A woman whose son has been taken captive by Hamas fears that he will die in Israel’s intense bombardment of the Gaza Strip, as families of the hostages plead for information from Israel’s security establishment.
“If the airplanes are bombing there, maybe the hostages can be hurt, too,” Maayan Sherman told reporters on Thursday. “I cannot watch TV because I'm so worried that he's inside and he can be hurt, too. You know, you're not killing only the terrorists, now. The hostages are in there, too.”
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Sherman’s 19-year-old son, Ron, was captured when Hamas terrorists overran his base near the Gaza border early in their surprise attack on Saturday morning. She was invited to tell the story of his capture at a press conference with the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and she used the opportunity to put pressure on Israeli officials whom she described as failing to communicate a plan to rescue the estimated 150 people whom Hamas carried off into the Gaza Strip.
“Like all of you, we were shocked to see all the terrors that went on in all the kibbutz[es] just around the Gaza Strip,” she said, in an acknowledgment of the atrocities that Hamas perpetrated before Israeli forces could rally. “We are asking, really, what is the government going to do [for] the hostages? Because right now, everybody wants just to erase the Gaza Strip from the map... but what about the hostages?”
Her appeal drew an ambiguous response from the Israeli officials who participated in the virtual press conference. A military spokesman acknowledged that the IDF is “willing to sacrifice life” to achieve its fundamental objective.
“Our hostages, our people, human life is what we are defending here,” Israel Defense Forces Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler replied when asked to address her concern during a question-and-answer session following their presentations. “And we're using all the different means that we have in order to achieve that goal. That is our mission. That is why we are here. That is why we're willing to sacrifice life in order to save the lives of our people and to save human morality, in that sense.”
International observers are uncertain about the number of hostages taken by Hamas as Israeli first responders continue to gather the bodies of the dead and families search for information about missing relatives. Ron Sherman was sleeping between shifts, unarmed and out of uniform when he sent text messages to his parents telling them that his base was under attack.
“He was very worried... because it was a very, very heavy missile attack,” his mother said.
She tried to reassure him but heard for herself that “it really sounded different” than typical attacks.
“I told him just stay in the shelter,” she said. “And then, he told me, 'Mom, I can hear Arab language outside' and 'they are coming in,' and the last thing we know [is] that he told me, 'I love you all’ — that, 'it's over.' These were his last words. At this point, you know, we were sure he was dead.”
She turned on the television, but the media had not yet begun to cover the attack, which had caught Israeli forces and civilians by surprise. Several hours later, however, her relatives came across a video that Hamas terrorists had published, which showed Ron being marched into Gaza in a T-shirt and sandals.
“You can see him clearly — kidnapped, beaten, humiliated, but very much alive — which made us very happy, as crazy as it sounds,” she said. “And I know that, you know, we are the lucky ones that saw him alive, saw him alive after the kidnapping. So, we don't know right now what happens. We don't get any answers from anybody.”
Hamas has said that it “will not negotiate on the issue of captives” unless Israel halts its bombardment. An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman has made clear that its forces are “not talking about negotiations or mediations” during the conflict.
“Israel’s goal will be to try to rescue the hostages in military operations,” Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information co-founder Gershon Baskin, who helped negotiate the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011, told Foreign Policy. “There is no doubt, calculating the risks, that hostages will be killed in those military operations.”
Many of the hostages are civilians whom the terrorists were able to seize in their rampage through a music festival and other lightly defended communities near the Gaza border.
"It is a common tactic in the Hamas playbook to break up hostages and move them around in, sometimes, small groups,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Thursday. “In order to think about our policy options, you have to make some assumptions. And we can’t rule that out as a possibility.”
Israeli officials have launched an intense and sustained bombardment of the Gaza Strip, saying they are “very aggressively” targeting Hamas targets wherever they might be found.
”We are attacking very aggressively any place which Hamas and its people are using," IDF Air Force chief Brig. Gen. Omer Tishler told local media on Wednesday. "There is always a military target, but we are not being surgical.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team has emphasized that Hamas terrorists “bear the responsibility” for any Palestinian civilian casualties in the bombardment. An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman offered a similar perspective on the fate of the hostages.
“Israel will do whatever it takes in order to liberate the hostages that are in the hands of the terrorists, but their lives, and the wellbeing of the hostages, is the entire responsibility of the Hamas terror organization,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Lior Haiat said after Sherman made her appeal. “If any harm will be done to them, they will pay a huge price for that.”
The IDF has tapped “two major generals” to coordinate “the best ways for us to bring back our people home in the safest way,” according to Shefler. Blinken brought a senior State Department official for hostage affairs to Israel on Thursday.
“We’re doing everything we can to secure the release of the hostages, working closely with our Israeli partners,” Blinken told reporters in Tel Aviv.
Shalit, the Israeli soldier released in 2011, spent five years in captivity before he was released by Hamas in exchange for 1,027 prisoners in Israeli custody.
“I believe that the current war being waged by the Israeli government in response to the Hamas attack is to retake control of Gaza and to eliminate Hamas as a political and military functioning body in the Gaza Strip,” Baskin said. “My sense from trying to understand where the Israeli public is, it believes that we already paid with a thousand lives, and if some of the hostages have to get killed in order to release others, I think the public would accept that. It’s a very strange situation, because Israel has kind of an ethos that we don’t leave anyone behind.”
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Sherman, whose son was required “to serve for a minimum of 32 months” in the IDF under a conscription law that applies to most 18-year-old Israelis, did not sound accepting.
“We demand, really demand our government to bring the hostages back, all of them,” she said. “We gave you our children to serve the country, and they just — they were taken, you know, during sleeping, during the sleep time, and nobody knows anything else. And it's something that we are not — we cannot live with this.”