Supporters and family members of Israeli hostages snatched by the Palestinian militant group Hamas last week in a surprise attack into Israel, protest outside of the Israeli military base of Ha-Kirya in central Tel Aviv on October 14, 2023. Photo by Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images

Deputy Opinion Editor Nora Berman October 16, 2023

Bring them home now.

Noa. Hersh. Yaffa. Adi. Erez. Vivian.

Those are just a few of the at least 199 Israeli hostages who were kidnapped by Hamas. Babies, elderly people and families, violently taken from their homes or a music festival, and are now trapped in Gaza as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right ministers bomb it to bits, with an explicit lack of care as to whether those same hostages are injured or killed. 

A spokesman for Al-Qassam Brigade, Hamas’ military wing, claimed Monday that 22 Israeli prisoners have died under Israeli bombardment, information that has yet to be corroborated. 

In the wake of the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history by many magnitudes, Netanyahu and his government have completely abdicated any sense of leadership, most atrociously concerning the hostages. They are bombing Gaza into oblivion, without a clear strategy for what might come after Hamas is uprooted, in an effort to distract the Israeli public from the colossal intelligence failure, and the way his government directly facilitated it.

With Netanyahu’s love for media attention, I might have expected this disaster to be his Rudy Giuliani moment, when the former New York City mayor rose to national prominence for his leadership during 9/11. Instead, Netanyahu and his government are not only neglecting the hostages, but poisoning any possible goodwill they could have received from Israeli citizens.

Aside from a brief video clip posted to social media, Netanyahu has made only two media appearances since the war began. His first, an address to the nation, came a full 70 hours after Hamas’ attack on southern Israel began.

He has not met with any families of abducted citizens. Only today, well over a week since the attack, were the families of 199 hostages — one of whom, Maya Sham, appeared alive in a Monday video distributed by Hamas, the first of its kind —  given direct confirmation of the kidnappings by the IDF.

Netanyahu directed his government to explicitly not take the hostages into consideration in their military plans, unless they receive specific intelligence as to where they may be hidden in Gaza. One of his ministers, Bezalel Smotrich, said that “We have to be cruel now, and not to think too much about the hostages. It’s time for action.”

At least one parent of a hostage has been physically assaulted by Netanyahu supporters.

The father of Liri Olbeg, who was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nahal Oz, was attacked by Netanyahu supporters when he arrived to join the other hostage families protesting in front of the IDF and intelligence headquarters. The attacker shouted in Hebrew, “Leftist betrayer, you can go die along with your daughter.”

In a decision widely excoriated by Israeli news outlets, the government suspended a previous rule that ministers must attend military funerals, removing any sense of compassionate leadership that citizens might expect during such painful ceremonies. Netanyahu has ordered the government to not assist the team that his own Defense Ministry tasked with reconstructing the southern communities destroyed by this violence, because the man leading the team, retired general Roni Numa, is active in the protest movement against Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul. 

Many of those communities have residents whose loved ones were kidnapped. By failing to advocate for the hostage’s return and turning his back on efforts to rebuild, Netanyahu has abandoned them twice.

In the absence of assistance from the Israeli government, families of hostages are turning to foreign governments and creating ad-hoc war rooms in their homes. “From the moment we heard about it, we said we are not waiting for the police, the army, for anyone,” the father of American-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin said.

“We know a lot of things that the government doesn’t know,” Karine Nachon, leader of a civilian-led operation to map the hostages’ locations told the Forward. The collective lack of trust in Israel’s government is chilling — and, from what we have seen, warranted.

Hamas’ Israeli captives are in dire need of medical attention. In addition to suffering from illnesses like diabetes and cancer, many hostages were wounded — some grievously, like Goldberg-Polin, whose arm was blown off by a grenade — and have special needs like autism and cerebral palsy. “Of course, we want Hamas to release them all,” read a letter from an organization representing the hostages’ families to the International Committee of the Red Cross on Sunday, “but at least to provide them with medical attention.” 

Netanyahu’s mandate is clear. He and his government must rethink their callous approach bent on revenge, and bring the hostages home now.

In 2011, Israel freed 1,027 prisoners in exchange for a single captive Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who had been held in Gaza for five years. Yet after the greatest massacre of Jewish lives since the Holocaust, which occurred not in Europe but in the Jewish state itself, Israel’s leaders seem to care about nothing but revenge. Instead of demonstrating actual leadership, Netanyahu is continuing to ignore the well-being of his citizens, and wants to erase Gaza, where 50% of the population is children, in order to draw attention away from his disastrous and embarrassing failure.

In the words of Israeli journalist Dan Shilon: “Don’t wait, put him on trial now. He is a war criminal.”

And bring them home. Now.

The legacies of Israel’s current leaders are forever tarnished, bloody with the stain of incompetence that led to 1,300 Israelis being massacred. Oct. 7 is the darkest day in Israel’s young life, and they will forever, rightly, be blamed for it.

Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, Israeli-American and cousin to Israel’s Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau, articulated a question on Instagram Oct. 14 that has dogged my consciousness ever since. After a lengthy and emotional plea for peace, he asked, “What kind of ancestors do we want to be?

Do we want to be the kind of ancestors who moved heaven and earth to bring all of our loved ones home safely, or the kind that valued vengeance over peace?

Bring them home, now.

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