A petrified Israeli society is living with horror and anguish as minute by minute they wait to find out the situation of the hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip since October 7. On television, on social media and among almost every family, the fate of the 199 captives of the terrorist organization (the official count by Israel, a figure that has not ceased to vary over the past week) constitutes a completely unprecedented ethical, political and military dilemma. It comes as the Israeli army has been heavily bombarding the Gaza Strip for 11 days and is preparing new potentially dramatic ground action against this territory populated by 2.3 million people.
Tensions rose a notch on Monday, October 16, with the broadcast of a Hamas propaganda video in which 21-year-old Mia Schem appears on a bed, weakened, while a nurse applies bandages to her arm. Schem claims, as she looks at the camera, to have been injured on the day of the attack but is being treated well – which is unverifiable. "She was wounded in the hand. She had an operation. She looks terrified. She says what she's told to say. I'm very worried about her," said her mother, Karen Schem, in front of the world's cameras in Tel Aviv on October 17. "I ask the world's leaders that my daughter be returned to us in the state she and the other hostages are in today. I beg the world to give me back my baby."
Information on the hostages remains sketchy. On Saturday, the IDF announced that bodies had been found during an incursion into the Gaza Strip. Since then, however, nothing has been released about the identity of the victims or the circumstances of their deaths. For its part, Hamas reported that several captives had been killed in the intense bombardment of its territory by the Israeli army, which killed 3,000 Palestinians in 11 days. The Islamist organization had threatened to execute hostages whenever unannounced bombardments hit buildings in Gaza.
Benjamin Netanyahu's government has been severely criticized for its lack of empathy toward the families. On Sunday, the prime minister invited relatives of the hostages to a military base in Ramla. But, as reported in Haaretz, an opposition newspaper, the representatives of the main collective of the missing were surprised to see an unknown family taking part, one of whose members reportedly called on the prime minister to act "coldly and without any doubt," This povoked lively anger among the others present, revolted by this implicit call for strong military action.
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