UA glimmer of hope began to dispel the darkness of Gaza on November 24. The first releases of hostages captured during the massive Hamas attack on October 7 allowed twenty-four people, including thirteen Israelis, to escape hell. Elderly women and children were finally returned to their families, along with eleven Asian farm workers. The October terrorist operation gave rise to the worst massacres of Israeli civilians in the history of the Jewish state.
Further releases are expected to follow, if the agreement reached through Qatar is respected. They are imperative. None of the people currently imprisoned by Hamas, including eight Franco-Israelis, should depend on the fate of weapons or laborious negotiations to regain the freedom they deserve. It should be remembered that in armed conflicts, hostage-taking is prohibited and constitutes a war crime. Nothing can ever justify it, and this strategy of the worst ends up disqualifying the movement claiming to embody a Palestinian national cause that it has now drowned in horror and blood.
Dantesque destructions
The liberations of November 24 were made possible by the respect of a truce in Gaza, after weeks of a war which sowed death and destruction like never before. This truce must be preserved to obtain the other releases planned so far, and until the last of the hostages can finally leave this narrow strip of land. The silence of the guns must also allow the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians trapped in the fighting, driven from neighborhoods reduced to rubble, and deprived of everything, to finally access humanitarian aid which is still sorely lacking.
It is to be hoped that this truce can also be used by the Israeli authorities to take stock of the terrible destruction justified by the desire to eradicate Hamas, an objective incompatible in the immediate future with the pursuit of liberations. There is little doubt that the massive Israeli response dealt an already severe blow to the Islamist militia and its infrastructure, which is often melted into the urban fabric, which constitutes another violation of the laws of war. However, its complete disappearance is still not in sight, and it is not certain that it will be obtained by subjecting the south of Gaza to the punishment already inflicted on the north.
Weakened, Hamas nonetheless continues to claim successes. He thus intends to make the most of the compensation obtained in exchange for the release of hostages: that of thirty-nine Palestinian women and adolescents held in Israeli prisons, while the Hebrew State continues to resort to so-called “administrative” detentions, without charges or trials, which deprive detainees of their rights.
In welcoming the first releases of hostages, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, was right to recall how necessary it was to return to the path of negotiation, and how essential it was to revive the two-state solution, the creation of a Palestine alongside Israel. Because the Islamist militia builds its hegemony over the Palestinians on despair, its most effective disarmament remains political and not military.