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Commentary

Families Plead for Release of Hostages as Israel, Hamas Approach Ceasefire

December 18, 2024

“Israel is closer than ever to another hostage deal” with Hamas, according to remarks by Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz reported in the Israeli press. After 439 days, 101 of the hostages Hamas kidnapped on October 7, 2023 remain in captivity, and seven of them are Americans. Their families are desperate to free them from barbaric conditions, and recent developments may finally force Hamas to negotiate.

“We’re hearing that from both Palestinian sources and also from the current defense minister … that this is very close,” said Regent University professor A. J. Nolte on “Washington Watch” Tuesday. “They are expecting a deal that is going to easily pass both the security cabinet and the Knesset — because, of course, just proposing the deal is not enough on the Israeli side. They’ll have to pass it as well.”

The good news of a hostage deal cannot come soon enough for the friends and families of those captives, who have formed a coalition, Bring Them Home Now. This coalition organized a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, along with members of the Bipartisan Women’s Caucus, Reps. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.), Monica De La Cruz (R-Texas), Emilia Strong Sykes (D-Ohio), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), and Kathy Manning (D-N.C.).

“It is unconscionable that Hamas has for so long rejected a hostage deal,” Wasserman Schultz declared, “and that 100 hostages — dead and alive — still languish in Gaza. Instead, they cling to the innocents, doing unspeakable things, and all to use them as political leverage.”

“We went through so many moments that I thought we were going to die,” recalled released hostage Aviva Siegel. Her husband of 43 years, Keith, is one of the seven Americans still held captive by Hamas. As their captors cruelly tormented her husband, she added, “the Hamas terrorists just stood there and laughed at him. They made a joke out of him.”

“I’ll never forget the Hamas terrorists just telling us to sit, in the middle of the night — to just sit and wait, when we wanted to lie down — because they were in charge of everything they wanted,” Siegel continued. “If they wanted to touch the girls, they touched the girls. [I watched] the girls come out after they had been touched and [have to] behave like nothing had happened.”

Siegel went on to recount watching “one of the girls being beaten up into pieces, and two minutes later she had to smile to the Hamas terrorists as if nothing had happened, even though we wanted to cry. But we had to pretend all the time that everything’s okay, and that everything is very easy for us.”

She listed more of their captors’ cruelty, noting, “They starved us and ate in front of us. They didn’t give us any water. We weren’t allowed to move many, many, many days. We just had to sit or lie down, for days. We had to keep silence, complete and utter silence.”

The hostages left alive are hidden away in underground tunnels, guarded by captors who have little to eat or drink themselves.

“We need to get them out now,” Siegel concluded. “Winter is coming,” which will surely make the suffering of the abused hostages even worse.

“Every minute we delay in bringing these hostages home is a minute too long,” urged Cammack. “Time is of the essence. Each passing moment diminishes hope and exacerbates fear. We cannot allow politics, bureaucracy, or uncertainty to dictate the fate of our loved ones.”

Israel could likely secure the release of many of the hostages by agreeing to all of Hamas’s terms right away. But Israel is caught in a tricky situation; they must not only secure the release of the remaining hostages, but they must also ensure that Hamas is never able to repeat the October 7 massacre again.

In pursuit of this second end, Israel has some non-negotiable demands in the ceasefire talks. “Some of the necessary preconditions that the Israelis have said they want are, for example, access to the Philadelphi corridor … that stretches across the border crossing from Egypt to Gaza … on the Egyptian side.” Israel has been using the border region to secure parts of the Gaza Strip for now, and “Israel moving out of those areas … does not seem to be on the table,” Nolte added.

While the terms of the potential deal are fluid, they likely include “a staged release of hostages … in exchange for what looks like some sort of prisoners to be released from Israeli prisons, and then also a ceasefire,” Nolte pointed out, which is similar to the hostage deal Israel and Hamas negotiated last November. The release of hostages would likely begin “with what they call these humanitarian categories,” he explained, which would include “folks that are sick, female soldiers, and perhaps children, and the elderly.”

“Of course, with these negotiations, we’ve been very close a couple of times in the past. So it’s hard to say exactly how close we are right now,” Nolte cautioned. “The optimistic case is that, over the past several months, Hamas has systematically seen all of its potential international backers removed … from the table.” Israel has effectively crippled Hezbollah, and the pro-Iranian regime in Syria collapsed, while Israel demonstrated that Iran is helpless against its air power.

“That will complicate things for Iran, which is one of the main backers of Hamas right now in terms of their logistics,” he said. “So the board has really flipped in a lot of ways. … It seems like, if you’re an optimist, perhaps Hamas is more in survival mode than they have been in the past.”

Optimism or no, the families of the hostages and members of Congress from both parties agree, in the words of Wasserman Schultz, “Hamas must not succeed, and the hostages must come home.” Hopefully, the incoming Trump administration can accomplish that.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.



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