As battle for Gaza rages, families of hostages wait with trepidation
Abbey Onn lost her aunt and a young cousin when Hamas attackers rampaged through Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7. Now Onn is worried about what will happen to three other family members taken hostage that day as Israel pounds Gaza City in a bid to end Hamas' control of the Gaza Strip.
She wants the world to remember that Ofer Kalderon and his children Sahar, 16, and Erez, 12, are caught in the crossfire.
“As long as they are hostage, we're all hostage,” Onn says. “And we need them home so that whatever is happening there can be solved. I don't think it's a simple solution, but you can't hold hostages and fight a war at the same time.”
As the Israeli military tightens its grip around Gaza City, friends and family of the roughly 240 hostages held by Hamas fear their loved ones will be an afterthought for the politicians and generals directing the campaign. Hamas on Monday released video of the first hostage confirmed to have died in captivity.
With much of northern Gaza flattened and faceto-face battles underway,
the question of how to safely free the captives is becoming more urgent. Israel's twin goals of crushing Hamas and freeing the hostages are about to collide.
How to balance waging war and rescuing hostages?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the goal of the assault on Gaza is to prevent future attacks on Israel by destroying Hamas and ensuring it can never again govern the territory.
On the other side, Hamas is reluctant to release
the hostages because they are useful as human shields and offer leverage in squeezing concessions from Israel, says Justin Crump, a former British Army tank commander and CEO of Sibylline, a London-based strategic advisory firm.
Any rescue operation would be risky because the militants are holding their captives in secret locations, probably underground tunnels, where they can ambush Israeli soldiers and inflict heavy casualties, Crump says.
“The Israelis want the hostages, but it's not the sole purpose of this operation. And they're not going to be held hostage by the hostages themselves, if that makes sense..,” he says. “They've got to focus on their most important objective.”
But with the Israeli military now claiming that Hamas no longer controls Gaza, Israel may soon be willing to negotiate for the return of the hostages, says Nomi Bar-Yaacov, an associate fellow in the international security program at Chatham House, a Londonbased economic and global affairs think tank.
“I think we're at a turning moment,” she says. “I don't think Israel will achieve all of their military targets, but it means that that's achieved a serious chunk of them. And therefore, I think, this is the time when a deal will have to be made, and the sooner the better.”
Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an Israeli military spokesman, says the bombardment was necessary to crush Hamas and put pressure on the militants to release the hostages. Asked whether the attack on Gaza was putting the hostages at greater risk, Netanyahu said last week that Israel was “taking that into consideration.”
“There's no one who wants to get our hostages back more than us,” he told ABC News.