400 Days of Silence: A World Unmoved by Hamas’ Hostages

Four hundred days. Four hundred interminable, unspeakable days since Hamas wrenched innocent men, women, and children from their homes and buried them in a shadowy, hostile silence. Four hundred days of ordinary lives brutally interrupted, of families hollowed out by the knowledge that their loved ones are somewhere beyond reach—held by a group whose very existence hinges on its capacity for hatred and its skill at inflicting misery. And yet, here we are, a world so appallingly indifferent, so paralysed by feeble platitudes, that these hostages have become invisible.

The Israeli hostages taken by Hamas—a list including not only Israelis but, shamefully, citizens of other nations, including the United Kingdom—remain mere names on a page, footnotes in a media cycle that has inexplicably relegated them to the periphery. The world’s silence is not benign; it is the silence of complicity. To remain silent as women and children are held hostage, as they languish in the hands of a brutal organisation, is to be an accessory to the horror.

What can be said of a society that can witness such a flagrant assault on the innocent and respond with little more than ambivalence? It is not ignorance that accounts for this shameful apathy. It is the moral torpor of a world that has learned to rationalise cruelty, that has begun to accept the outrageous notion that terrorism, in certain hands, can be legitimate—that, perhaps, some lives deserve to be wrecked, some innocents sacrificed on the altar of “resistance.”

There is a particularly grotesque irony in this. Many of the hostages are women and children—individuals who, by any decent human standard, represent the very essence of innocence. And yet, these women and children remain voiceless, denied even the dignity of recognition in the global conversation. In the eyes of Hamas, they are pawns—human shields to be used, abused, and displayed. And what has been the world’s response to this mediaeval barbarity? A shrug, a mutter about “complexities,” a few limp statements of concern. We have witnessed an appalling moral failure, one that stretches across governments, international bodies, and media outlets that should know better.

Among these hostages is a British citizen, a woman whose freedom has been stolen, whose life has been reduced to a bargaining chip in a perverse ideological war – Emily Damari. Where is the British government’s outrage? Where is the global community’s rallying cry? This is a citizen of a free nation, a woman held captive by a group that revels in its brutality. And yet, there is no groundswell of support, no loud and unified demand for her release. One has to wonder: is this indifference or cowardice? Or, worse still, is it a tacit acceptance that some hostages, simply by virtue of their nationality or ethnicity, are not worthy of the same attention?

Hamas, of course, is only emboldened by this silence. Every day that the world looks away, that it chooses to rationalise rather than condemn, Hamas finds new justification for its barbarism. It finds validation in the quiet acceptance of its tactics. This is a group that does not seek dialogue or justice but the suffering of the innocent. It is not driven by the noble ideals of liberation, despite the rhetoric it cloaks itself in, but by an unquenchable thirst for power and destruction.

For four hundred days, the world has allowed Hamas to keep these hostages in the dark, has allowed an organisation with blood on its hands to dictate the terms of moral discourse. It is nothing less than a surrender of human decency, a betrayal of every principle that supposedly underpins the international community.

It is high time that this silence is broken, that these hostages are not left to languish unseen and unheard. We must demand their release, loudly and unequivocally, without the nauseating equivocations and justifications that have tainted the discourse thus far. If we continue to look away, if we continue to downplay the horror of their captivity, then we, too, become culpable.

The hostages of Hamas deserve more than silence. They deserve more than our shameful inaction. They deserve their freedom, and they deserve it now.