https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-diary-israel-hamas-hostages-war?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
“What is life?” a child asks Oriana Fallaci at the beginning of her great 1969 book Nothing and Amen. As Fallaci wrote, the next morning she flew to the Vietnam War to find out.
I have thought about that question a lot in recent weeks, since arriving in Israel earlier this month to cover the war. I have seen plenty of wars before and they always throw up that question: “What is life?” To understand life you have to understand death, and to understand death you have to try to understand the worst thing that humans can do to each other: war.
Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 has left 1,200 dead. Nearly 240 hostages—children, women, grandmothers—were taken to Gaza. Over the past few days, about 81 hostages have been returned to their loved ones during the cease-fire.
I was at the children’s hospital in Tel Aviv when the first children and their parents were released. When the helicopters landed and the hostages got out, IDF soldiers blocked their faces with screens to protect them from the glare of the cameras. But I’d already been sent a single photo taken by the Arab press that showed some of the mothers with their children inside a bus when they were still in Gaza.
The terror on their faces. They looked as though they’d aged by decades.
But at this moment, there was joy. As the helicopters landed, traffic stopped, and people got out of their cars and broke into song. They clapped and their voices rang out as they welcomed back the hostages with songs like “Hevenu Shalom Alechem.” (“We brought you peace.”)
As it happened, 12 of the 13 returnees that night were from Kibbutz Nir Oz, the first place I visited on my trip to Israel. But for every returnee, you remember those still in Gaza. I thought especially of the grandsons of the man who showed me around the kibbutz during my visit. On the morning of October 7, the teenage boys were alone in the house. Their grandfather was on the phone with them trying to tell them how to hold the safe room door shut while avoiding being shot from the other side. The two boys struggled with a wound-up sheet, and held out a while, but they couldn’t fight back against two grown men, members of Hamas. They were taken into Gaza.
So was Kfir Bibas, a baby of ten months. So was his brother. So was their mother. Yesterday, Hamas said that they would not be released because they died in captivity.
Who knows if Hamas killed them, as they killed so many others, or if they are lying in order to torture those waiting for their return.
