All over Israel, posters of the hostages are starting to come down. From the plaintive portraits and mocked-up missing notices to the more urgent, angry ones – Bring them back from hell – the faces that made at least one aspect of the war omnipresent in Israeli lives are beginning to vanish. They won’t all disappear: more than half of the 251 hostagestaken by Hamas on 7 October 2023 never came home. Their posters have become makeshift memorials, visions of mute reproach.
Like the war that it precipitated, the Gaza hostage crisis was the longest, largest and most divisive in Israeli history. One of Israel’s foundational myths is that we take care of our own. Go missing on a hiking trip in the Andes and retired military experts will fly out to track you; find yourself in jail over a narcotics misadventure in Asia and the consulate will attempt to intervene; get yourself killed in a car crash and the state will try to bring you home to your family. But this kind of solidarity pales next to the intensity of that extended to Israeli hostages.
The majority of Jewish Israelis were either once conscripted to the army themselves, or have children who are conscripts; most women and men are drafted at 18 and serve two or three years, respectively. Captured soldiers therefore undergo a kind of collective adoption and become everyone’s children. This is quite different to how much of the rest of the world – which is more aware than a lot of Israelis of what many of their soldiers are doing in occupied territory – sees the Israel Defence Forces. Soldiers are always “hostages” or “abductees”; never – not since the October War of 1973 – “prisoners of war” or “captives”. Once taken, they enter a kind of limbo: neither living nor dead, but ever-present.
All too often, dead is how they end up, executed by their captors or killed in a botched rescue raid. Other times, as in the 1976 hostage crisis in Entebbe, a rescue is successful; such occasions generate a sense of bravado that sits uneasily with Israelis’ existential dread. On one fateful occasion in 2011, an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, was traded after five years in captivity for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. It was like watching someone come back from the dead.
That so many hostages were captured on 7 October to begin with was bad enough. The fact that so many of them were civilians, taken from their homes, tore a hole in Israelis’ sense of security that all the violence wreaked in return on Gaza and the rest of the region hasn’t been able to fill. Perhaps most destructive for Israeli society’s sense of self was seeing so many of our hostages neglected by the government, as repeated diplomatic opportunities to recover people’s loved ones were sacrificed to pursue a brutal, maximalist, open-ended campaign of destruction. Families of hostages were historically treated with sombre admiration at best and grudging respect at worst. But in this conflict, those who protested the government’s failure to secure the safe release of their loved ones were derided by coalition ministers and attacked by police and counter-protesters.
At the same time, the return of the remaining living hostages has in no way made Israelis remotely more trusting of Hamas as any kind of counterparts for future peace negotiations or more empathetic to the suffering of Palestinians in Israeli jails. The elaborate performance of the hostage releases in successive orchestrated rallies, complete with stage directions to the captives, was seen as sadistic political theatre and only further cemented the perception of Hamas as equivalent to Islamic State. The widespread abuse (and in some cases, killing) of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails has received little press coverage, and the fact that many of them were taken quite explicitly as “bargaining chips” to bulk up hostage exchanges was reported as par for the course.
The state’s blatant disregard for the hostages, with the exception of a few rescue raids, helped strengthen Israeli opposition to the war. It galvanised protests in Tel Aviv and elsewhere, eventually catching the attention of Donald Trump – perhaps the only recent occasion in which mass protests in favour of a ceasefire actually contributed to one. But the position of protesters was often conservative: at times they even argued for the resumption of war once the hostages were released. The disconnect between what Israelis wanted to know about the suffering our army inflicted on Gaza and what the world knew was vast. While images of emaciated hostages prompted outrage in Israel, images of starving Gazans were ignored or not seen at all.
On a recent visit to Tel Aviv, I noticed a new kind of memorial: bumper stickers covered walls and lamp posts and cars, each dedicated to a fallen soldier killed in the war in Gaza. It’s too early to tell if the ceasefire will hold or if fighting will resume, prompting the proliferation of even more stickers. But with the return of the last surviving hostages, it feels as if Israel has turned at least one corner. What lies ahead, however, is still very unclear.
[Further reading: Surviving 491 days in Hamas captivity]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Emperor
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