible, emaciated, Ben Ami even needed to be supported as he had trouble walking. Worse, they were put on stage and forced to read out statements and in Eli Sharabi’s case it included him saying how he was looking forward to be reunited with his wife and two teenage daughters. Hamas deliberately put this gaunt and tortured man through this mental suffering knowing full well that Lianne, Yahel and Noya were murdered by them 491 days ago.

Sarabi also had yet to hear that his brother Yossi had died in Hamas captivity. Or Levy, captured together with the late Hersch Goldberg-Polin, is returning as the sole parent to his 3-year old son Almog, his wife Einav was also murdered on that bloody Saturday in October. The three men’s time in captivity as we know now was far worse than what the other released hostages have experienced: they spent most of their time underground, isolated and had no access to news or any signals from the outside world. Malnourishment over long periods of time affects the muscle tissue and bone density and it will take a long time for them to recover, physically. The mental trauma will be there forever.

For these men the clock stopped moving on October 7th. It is impossible to fathom how a human being deals with this level of both physical and mental torture and then when it is over get the most devastating news one can imagine. You will have to go back eighty years for comparables when concentration camp survivors returned to empty homes.

Watching it all unfold, hearing and feeling the tears, there was no escaping the raw emotions consuming social media and WhatsApp groups yesterday. And these sentiments were channeled in different directions.

One route was the one of lethal rage. To see these poor emaciated men surrounded by well-armed and well-fed Hamas fighters while the world accuses Israel of genocide is too much to bear for a nation that carries the weight of the Holocaust. And as emotions boil over it was easy to see and hear calls for revenge on Hamas, on Gaza, but also on the institutions that willingly looked away and barely lifted a finger like the UN and the Red Cross. In some instances they even collaborated.

The other obvious target is Israel’s sitting government who for a very long time have been well aware of what was going on in the tunnels and who kicked the negotiation can down the road, at times deliberately. For political reasons, but also in a mistaken belief that sheer force would somehow bring the hostages back. And in doing so was willingly let a brutal and life threatening external conflict tear away at the internal cohesion required to win that very conflict. The message yesterday for Nethanyahu and his coalition partners was clearer than ever: there is not even time to complete the deal along the now agreed phases, all hostages need to come back now. There is simply no time to lose.

An Israeli mission has arrived in Qatar to start negotiating the next phase, but the initial reports hint that Nethanyahu - who now has a stack of political capital following his Washington visit - may already be frustrating the process. The weird irony here is that the man that lifted Bibi’s political fortunes, Trump, wants a deal and a permanent end to the conflict. It is totally unclear as to how that will now be accomplished.

And so at a point in time when the details of the next phase of the hostage release and ceasefire need to be hammered out somehow, we are being pulled in different directions by the ‘anti-Nethanyahu’ forces on the one hand and the ‘destroy Hamas’ crowd on the other. Both are valid and both have lived together painfully for the past sixteen months as two sides of the same coin. The US government is the only one that can coax the process forward, step-by-step, getting hostages out while creating a post-Hamas Gaza.

We are at day 492. The process of taking incremental steps in this complicated war will continue for many more days. But looking at the faces of the three men yesterday one thing is abundantly clear: the remaining 76 hostages need to come home now. Fast.

Photo, video: the inhabitants of kibbutz Be’eri react as they see the hostage release, Eli Sharabi on stage and Or Levy reunites with his young son Almog.