As Israel begins to receive hostages in the fragile Israel-Hamas truce, there is both relief and agony.
The October 7 atrocity does not end. Beyond the physical horrors of both October 7 and the ferocious multi-front war that has followed, Israelis and millions of Jews around the world continue to experience the collective psychological warfare. It began in the first moments when Hamas uploaded violent footage, live streaming their crimes against humanity in real-time, and comes newly into focus as the hostage release deal gets underway.
Twelve days after the initial attack, I flew to Israel to examine the bodies of the dead and bear witness to the genocidal violence prosecuted on countless civilians to an extraordinary level of depravity. I gathered testimony of eyewitnesses while they identified bodies mutilated of breasts and male genitalia, bodies found with impaled knives in the vagina, received decapitated bodies where the severed head had been impaled into its truncated torso, and sometimes even entire collections of decapitated heads.
I witnessed the testimony of women who had seen others gang-raped on the Nova festival site and then, while alive, brutally mutilated their breasts which were sliced off for sport. It was a violence that innumerable women were subjected to repeatedly as their cadavers revealed. As physician, I examined both the charred remains of bones and teeth and joined pathologists performing external autopsies of putrefied cadavers as doctors worked to identify and restore remains to families.
Over these next weeks, as the hostage release and prisoner exchange is drawn out over an agonising timeframe, the world will witness how Hamas exacts a maximum price for the hostages’ return, even as Israel entered the deal not knowing which hostages will return alive and which will return dead. Security experts are very guarded about the outlook.
The return of hostages also exposes Hamas for their own barbarism, even as they (and others) perversely lionize them as ‘resistance fighters’. The Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, in May 2024, underlined it was not possible for Hamas to be labelled terrorists when they are ‘resistance fighters’. Many in the Muslim majority world agree with that position.
With each hostage’s return, Hamas’ depravity becomes clearer still. Hamas may have wanted a ceasefire, but they certainly do not want the world to see the damning evidence of their crimes against humanity in keeping civilians (including children and infants) in barbaric captivity, subjected to torture, physical, psychological, sexual abuse, death threats, forced viewing of videos of Hamas perpetrated violence, and even surgery without anesthesia.
Through this conflict, Hamas’ systematised barbarity has pushed Islamists globally to greater extremes, indistinguishable from an age Islam refers to as the ‘Jahaliya’ – a pre-civilisational state devoid of enlightenment, defined by ignorance, hallmarked by barbarity, violence, cruelty, and inhumanity.
Additionally, through scale, ambition and strategy, both the October 7 attack and the foiled Operation Conquer The Galilee, Hamas has dispelled forever the idea that they are a mere ‘terror group’ and instead cemented Islamist jihadists as highly trained, heavily-armed, formal militaries of terrorists.
Hamas did not achieve this alone.
Hamas has been sustained during this war through the exploitation of international humanitarian infrastructure. Armies of Hamas terrorists survived on the hoarding and seizure of international aid and the profits of the black markets they fueled.
It is widely alleged that terrorists employed by United Nations Relief and Works Agency for ‘Palestine Refugees’ held hostages captive in UNRWA schools by UNRWA workers – Hamas terrorists. Further, it has also been alleged that UNRWA-funded facilities were exploited and devoted to Hamas military bases.
Under Hamas governance, healthcare infrastructure, schools, kindergartens and mosques – all financed by international aid – were accused of being deployed into preserving the Hamas mission. Palestinians who elected Hamas to power found themselves and their subsequent generations lacking even the basic choice of whether they subscribe to Islamist jihadism or not. Any opposition faced crushing punishment and often death as Gazan Palestinians themselves have bravely detailed to the Center of Peace Communications.
October 7 also unleashed the most remarkable and ongoing adoption of virulent global antisemitism under the guise of anti-Zionism (itself a form of antisemitism) and a callous exploitation of empathy for the Palestinian people erupting in protests around the world even as Palestinians themselves remain prisoner to Hamas Islamism into vehicles endorsing terror.
Renowned counter-terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins paints a bleak picture – as Hamas loses its valuable asset – of living hostages- and with it its bargaining powers, the likelihood of renewed conflict rises. Yet because of the Jewish and Israeli values of sanctity of human life, Israel will exchange over 1,000 security prisoners [convicted terrorists] for each returning hostage (most of whom being women, children, the sick, and elderly civilians). More prisoners will be released in the next phase of the ceasefire. Among these Palestinian prisoners are numerous serial killers, some sentenced with dozens of consecutive life sentences. In saving lives of the hostages, Israel is forced to release terrorists – the next architects of global jihad.
The Palestinians also continue to suffer enormously. In Gaza, those civilians who have been injured, killed, lost loved ones as well as their homes, businesses, and communities, have endured grave consequences because Hamas conceals itself within them and exploits all their civilian infrastructure – clearly seen as Hamas terrorists, well fed and once again heavily armed, swarm around the hostages during their release.
Israel has suffered deeply since October 7 and continually lives through an ongoing terror attack. Israel is a nation of Holocaust survivors, survivors of Bolshevik pogroms, Farhud pogroms in Iraq, and survivors of pogroms everywhere. The inter-generational trauma is unfathomable. Over time, Israel’s psychological warfare is only deepening and Israel’s anguish will split open wide as Israel sees the violence perpetrated to the returning hostages, whether they return home living or deceased.
Today’s pain is Israel’s. Much as the world still conspires with Islamists to both silence, deny, and erase Jewish suffering and say it isn’t so; much as the world denies the right of the State of Israel, the only Jewish state, to defend herself from genocide writ large, Israel’s pain is undeniable.
Yet as the world watches each week for the return of Israeli hostages, it is Islamists who pay heed. From the Sahel to Khorasan, from Dearborn to Cologne, from London to Sydney, Islamists have established October 7 atrocities as an extremely effective and paralyzing strategy not only against the Jewish State but also against others. The Western democratic, pluralistic world remains naïve of Islamism, both engulfed in and afraid of its empathy, not for the victims of Islamist warfare – the Jews, the Israelis, even the dual nationals still in Hamas captivity – but instead for the Islamist perpetrators. It is a matter of time before Islamists jihadists ensure tomorrow’s pain will be ours.
Diminishing tomorrow’s pain must be the world’s mission.
Dr. Qanta A. Ahmed, Senior Fellow, Independent Women’s Forum; Life Member, Council on Foreign Relations; X @MissDiagnosis
