Witnessing the unalloyed joy and relief on the faces of the surviving Israeli hostages as they were finally freed yesterday was a deeply emotional moment.
Not just for them, of course, and for their families – but also for all of us who have followed their plight since that terrible day in 2023. Who can know what traumas they endured, what physical and psychological damage they carry, how and if they will be able to rebuild their lives?
But for now, none of that matters. They – and we – must just be happy and grateful that this latest, nightmarish chapter in the history of this bloodiest of conflicts is coming to a close.
Ultimately, though, our joy is tinged with a deep sadness. One cannot help thinking of those who did not survive, either because they were murdered by Hamas during the attack itself, or subsequently by their abductors in their hideous and inhuman captivity.
One thinks of the Bibas family, little Ariel and Kfir, whose bodies were returned to their grieving father Yarden – alongside an unidentified female corpse who was not their beloved mother, Shiri.
Such dishonesty, such sickening disrespect for human life, speaks volumes about the true nature of Hamas.
One thinks of Tsachi Idan, Itzik Elgarat, Shlomo Mantzur, Eden Yerushalmi, Almog Sarusi, Ori Danino and many more, all killed after being kidnapped. And of those whose bodies are lost and will never be returned.
One also, inevitably, thinks with gritted teeth about the 250 terrorists, mostly serving life sentences (plus 1,700 other detainees from Gaza) that Israel has agreed to release in return for its own innocent and illegally seized hostages.
Released Israeli hostage Avinatan Or arrives at hospital near Tel Aviv yesterday
I’m talking about scumbags such as Ahmed Mahmed Jameel Shahada, who was convicted in 1989 of the rape and murder of 13-year-old Oren Bahrami; or Iyad Abu al-Rub, who orchestrated several suicide bombings in the early 2000s, killing 13 people.
Muhammad Zakarneh, who planned the 2009 attack in which taxi driver Grigory Rabinovich was murdered; and Muhammad Abu al-Rub, who in 2017 carried out a frenzied knife attack that killed Reuven Shmerling.
Another is Raed Sheikh, convicted of lynching two Israeli reservists, Vadim Norzhich and Yossi Avrahami, at a police station in Ramallah in 2000.
The two men were brutally murdered and their bodies paraded around the city, much in the same way that Shani Louk’s broken body was on October 7.
These murderers do not deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as those two red-haired children and their poor mother, or defenceless young women such as Shani – and yet their fates are now inextricably linked.
That violent killers such as these should profit from the murder, torture and rape of the 1,200 innocent people whose lives, and that of their families, were shattered on October 7 is very hard to swallow.
It seems like a perversion of justice. But that is the agreed price – and, yes, it must be paid. After all, what is the alternative? More of what we have just seen played out in Gaza over the past two years? An endless horror that serves little purpose save to turn the world against Israel and foster future generations of brainwashed Islamists? No. A compromise must be reached.
It is hard, and it will be just as hard for the people of Gaza – many of who are just as much the victims of Hamas as the hostages themselves.
People react as they watch the hostage release live stream at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv
For this to hold, they too will have to swallow their anger, set aside their agonies and try to find, if not forgiveness, then some kind of way forward.
Can that happen? Already there are those who are determined to make sure that it never does; those for whom peace between the Palestinians and Israel is too much of a threat to their power base and their ideology even to contemplate.
Those whose entire existence is predicated on stoking the fires of anti-Semitism and proclaiming themselves victims of a ‘Zionist supremacy’ – of which America, in their view, is a key architect and supporter.
These people – those who march on our streets every week, those who cheered even as the horrors of October 7 were unfolding, those who peddle their sectarian prejudices unchecked by authorities too woke or too cowardly to challenge them – don’t really care about the lives lost, about the babies buried under the rubble they pretend to mourn.
Their main worry is themselves and preserving their twisted narrative and toxic ideology.
Even as Donald Trump was addressing the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, yesterday, two protesters – Ayman Odeh and Ofer Cassif, members of the socialist party Hadash – loudly interrupted, one holding up a sign saying ‘genocide’.
In America, the fact that it was Trump, and not his ineffectual predecessor Joe Biden, who managed to get this deal across the line, has enraged those who, one might think, would be delighted to see an end to the bloodshed in Gaza.
Those for which nothing less than the destruction of the state of Israel will suffice are now doing their best to discredit this deal, with abundant assistance from their useful idiots in the West.
That is, the bien-pensant liberals who cannot bear the thought of The Donald have succeeded where their own side’s efforts failed.
This fragile peace has barely drawn its first breath, and already there are many who would stifle it.
The best hope now is that Trump, with his deal-maker’s zeal, can turn this moment of respite into an opportunity for real change and reconciliation.
But given how much his enemies loathe him, it seems like a long shot. I only hope and pray I am wrong.
