Hamas abducts about 150 Israelis

Families fear for loved ones’ safety

JERUSALEM — Gaya Kalderon last heard from half her family at 8:26 a.m. on Saturday.

“They are here,” her sister, Sahar, 16, wrote in a text message.

“Who is?,” said Gaya, 21. “We’re hiding from them,” Sahar said. “We left the house.”

“Where are you?,” Gaya said. “Where are you going?”

There was no reply.

It wasn’t until Sunday that a terrified Kalderon saw any sign of her missing relatives, on social media. A video appeared of an Israeli child being shoved down a path by Palestinian militants.

“I am looking on Instagram and I see a video,” Kalderon recalled. “And it’s my brother.”

Erez, 12, and four other members of the Kalderon family are feared to be among an estimated 150 Israelis, many of them civilians, taken hostage by Palestinian militants during the broadest invasion of Israeli territory in 50 years. About 800 other Israelis were killed, according to a government statement.

The hostages were seized from homes in towns along Israel’s border with Gaza — including the Kalderons’ small village of Kibbutz Nahal Oz — as well as from military bases and an enormous outdoor dance party.

They include civilians, soldiers, people with disabilities, children, grandparents, and even a 9-month-old baby. The hostages are also believed to include at least one Palestinian resident of Israel, a bus driver who spent the night near the outdoor party after driving Israelis there, his family said.

The capture of so many Israelis by Palestinian militants has taken the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into uncharted territory — not only in the sheer number of hostages, but in the dire threats Hamas is making against them.

On Monday night, the Hamas military wing warned that it would execute a civilian hostage every time an Israeli airstrike hits Gazans “in their homes without warning.”

Already, Israel has responded to the deadly assault by Hamas with a counterattack on the remaining gunmen inside Israel and an unusually intense series of strikes on Gaza, killing about 687 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities.

Hamas may have hoped that taking dozens of captives would ease its chances of pursuing a broad prisoner exchange with Israel, said Eyal Hulata, who served as Israel’s national security adviser until January.

But for Israel, in the throes of one of the worst disasters in its history, now is not the time to even consider such an exchange, Hulata argued.

Hulata allowed that some Israeli captives might be killed in an ongoing Israeli offensive. But that would probably be Hamas’s responsibility for “placing them as human shields,” he said.

“I want to bring everyone home. But we cannot do that as long as the other side thinks they can get away with this,” said Hulata.

In the past, Egypt and Qatar played key roles as mediators between Israel and Hamas as the two foes negotiated over captives. But for now, the sides were only “at the stage of passing messages along,” rather than direct talks to free prisoners, said Yaron Blum, a veteran Israeli intelligence official who served for five years as the country’s point person for captured and missing Israelis.

“My assessment is that they are passing along this message: Hamas is responsible, and that if one hair on the heads of those elderly, women, babies, soldiers is touched — Israel will go ballistic,” Blum said.