Reuters World News - The hostages and the grassroots diplomacy to free them

Episode Date: October 21, 2023

On Part Three of our series on the Israel-Hamas war, our journalists examine the challenges around freeing the hostages held in Gaza amid a grassroots campaign by family members to bring them back. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A young woman looks into the camera. She appears exhausted, a bit dazed. Her arm's in a sling. It's not clear where she is, and of course that's the point. Her name is Miehashem. She's a 21-year-old French-Israeli being held hostage by Hamas. The hostages Hamas captured in its shock assault on Israel have added another dimension to the war.

complicating Israel's military plan in Gaza, putting pressure on governments around the world to do something and scrambling diplomatic lines. For the families of those being held, it's a nightmare with no immediate end. On this special episode, we'll talk to those families and examine the challenge of negotiating the release of their loved ones as the grassroots campaign to bring them home grows around the world.

I'm Kim Vinal in Cyprus. And I'm Jonah Green in New York. As we were recording this podcast, we learned that two American hostages, a mother and a daughter, have been freed. Judith and Natalie Ranan safely returned to an Israeli military base late Friday. They'd been taken from the Nahal-Az Kibbutz near the Gaza border.

They are believed to be from the Chicago suburb of Evanston. They're the first hostages to be freed. A foreign ministry spokesman said, Qatar hopes dialogue will lead to the release of all civilian hostages from every nationality. We'll delve more into Qatar's role later in the show. I could hear my youngest, who was on the phone with me with his phone, saying, don't take me, I'm too young. And that was the last part of him.

Renana Gohm's two children aged 12 and 16 were at home with their father in the near-Oz kibbutz when Hamas gunmen rampaged through Israeli communities. they're believed to have been kidnapped. Renana says before all this happened, she had always taught her kids to be empathetic to the plight of those living in Gaza. But now, she's lost hope that the two sides can reconcile their differences.

And if I thought until a week or so ago that I had neighbours that I could make peace with, I'm sorry, but I don't believe it anymore. This is inhumane. I'm sorry, you can't keep. Children, babies, women and elderly people hostage. This is the unimaginable reality of so many Israelis right now. James McKenzie is our bureau chief for Israel and the Palestinian territories.

He's in Jerusalem and is running Reuters' ongoing coverage. James, thanks so much for talking with us. First off, what do we know so far about the hostages? We know that several of them have other nationalities. They're French, they're Americans, they're Italians. We know they're held by Hamas, and also Islamic Jihad said it had taken a number. In public, at least, they don't know where they are. And in all likelihood, it seems that they must be very hard to find,

given the sort of network of tunnels and the places there are for Hamas to hide these people in Gaza. And, you know, they're no doubt spread out in different locations, which makes mounting any kind of rescue operations. operation, very difficult. What about negotiations? What reporting do we have about those? Basically, there's behind the scenes efforts from people like Qatar and the Gulf to sort of work something out. There's a possible intersection of this issue with the issue of getting humanitarian aid into Gaza. The problem is, of course, Israel will not negotiate with Hamas

about this kind of thing at all under these circumstances. Previous hostage issues have been, you know, they've had sort of individual or one or two hostages kept for years. To take the example of the soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was seized in 2006, and he was held for five years. And in the end, they ended up exchanging him for over a thousand Palestinian prisoners. That kind of thing is not really conceivable for 200 people. I mean, 200 people is a massive number of hostages, you know. I mean, for Israel, completely unprecedented, but even on a world scale, you know, just an enormous number of people taken into captivity like that.

So the kind of conventional responses don't really apply. Israel is intent is planning a ground operation, which is going to be complicated by these hostages, because they're going to be spread out around Gaza City, probably in some of the tunnel network that exists there that Hamas has built up over the years. It's obviously going to be very dangerous for them. They're their hostages, after all. And Hamas has threatened to kill a hostage if Israel kept targeting civilians. They haven't done that as far as anyone can see.

We're seeing the families in Israel a lot on the television. They must release them immediately and then make the war. This is Hadass Kaleran, whose two children aged 12 and 16, along with her elderly mother, were taken in the same kibbutz raid. as Renana Goem's children. You can't make wars at expense of children and babies. The families of the hostages

obviously are extremely worried and concerned about what's going to happen to their relatives once this ground operation starts whenever that is. And it's really going to be a very difficult balancing act for an Israeli government

which feels on the one hand that it has to launch this ground operation to eradicate Hamas, but it's a very difficult. It's also aware of the impact on general public opinion, the families, you know, how it looks, and also it's concern for these hostages. Begging the world to bring my baby back home. That's Karin Shem, mother of Miehashem, the French-Israeli hostage in Gaza.

She's one of the family members of those missing who have risen to the fore to bring awareness to those who vanished in the attack. I tried to call him, and he didn't answer, and I texted, and I still haven't had any response. Israeli American Rachel Goldberg typically doesn't check her phone on Shabbat, the Jewish Day of Rest. But on October 7th, when she heard reports of a possible incursion from Hamas militants on Israeli soil, she turned on her phone. She wanted to check on her 23-year-old son, Hirsch. That's when she saw two messages.

The first one said, I love you, and the second one said, I'm sorry. Hirsch had gone to the Nature Party Music Festival with a friend. That's where 260 people were killed by Hamas militants. Eventually, survivors of the massacre contacted Goldberg and her husband with news that they had seen Hirsch get into a Hamas pickup truck with other hostages. I don't know that he's alive. I don't know that he made it. She says she and her family have been in touch with Israeli and U.S. authorities, but little progress has been made.

This is the situation. Six members of my family right now are being held in Gaza. Yafat Zyler's family was also in the near Oz Kabuts. There's a nine-month baby and a three-year-old child and my aunt has Parkinson's disease. I want them back. We all want our family back. A video shared with Ziler that Reuters has seen but not verified. appears to show her cousin and two children being led away by armed men. And I cannot think about them over there. I don't know if the baby was fed.

I don't know if he got his diaper. He doesn't eat much food, you know, normal food. It needs his formula still. I really... I want to go back to Friday. You know? I want to close my eyes and this was all the A nightmare. Walking through New York recently, I actually saw a picture of Yafat Ziler's three-year-old

nephew, Ariel. He was on a poster taped to a streetlight near Union Square. And there he was, just a smiling little boy with a shock of red hair. Above him, the word, kidnapped. All over New York, Israel and other cities around the world, you'll see these flyers. This one said, take a photo of this poster and share it. Please help bring them home alive. Which speaks to a certain grassroots element at play here, and it's not just from the families. As governments from around the world hold high-level talks with their foreign counterparts, concerned citizens are doing whatever they can. Right now, you're in the middle of what we call the war room. Karin Nahon is the head of the civilian missing war room, a collection of tech professionals in Tel Aviv who have set aside their private sector jobs

to try to help locate the missing Israelis. Since the attack, nearly 500 volunteers there have been analyzing the videos posted to social media by Hamas militants. And using cutting-edge technology, including artificial intelligence, facial and voice recognition,

they tried to identify the missing or confirm the dead. We were able to find the status of more than hundreds of people here. In fact, we became the hub for the security forces, for the government, Nahon says that they've been sending this intelligence to Israeli government agencies.

She gave one example of how her researchers were able to identify one man who was missing. There was a video of a man sitting when Hamas soldiers are above him, and one of the things that we notice is his underwear. It was a very special underwear. So the people from the video, from the analysis of the video, took this and started to match that to hundreds of thousands of movies that we have inside the Hamas. And after like two days, we had a match. Obviously, these volunteers who work around the clock for free have seen some terrible things in combing through all this footage. Nahon says they've learned to detach themselves to do the work.

It's difficult. It's very difficult. emotionally, you create a kind of an alienation during the time, but we had this one moment that everybody broke. On Friday, we did a kiddush here entering to the Shabbat. We took wine and we sang a little bit. And once somebody was starting to sing, everybody were, I think there was not even one eye that kept on and was dry because, you know, we work all day and we kind of maintain a kind of a distance.

You have to. This is the way that you protect yourself as a human being. And there was at this point that you returned to be a human being and where everybody were like, work like, it's difficult. It's not easy. James, it seems like the families have become a sort of emotional diplomacy that is forcing the issue to stay top of mind for governments.

I would say so, yeah. There's certainly quite a well-organized campaign to make sure these people, the hostages aren't forgotten, that the families have organized themselves together. They give interviews to the media. They talk about their relatives who are being held hostage. And they're trying to make sure that, yeah, the issue isn't forgotten or just slips down the agenda because they're aware that the more it's talked about, the more it's an issue that governments will have to take into consideration. Ultimately, the calculation which Israel will

have to make is when it launches this ground operation, how far will it be constrained by the possibility, indeed the likelihood that it will harm inadvertently these hostages? But it's not something that the government as a whole has really sort of spoken on or announced its opinion. Right. They haven't clearly stated that we will do everything we can to avoid killing hostages as we go in. No, no, nothing like they. They've just demanded that Hamas give them back. Because one sort of risk is that these hostages are used to kind of human shield sort of thing. If they said we won't bomb where they are, then obviously that's the sort of invitation to put them somewhere that you don't want to get bombed. So they're...

There aren't really any good options in this one. It's a very, very tough set of choices that they're facing. That set of impossible choices historically has been a feature of hostage negotiations. We wanted to learn a bit more about the strategy involved, but also the political peril facing governments. Ashad Mohammed has been covering foreign policy for nearly 30 years. So taking hostages, it's a way to extract benefits from your... adversary, often in the form of ransom payments or prisoner exchanges, that you can't achieve by force. So to take the current example of Hamas's taking of hostages in Gaza, Hamas does not have the military

might to impose its will on Israel. It doesn't have the ability to send in special forces to break Palestinian prisoners out of Israeli jails. But it does have the ability to take hostages, as it showed on October the 7th. So it can now use them as bargaining chips. But the question, of course, is who will bargain with Hamas? I once read a New York Times analysis from like 30 years ago that said governments facing a hostage situation usually start out sounding like Clint Eastwood. We're not going to negotiate with terrorists, make my day, but they almost always end up negotiating. It's a classic dilemma. You don't want to encourage this behavior, but on the other hand, you don't want to suffer the political price of not getting your citizens out. Even if you have the military might to try to deter it, it's very hard to free people. I mean, one of the things that truly contributed to Jimmy Carter's defeat in the 1980 election in the United States was the U.S. government's failed effort to free the American hostages held in Iran.

helicopter crashed in the desert in a dust storm. I think about a half dozen American soldiers died. And it was a catastrophe. They didn't get the hostages out. The United States looked impotent and incompetent. This is a really hard problem to solve. And therefore, nine times out of ten, you end up negotiating. As countries and volunteers banned together, one nation aside from the U.S. that has emerged as a mediator in this conference, is Qatar. From the beginning of this crisis, Qatar has been engaging in talks with both Hamas and Israel in trying to negotiate the release of some of the hostages.

Andrew Mills is in the capital, Doha. Andrew, why has Qatar taken on the role of mediator here? How do they see themselves in the region? You know, Qatar's a very small country. It's the size of Connecticut. And it's got two very giant, very powerful neighbors, Saudi Arabia, one side and Iran on the other side. It requires Qatar to do things that get it support of other powers. We often say Qatar sort of punches above its weight in terms of foreign policy.

And so they have things like the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East here in Qatar, which helps maintain the security in this neighborhood. At the same time, Qatar also hosts groups like the Taliban, Hamas, and others, and they have political offices here, and Qatar maintains an open line to those groups that are adversaries to the West. This allows Qatar to go between Western powers and their adversaries that Western powers don't talk to directly. By providing that kind of function, Qatar matters in a way to Western countries that they wouldn't otherwise. And we can't forget how important this military base is to maintaining Qatar's security in this region. So it sounds like Qatar is trying to be this Switzerland of the Middle East.

Yeah, I mean, that phrase is used a lot for Qatar. I mean, Qatar has been really sort of flexing its mediator muscles recently. Qatar has been mediating between the United States and Venezuela. they've mediated between the United States and Iran. And now we think they're playing a very significant role mediating between Israel and Hamas on the issue of hostages. So this is also a key part of their foreign policy to play this mediator rule. Some of the hostages are foreigners

and others have dual nationality. How does that impact the negotiation process here when you've got, you know, many other nations that have a vested interest in seeing their people released. Contra's ruling Amir has taken all sorts of phone calls from international leaders in the last week. The Netherlands, the UK, Canada, Italy, many more countries have been having conversations directly with the Amir. I don't know, but my guess is that those conversations are about these dual nationals who are held in Gaza. Qatar led this negotiation between the

United States and Iran over the release of five American prisoners for five Iranian prisoners. Those negotiations took, we think, up to 18 months, if not longer. And the urgency that we're seeing here in the last two weeks and the conversations that are going on with between Qatar and foreign leaders, I think suggests that this is at an entirely different level. And the urgent need to try to continue mediating on the potential release of hostages is huge. It's also, I mean, it may be about emotion. It may also be about trying to get two adversaries on the same page. and to get those two adversaries, if you get them on the same page on hostages or prisoners, then maybe there's a potential to get them on the same page with other things,

like potentially a ceasefire or humanitarian goods. And I think that's a really important part of what's going on here, is that it's about hostages, of course, but it's also about what might come next in terms of potential negotiations between these two major adversaries. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much to James McKenzie, Andrew Mills, Arshad Muhammad, and all the families for speaking with us

on this incredibly complicated and difficult topic. Our podcast team is made up of myself and Kim Vennel, as well as producers Chris Waljasper, Tara Oaks, and David Spencer. Joshua Summers is our maestro sound designer. Carmel Crimmons is our senior producer and Lila de Cretzer is the editor in charge. Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast player or download the Reuters app.