The Journal. - The Hostage Crisis in Gaza

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

More than a week after Hamas militants launched a deadly attack on Israel, the fate of around 200 hostages held captive in Gaza is unclear. Direct lines of communication with Hamas are difficult, but two countries in the region have positioned themselves as key intermediaries: Qatar and Turkey. WSJ’s Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson on what we know about who was taken and how the backchannel diplomacy is working.  Further Listening: - For Palestinians Trapped in Gaza, There’s No Way Out   - The War Between Israel and Hamas  Further Reading: - Dozens of Countries Scramble to Identify More Than 150 Citizens Held Hostage in Gaza  - ‘I’m Not a Diplomat…I’m a Mom.’ The American Parents Thrust Into the Israeli Hostage Crisis.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Saturday, October 7th, as Hamas militants stormed into Israel, Rachel Goldberg heard emergency sirens. She turned on her phone to see if her son, Hirsch Goldberg-Polin, had been in touch. She found two text messages from him. One said, I love you guys. The other said, I'm sorry. Her son was at the Nova Music Festival, one of the sites attacked by Hamas militants

where they killed more than 250 people. Rachel later found out that her son had been hiding in a bomb shelter as Hamas fighters moved in. And these are men coming with submachine guns. And he was picking up grenades that they were throwing and throwing them back out. The Hamas fighters left momentarily. And then they came back in and they said, anyone who can stand up, get up.

And Hirsch got up and three people saw that his arms had been blown off like around the elbow and that he had tied a tourniquet around it and they said and he got up and he walked out. And that's the last that he was seen. They were told that the boys who went out were put on a pickup truck and driven toward Gaza. Rachel is now trying to find out anything she can about her son's whereabouts. And so are the families of around 200 hostages from at least 30 countries

in what is now one of the most complex hostage crises in history. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leinbaugh. It's Tuesday, October 17th. Coming up on the show, a hostage crisis in Gaza. with them. How's that spicy enchilada? Very flavorful. Yodeling with them. Ooh, must be mating season. And hiking with them. Is that a squirrel?

Bear! Run! Collect more moments with more ways to earn. Air Mile. Nine days after the Hamas attacks in Israel and after around 200 hostages were taken across the border into Gaza, there was the first public sign that at least one of the hostages seems to be alive. Yesterday, I saw my baby on television.

I saw she's alive. That's Karen Scharfshem talking to reporters. Her daughter, Mia Shem, who's a French-Israeli, was also abducted at the music festival. Hamas released a video of Karen's daughter sitting in a nondescript room with a bandaged shoulder. She looks very terrified. She looks like she's in big pain.

And I can see that she's saying what they tell her to say, but I can see that she's saying what they tell her to say, but I can see that she's stable. I can see she needs medical care. I didn't know she's dead or alive until yesterday. All I knew is that she might be kidnapped. All I knew is that she might be kidnapped. I'm begging the world to bring my baby back home.

Our colleague Joe Parkinson has been reporting on the hostage crisis and watched the Hamas video of Mia Shem. These videos will be very carefully choreographed now to deliver certain messages to try and engender certain outcomes. And, you know, as often in this case, we have to assume that she's speaking from some sort of script from her attackers. And unfortunately, all of these people who've been taken, their fate is now linked to an incredibly complicated conflict that is unraveling in real time, where the attackers and the Israeli government and the mediators and the families all have to somehow try and find agreement in the middle of this war.

Joe and his reporting partner, Drew Henshaw, have been trying to find out what is happening in a very chaotic, fast-moving situation. They spoke with officials from the U.S., Israel, Egypt, and Turkey, officials who were involved in efforts to find out who Hamas has taken. Israel released a preliminary list of hostages. Apart from Israelis, there are also citizens from many other countries, like the U.S., the U.K., Paraguay, and Thailand. Where is it believed that they're being held captive?

The general assumption is that they're being held in tunnels under the Gaza Strip. There's a complicated network of tunnels. Many of these tunnels, you know, you think of tunnels, these are big tunnels with power and communication lines allowing dozens of yards beneath the earth, metal sheeting along the sides. It's been described as a maze of tunnels and bunkers and with weapons caches and other kind of redoubts. And the general assumption is that that's where most of these hostages are being held.

What is making it so hard to get the answers? Because the hostages themselves have been divided, split up underneath Gaza at a time where there is a sustained aerial bombardment above ground. So it's hard to imagine a more complicated situation. At the same time, what we're told is that a lot of the senior Hamas military commanders who have also retreated underground into this tunnel network are being very, very careful about the communications that they're using because they're afraid of them being intercepted and then being targeted by the Israelis.

And so that makes it very difficult to reach them and understand from them, the people who are best placed to know, how many people are hostages, what their names are, and whether they're still alive. At a high level, what role are these hostages playing in the Israel-Hamas war? Us, people being taken hostage, taken across a border and hidden in tunnels or tower blocks inside another region would be the biggest thing that could possibly happen. But because the context of last week's Hamas attacks is so complicated, so multifaceted, this actually isn't something that we can address just on its own. We have possibly an unprecedented hostage crisis with 30 nations, more than 200 people, which is happening inside an active war zone under aerial bombardment. So it's layers and layers of complexity, and we can't really see it just on its own.

So it's layers and layers of complexity, and we can't really see it just on its own. One of the things that's making it so hard is that so many countries define Hamas as a terror organization, and so there are legal restrictions on even talking to them. And especially after this murderous attack, there's a lot of countries that don't want to be openly talking to Hamas or to be seen to be at the early stages of a negotiation with them. And this is where back-channel diplomacy comes in. What that back-channel diplomacy looks like is next. Travel better with Air Canada. You can enjoy free beer, wine, and premium snacks in economy class.

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From the early hours of the attack, when it became clear that hostages may have been taken into Gaza. The phones have been ringing off the hook in Ankara and in Doha. Ankara, the capital of Turkey, and Doha, the capital of Qatar. Those two countries have become central in the hostage crisis. From the very first hours of this attack, the Qataris and the Turks had outreach to the Hamas political leadership. They say that they were engaging them on all aspects of this, but particularly on the hostage file.

Why is Qatar involved? Qatar, it's in a really unique position. It's considered by the U.S. to be a non-NATO ally, meaning it is effectively an ally of the United States. At the same time, it's long allowed leadership, the political leadership of Hamas, to come to the capital of Doha, to have something of a place where people who want to reach Hamas can go to, to do so. That's always brought them a little bit of controversy. There's been often kind of political calls for Qatar to shut that down. On the other side, it's right now the main channel

for reaching these people who hold human lives in their hands. And what about Turkey? Why has Turkey emerged as another leading country in these efforts? Turkey has been carving out a role for itself in the Middle East, but also in Europe as a peace broker. A lot of the talks between Russia and Ukraine and some of the prisoner exchanges between Russia and Ukraine have gone through Turkey. The grain deal to release Ukrainian grain to the world was worked out in turkey early peace talks during the beginnings of the invasion of ukraine and the same is true in the middle east turkey is a nato ally it is one of the oldest nato allies in fact and at the same time it has

good connections years of connections to hamas and it's in a position to show its value to the United States and to Israel and to other global countries by reaching, trying to at least reach Hamas and help identify who's in their custody. And maybe as things advance, hopefully finding ways for those people to go free. Getting back to these back-channel negotiations, what have you guys found out about what has come out of them? There was a very, very early proposal. And the proposal was that Hamas should release, without preconditions,

all of the elderly and all of the women and children, civilian women and children that they're holding. But of course, one of the things that the mediators are saying is that in order to do any exchange or any releases, they would need a humanitarian corridor. And in order for a humanitarian corridor to be safe, the airstrikes would need to stop. And Israel for the time being, is not prepared to do that because it has its own military aims that it's pursuing in response to this attack. So there's kind of a catch-22 that's preventing movement on even perhaps the first stage of starting to release some of these hundreds of people. Are there concerns that the hostages are in danger from the aerial bombing?

Just about every official work on this that we've spoken to has said that the airstrikes happening and that Israel is conducting in Gaza are making this more difficult. Absolutely. Hamas has released press statements saying that a number of hostages have already been killed in the bombardment. Clearly, with the intensity of the bombardment that we have going on now, the small geography of Gaza, you have to imagine that the hostages, wherever they're being held, are potentially at risk. And that's just from the airstrikes, of course, if water, sanitation is also restricted, not to mention you have to presume that some of these hostages were carrying quite serious injuries

when they were pulled across the border. It's a grave situation for all of them. What's the assumed endgame? That's really difficult to say. I mean, this is unprecedented. You know, the number of countries involved, all of them have different policies on how they deal with hostages. The United States, the United Kingdom, they don't pay ransoms.

Other countries potentially do. In some countries, the governments might face a lot more political pressure to get their hostages out than in others. What are you looking for from here? What are you looking for from here? I think one of the important milestones to watch is whether the humanitarian circumstances improve, whether we start to see substantial amounts of food, water,

medical necessities getting brought in, whether hospitals are allowed to operate without the fear of bombardment. Because that's part of what Hamas has been saying, is that we can't discuss prisoner negotiations under circumstances like this, in which you have huge numbers of people leaving their homes, no water, no food, aerial bombardments. Those aren't conducive to any discussion of prison negotiations. Now, the potential for a hostage negotiation is just one aspect

of a very complicated and sort of raging conflict here. Today, Palestinian health officials said more than 500 people were killed in an airstrike on a Gaza hospital. It comes hours before President Biden is expected to arrive in Israel. Since the start of the war, more than 1,400 Israelis have been killed. In Gaza, the Palestinian death toll was at about 3,000 before the hospital airstrike. That's all for today, Tuesday, October 17th. Additional reporting in this episode by Isabel Coles. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. And today marks a special day for our show. It's our 1,000th episode. Over the years, we've covered so much. From global conflicts like

today's episode, to the pandemic, elections, strikes, fears of a recession, and of course, Taylor Swift, Taco Tuesday, and the death of Tab Soda. And we wanted to say thanks to all of you, our listeners, for being here for all of it. As a special thank you, we have something to give 10 lucky listeners. Send us an email telling us what's your favorite episode and why, and we'll put your name in a random drawing for some journal swag. It's pretty sweet. The email is thejournalatwsj.com. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow for episode 1001.