Hostages Killed

“It wasn’t the first time that several of the roughly two hundred and fifty hostages seized by Hamas terrorists on October 7th had been killed. Just this June, four other hostages were pronounced dead, including two over the age of eighty; their bodies are still being held in Gaza. I went to the vigils that followed those deaths. They were sizable, charged, and emotional—but nowhere near the outpouring of public fury unleashed this time around.” Ruth Margalit in The New Yorker: Grief and Fury in Israel. “Hamas’s killing of six hostages in Gaza, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly delayed a ceasefire deal, has provoked major protests and a renewed sense of crisis.”

+ Franklin Foer in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Hamas’s Devastating Murder of Hersh Goldberg-Polin. “After his kidnapping, Hersh became the best-known of the hostages in the U.S. His American parents were unafraid of confronting their pain over and over, in conversations with whichever reporter or politicians agreed to meet them. Like mythological characters, they were doomed to relive their worst day—and doomed to experience it with clarity that never dulled. And despite their pain, they eloquently expressed empathy for the suffering of Palestinian parents too.”

+ CNN: “With its announcement that militants guarding Israeli hostages in the buildings and tunnels of Gaza had ‘new instructions’ to kill them If Israeli troops closed in, Hamas signalled the opening of a chilling new chapter in an already brutal war.”