The end of the ordeal of the Israeli hostages

When Witkoff took the stage, the crowd exploded with enthusiastic applause and chants of “Thank you, Trump!” But when he tried to mention Netanyahu’s name, his words were drowned in sarcasm that lasted long enough to see Kushner laughing uncomfortably behind him. He later lashed out at Netanyahu’s son, Yair, claiming, bizarrely, that the booing protesters were “financed by Qatar.” Some in the opposition even complained that the booing was rude. But the Israeli public follows the news. It knows that Netanyahu and his ministers have repeatedly obstructed and torpedoed previous attempts to return the hostages and end the war. Some ministers even voted against an earlier agreement to return children who were still being held in captivity. (This deal went into effect anyway.) It takes a level of extreme fanaticism, not to mention outright cruelty, to do so. The Israelis will not forget it soon.

For the hostages, a long and uncertain recovery process now begins. Over the weekend, I spoke by phone with Hagai Levin, who heads the medical team organizing the hostage families. “The feeling is nerve-racking,” he said, adding that many health experts working with released prisoners felt a kind of “ambivalence.” On the one hand, there is now a great deal of knowledge about how to manage the care of returned hostages. There will be, for example, a focus on trying to place hostages who have been in captivity together in the same hospital, because of their need to remain close and provide support to each other. On the other hand, Levin told me, “This is the first time we’ve had people in two years. We can’t stick to the protocol.” Although the group of twenty people appeared to be in relatively good health upon their release, some of them suffered severe physical attacks. Some of them were left alone for long periods. Alon Ohel, the twenty-four-year-old pianist who was kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival, was held in a tunnel under Gaza, along with three other kidnappers. These three were released last winter, during a recent hostage exchange. O’Hale was left alone, and has reportedly been isolated since then.

Adding to the uncertainty is the issue of medical changes the hostages have experienced over time, Levin said. For example, a prisoner who lost forty pounds may have lost eighty pounds but regained some of it before being released. During the past two years, some prisoners may have experienced deterioration, or even failure, of vital organs. “In the early days, people thought that since the hostages were walking and talking, maybe the situation wasn’t so bad,” Levin said at a news conference. But he added: “We realized with the passage of time that there are internal injuries such as kidney problems, neurological problems, and heart problems that may increase, including accelerated aging.”

However, Levine chose to focus on the hopeful side of this release. For one thing he told me everyone The surviving hostages will return home. This means that those released will not face the burden and guilt associated with knowing that others have been left behind; Nor will they face the impossible prospect of becoming immediate advocates and openly fighting for the release of others. “This gives us an opportunity that didn’t exist before, when they were always in the shadow of other hostages and couldn’t devote themselves to their rehabilitation,” Levin said.

Speaking at a rally in southern Israel before his release, Sagi Dekel Chen, who spent nearly five hundred days in captivity, addressed relatives waiting for their loved ones: “You are allowed to smile and hug, but, please, not too forcefully.” “Don’t spread information about them, because they haven’t been told anything. Don’t rush to tell them how much you suffered and how much you fought for them. Their burden is heavy, and they already know.” Then he turned to his former fellow captives. “Brothers. Finally, you are allowed to break everything you’ve been holding on to. Release everything, from your bellies, everything you couldn’t do there at night on a concrete floor surrounded by friends and kidnappers.”

With the hostages being reunited with their families, Israel was preparing to release nearly two thousand Palestinian prisoners and detainees, whose release it guaranteed in return. Two hundred and fifty of them were serving life sentences, many for carrying out attacks that killed Israeli civilians. The second phase of the ceasefire agreement – which will address the future governance of Gaza, the disarmament of Hamas, and the timeline and extent of the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Strip – remains unspecified, and is likely to take several more weeks to negotiate. A summit on the subject is scheduled to begin later Monday in Egypt. At Trump’s request, Netanyahu received a last-minute invitation from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Axios reported. He refused to attend, citing the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah as an excuse. He may have thought that it would not serve him well to be seen present while a group of Arab and Islamic countries, along with others, chart the contours of a future Palestinian state – something he adamantly insisted would never happen.

Across the fence, in Gaza, Palestinians have been traveling with their belongings for several days, since preparations for a ceasefire were announced. Many returned to their homes over the weekend, to find them under piles of rubble. Izz al-Din Shehab, a doctor based in Gaza, lost more than seventy members of his extended family. On Saturday, he wrote on social media about his homecoming experience. “Today we learned that our homes, our land, and our entire neighborhood, every home belonging to our family and neighbors, have been completely wiped out,” he wrote. “We were victims of genocide sparked by Hamas from inside our homes, only for the Israeli army to attack us and unleash its full brutality on civilians in Gaza, while Hamas fighters disappeared into their tunnels.”