On October 7, 1985, in Alexandria, Egypt, four armed members of a faction of the Palestine Liberation Front boarded the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship that was touring the Mediterranean. The hijackers seized the ship’s captain, herded passengers into a dining room, and declared that unless Israel released fifty Palestinian prisoners by three o’clock that afternoon they would start executing hostages. When the deadline passed without satisfaction, the hijackers separated Leon Klinghoffer, a sixty-nine-year-old Jewish American whose history of strokes had left him mostly confined to a wheelchair. They moved Klinghoffer to a deck outside, where Youssef Majed Molqi, the hijacking team’s leader, shot him in the head and chest. Molqi then ordered two of the ship’s crew to throw Klinghoffer’s body and wheelchair into the sea.
Klinghoffer’s murder became an infamous touchstone in the nineteen-eighties era of made-for-TV hijackings, a time when armed liberation movements in the Middle East demonstrated the asymmetric power of spectacular mass hostage-taking. Terrorists of that era wanted “a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead,” as the RAND Corporation analyst Brian Jenkins put it in 1974, because they sought to call attention to their cause without alienating sympathizers. Yet hijackers also singled out Jews and Americans for death as a form of strategic communication. As Molqi later testified at trial, after he was captured, “I chose Klinghoffer, an invalid, so that they would know that we had no pity for anyone, just as the Americans, arming Israel, do not take into consideration that Israel kills women and children of our people.”
That Molqi’s nihilism resonates today in the hostage crisis embedded in Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza is one depressing indicator among many of repetitive patterns of violence between Israel and stateless Palestinians, in the context of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its immiseration of Gaza. Yet this particular war has the feel of history sliding backward. When Hamas and its allies killed about twelve hundred Israelis on October 7th and retreated to Gaza with more than two hundred and thirty captives, the group revived the sort of hostage spectacle common in the Middle East from the late nineteen-sixties through to the eighties—a drama in which the fate of innocents is determined amid a competition of coercive public narratives.
It isn’t clear how much of a plan for large-scale kidnapping Hamas had put together in advance of its operation, but the group quickly began producing hostage videos and social-media posts to publicize its achievement. Unlike suicide bombings or military-style assaults, hostage-taking “is the kind of terrorist attack that stays in the news until the fate of the hostages is resolved,” Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University who specializes in the history of terrorism, told me. The longevity of a hostage standoff can allow the kidnappers to bargain at length for prisoner releases or other concessions, such as a ceasefire, as Hamas is doing now, through mediation by Qatar, and with American involvement. In such circumstances, Hoffman noted, capturing the most vulnerable civilians—“babies, small children, the elderly, the infirm”—can increase the militants’ leverage because it raises the sense of urgency around rescuing the victims.
In the current crisis, a sizable number of children and the elderly, ranging in age from less than a year old to eighty-six, are being held in captivity in an active war zone. Hamas and its allies may have seized more than thirty children, according to lists of suspected kidnapping victims published by the BBC and Haaretz. On Monday, the White House revealed that one of the children held hostage is a three-year-old American citizen who was orphaned when his parents were killed during the attacks. As many as twenty-five people older than sixty-five may also have been seized, although it is not clear whether all of these individuals are still alive. Hamas features these most vulnerable hostages in its propaganda videos. On November 9th, Islamic Jihad, an ally of Hamas, released one depicting Hanna Katzir, who is seventy-seven years old, and Yagil Yaakov, who is thirteen. Katzir is seen sitting in a wheelchair. The pair were abducted during the attack on Kibbutz Nir Oz; according to Haaretz, Katzir’s husband was murdered there. Human Rights Watch called this latest video and earlier ones released by Hamas and Islamic Jihad “a form of inhumane treatment that amounts to a war crime.” Omar Shakir, the organization’s Israel and Palestine director, said that “instead of filming a child under duress, the groups should release him safely to his family.”
In our social-media-soaked world of interconnected crises, we have grown accustomed to an iconography of children’s suffering in war and humanitarian emergencies—images deployed to make vivid and emotionally insistent what might otherwise be ignored or rationalized. During the Gaza conflict, it has become common for political leaders and journalists to emphasize the extraordinarily high number of Palestinian children killed during Israel’s counterattack on the strip—more than four thousand so far, according to Gaza’s health ministry. The Secretary-General of the U.N., António Gutterres, emphasized that Gaza was becoming a “graveyard for children” when he recently called for a humanitarian ceasefire. This week, the fate of premature babies being treated in an incubator in Gaza City’s besieged Al-Shifa hospital has presented a visually arresting image of the consequences of Israel’s bombing and ground campaign, which, according to the ministry, has killed more than eleven thousand people altogether. As Israeli soldiers closed in on Al-Shifa, hundreds of people—including dozens of babies—were trapped inside, and, according to local health officials, patients died because doctors were unable to work while the hospital was under attack. Yet Israel claims that it acted carefully as its soldiers approached Al-Shifa and entered the facility on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Tzipi Hotovely, the right-wing former settlements minister now serving as Israel’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom, had told Sky News on Tuesday, “This is not an innocent hospital. This is actually a military base, using the patients as human shields.”
The prominent place of elderly hostages in the crisis has a less familiar moral texture than the centrality of children. As many as seven octogenarians may be among the hostages, including Yaffa Adar, who is eighty-five. After being seized at the kibbutz in Nir Oz, where she lived alone and required a caregiver to help with daily bathing and medication, Adar was photographed as she was taken away by armed men in a golf cart. Her composed if ambiguous expression is as striking as any image in the archives of terrorism. “They won’t see her humiliated or scared or hurt,” Adva Adar, Yaffa’s granddaughter, told me, when I asked what she saw when she looked at the pictures. “She will let them see that she’s a person.” Adar added, “It’s hard to understand how you can enter into the home of an eighty-five-year-old woman, who can’t harm you, who can’t even protect herself, and, instead of leaving, you choose to take her hostage. I don’t get how a human being can be so detached from basic compassion.”