After speaking on the phone with Benjamin Netanyahu, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese defended his plan to recognize a Palestinian state by taking a swipe at his Israeli counterpart: “He again reiterated to me what he has said publicly as well, which is to be in denial about the consequences that are occurring for innocent people.”
If Albanese wants to talk about “denial about the consequences that are occurring for innocent people,” let’s talk about it.
This morning, the Israeli Health Ministry (which, unlike the Gaza Health Ministry, very much exists) released a report on the treatment of 12 Israeli hostages who were freed earlier this year from Hamas captivity. Because Albanese is so concerned about the suffering of the innocent, and presumably even he agrees the hostages are innocent, perhaps this will break through the wall of indifference he and other Western leaders have constructed around themselves regarding the lives of Israelis.
The report is in Hebrew, but Israeli media have provided some insight for English-speakers.
The hostages came into Gaza with injuries from their kidnappings. Those wounds were often either untreated or incorrectly treated, both of which worsened the injuries. The hostages were kept either in solitary or overcrowded dungeons, usually with ceilings lower than five feet high. Groups of up to six hostages were held in 2-square-meter cells. They were barely permitted to bathe, and basic women’s hygiene products were withheld from them.
If it’s starvation specifically that Albanese is worried about, he ought to be bothered by the report’s findings. On their better days, the hostages were given a single meal of some pita and insect-infested rice. But they often went days without food. When they were given water to drink, it was usually contaminated. In addition to loss of up to 40 percent of their body mass, hostages’ lack of nutrition caused scurvy, bleeding gums, and bone decay.
The 12 hostages included in the report spoke of sexual harassment and humiliation.
Physically, the Jerusalem Post reports, “the long-term consequences of such treatment include irreversible nerve damage, impairment of daily functioning, chronic pain, impaired fertility in women, hearing loss, and skeletal system damage.”
Mentally, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety were common among the hostages.
The Health Ministry will be sending the report on to the Red Cross, which has not visited the hostages and does not seem likely to do so without some kind of intervention on the part of the international community. This treatment is widespread and intentional and—crucially—confirmed in the individual cases.
As I explained yesterday, there is no longer any disputing that French President Emmanuel Macron’s announcement that his country would recognize the “state of Palestine,” in conjunction with his and other European leaders’ one-sided pressure on Israel, sabotaged the cease-fire deal that would have brought 10 living hostages home.
Which means that every leader who followed Macron in announcing a plan to recognize a Palestinian state—Mark Carney of Canada, Albanese of Australia, Keir Starmer of the UK—did so knowing the price that would be paid by the hostages.
The remaining hostages, including those who would have been freed had Europe not intervened on Hamas’s behalf, may not survive. But even those who do survive will be tortured, starved, and likely exposed to sexual mistreatment of one kind or another. Every added day of captivity brings them closer to death through painful and utterly inhuman treatment at the hands of Hamas monsters.
To join in the wave of “Palestine” recognition, knowing this, means several Western leaders have made a calculation: They can live with the deaths of the hostages, even when they are partially on their conscience. Such people may not be Hamasnik monsters themselves, but they are at the very least monster-adjacent.
Furthermore, this whole situation exposes something important about the international community. Those who claim to care for the wellbeing of Palestinians in Gaza are not displaying empathy. They are not displaying generosity of spirit or anything of the kind. They are, as they have explained time and again, acting out of domestic political pressure. That is certainly a legitimate driver of political policymaking, but it is not a display of morality or decency.
Were the “humanitarian” activists to advocate with equal force for the hostages, they might be saved. But the rest of the world doesn’t care, and politics is a numbers game: There simply aren’t enough Jews in these countries. That itself is a vicious cycle, and one the callous cowards of the West are unbothered by as well.
