One year after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, hostage families feel betrayed

There will be two competing ceremonies in Israel commemorating the Oct. 7 anniversary of the barbaric Hamas attack that murdered 1,200 Israelis and took 250 hostages.

The official ceremony on Monday will be a prerecorded TV event without any audience — from fear that live attendees would jeer the government’s failure to prevent the massacre or bring the hostages home. The other, on the eve of Oct. 6 in a Tel Aviv park, was organized by family members of the remaining 101 captives who bitterly accuse Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of abandoning their loved ones and condemning them to further torture and death.

The struggle between these two memorials reflects the political and military battles triggered by the tragedy of Oct. 7, 2023 — battles that continue to upend Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, and could produce a war between Israel and Iran that draws in the United States.

At the most basic level, the warring ceremonies reflect Israel’s internal struggle over how the post-Oct. 7 military conflicts can — or should — end and what role diplomacy can play.

» READ MORE: Netanyahu’s betrayal of remaining hostages could drag U.S. into a regional Mideast war | Trudy Rubin

“We won’t let the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] escape the title he’s earned — ‘Mr. Abandonment,’” insisted Merav Svirsky, sister of murdered hostage Itay Svirsky, to the newspaper Ha’aretz.

Most of the hostage families are convinced Netanyahu has refused the ceasefire-for-hostages deals godfathered by the Biden administration because right-wing extremist members of his governing coalition have threatened to bring down his government if he does so. If he then lost power in new elections, he would be facing potential jail time on corruption charges.

And the Israeli leader is also holding off on diplomacy in hopes that his pal Donald Trump will be reelected in November and support his military-only policy to the hilt.

“Netanyahu is using these hostages for his political survival,” I was told by phone, in one of the saddest interviews I’ve done from Israel, by 52-year-old artist, Sharone Lifschitz, whose 83-year-old father, Oded, is still a hostage. “There were plenty of opportunities to return the hostages, but he used them to stay in power. He knows when the war ends, his power will end.”

Netanyahu’s insistence that only force can free the hostages is clearly false — while 105 were freed during a cease-fire deal last November, only a handful have been rescued by the Israeli Defense Forces. On the other hand, dozens have been killed by Israeli military strikes or murdered in captivity, and three escaped captives were shot dead by Israeli soldiers.

Although Hamas has impeded U.S.-led negotiations, Netanyahu has repeatedly undermined progress on another hostage deal, backtracking even after assuring U.S. officials he was aboard. Meantime, his government has repeatedly refused to produce any plans for “the day after” fighting ends in Gaza. Instead, he insists that Israel must first achieve “total victory” over Hamas, and now over Iran’s proxy group, Hezbollah, in Lebanon.

Ever more clearly, Netanyahu tacitly supports the ideology of his most radical messianic cabinet members, Finance Minister Itamar Ben Gvir (who has a special portfolio effectively giving him civilian control of the West Bank) and National Security Minister Bezalel Smotrich. They believe that “total victory” requires permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and potentially a reoccupation of southern Lebanon.

Never mind that the country’s military recognizes such a goal is not achievable, as both Hamas and Hezbollah are based on an ideology that will only be strengthened by further occupation. As I witnessed in 1982-83 as a foreign correspondent in Lebanon, Hezbollah was created as a resistance force to Israel’s occupation of that region. Israel was forced to withdraw after 18 years of occupation in order to staunch its constant loss of troops.

Never has the phrase “those who forget history are condemned to repeat it” been more relevant than to any amnesiac’s plans to occupy south Lebanon again.

But resistant to history, Smotrich and Ben Gvir are also open about their desire for Israel to reoccupy and rebuild Jewish settlements in northern Gaza, while pushing the remaining residents there down to the south. There, these internal refugees would join more than one million internally displaced Palestinians living in horrendous conditions in makeshift housing, short of food and water and medical treatment. New war casualties would add to the 41,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli bombs and troops over the last year, the bulk of them civilians, mainly women and children.

Ben Gvir has told the Israeli press that the war presents an “opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza.” In other words, enforced expulsion.

Never mind that such a compelled “migration” would be a huge violation of international law. Egypt, across the border from Gaza, and already home to several million Sudanese refugees, will not take in one million plus Gazans who don’t want to become refugees in Egypt themselves.

This plan all but guarantees Hamas 2.0 will grow out of Gaza’s wreckage.

Moreover Smotrich and Ben Gvir have the same plan for the West Bank, where violent attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinian villages are encouraging the development of new Hamas cells. By supporting this violence, and ending any hopes for a future Palestinian state alongside Israel, Ben Gvir hopes to spur “migration” of West Bank Palestinians to Jordan.

These ministers think, wrongly, that they can reinstate Israeli rule in Gaza and effectively annex occupied territories without inciting a permanent civil war within a Greater Israel. They are deluded.

Such madness could also undermine the treaties with Jordan and Egypt that have provided peace on Israel’s borders for decades. Yet Netanyahu doesn’t reign in his fanatics.

Even more tragic, the “total victory” thinking wastes the very real chance that Israel’s military successes could provide leverage for strategic diplomacy in Gaza, Lebanon, and the Mideast region that, in turn, could provide an opportunity for real peace.

In Lebanon, many citizens are fed up with Hezbollah’s virtual takeover of the Lebanese government. Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah’s top leaders could provide an opening for a reorganization of Lebanese politics that would weaken the group’s stranglehold over the country, and strengthen the Lebanese army. It could also provide a new chance for the implementation of U.N. Resolution 1701 that required Hezbollah to pull back 18 miles from Lebanon’s border, replaced by an armed international force.

Equally crucial, moderate Arab gulf regimes, including Saudi Arabia, are ready to help rebuild Gaza, and Lebanon — and even provide peacekeepers — if Israel agrees to a “day after” deal for Gaza that provides a political horizon for a future Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Such a strategic vision would help Israel unite much of the Arab world against Iranian efforts to encourage violent Arab proxies to attack Israel. It would isolate Iran in a way that it is still not isolated. As Jordanian foreign minister Ayman Safadi said last week, “I can tell you unequivocally that all of us [the 57 Arab and Muslim countries that are members of the Muslim Arab Committee] are willing, right now, to guarantee the security of Israel in the context of Israel ending the occupation...”

This is a prospect that should be tested, not wasted.

Never has the phrase ‘those who forget history are condemned to repeat it’ been more relevant than to any amnesiac’s plans to occupy south Lebanon again.

As Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid made clear in a statement last week, “Alongside a military response, we must also develop an overall regional political strategy that turns military success into strategic change, and we must not forget for one moment the urgent need to bring our hostages home.”

And, as hostage sister Svirsky declared bitterly to Haaretz, “Today, there’s no such thing as a complete victory or total resolution. There will be a deal in Gaza and in the North [in Lebanon]. The question is, how many lives will it cost, soldiers, civilians, and, most importantly, the hostages, who are currently left without protection.”

On the evening of Oct. 7, that deal is what the hostage families will be hoping and praying for. So far there is no sign that Netanyahu will listen to their pleas.