While the government is under pressure to resume ceasefire negotiations, the ongoing issue of the 115 hostages, who have been held captive by Hamas for over 300 days, continues to fracture the country.
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In the streets of Israel, the posters of the hostages have changed since they were first printed. The names and faces remain the same, but after more than 300 days in detention, the ages have been corrected. Thirty-nine instead of 40 for one of the hostages, 20 rather than 19 for another.
“We want an agreement. We want our government to do its part. There have been many missed opportunities. But, each time, we hope. The hostages won’t be able to hold out much longer…” worried Naomi Sappir, a volunteer with the Forum of Families of the Missing and Hostages, an Israeli NGO that tries to keep attention on the cause. On the evening of Monday, August 12, in Jerusalem, she organized the Tisha Beav ceremony, dedicated this year to captives of Hamas. There are still 115 missing people out of the original 240 taken hostage on October 7, 2023.
The crowd was large, with around 2,000 people in attendance, comprising both the usual secular crowd mingling with more religious-looking families. Tisha Beav, a commemoration of the tragedies experienced by the Jewish people, evokes the memory of events such as the destruction of the Jerusalem temples, the expulsion from Spain and the Holocaust. Perhaps the massacre of October 7, 2023, will be added to this terrible list. Or, more precisely, the hostage-taking that followed, unprecedented in its scale in Israeli history.
On Thursday, August 15, the Israelis will embark on last-chance negotiations in Cairo. Pushed by his American ally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed to send envoys to the Egyptian capital. Talks have been failing since the first truce in November 2023, which led to the release of 80 Israelis.
If they don’t succeed, the region is set for a dangerous escalation with Iran and its allies, Hezbollah in particular, after the targeted assassination of one of its top men, Fouad Shukur, and that of the head of Hamas’s political bureau Ismail Haniyeh. Both assassinations were attributed to Israel and carried out on the same day, July 31, in Beirut and Tehran.
A national priority
The mass kidnapping of October 7, 2023, could also be the final act in a change of doctrine for Israel. Two government figures and members of the far-right supremacist movement, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, seem to think that the price to be paid for the return of the hostages is too high. Both men are indispensable to Netanyahu if he is to remain in power and avoid trials for corruption, fraud and breach of trust − in which he risks being sentenced to prison. Smotrich and Ben Gvir refuse any arrangement with Hamas in favor of continuing the war and the total destruction of Gaza. The former has described any agreement as a “dangerous trap,” while the latter said it would be a “serious mistake.”
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