Hadas Ziv, the director of ethics and policy at Physicians for Human Rights Israel, has worked for years defending Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza. She advocates for the rights of migrants, asylum seekers, and prison detainees. Lately, she has been involved in gathering publicly available testimony and forensic evidence about the sexual assaults committed by Hamas, and says that the evidence points to rape, in this instance, being “a weapon of war.” (Hamas spokesmen have denied the accusation.) She has been condemned by Palestinians online who find her latest work to be excessively “pro-Israeli.”

“This is part of what breaks my heart,” Ziv told me. “When I see Israelis and Palestinians, I see twins, people who are alike in so many ways, mirroring each other, yet they go on inflicting more and more trauma on each other to the point where we refuse to see each other.”

Itai Pessach is the director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Children’s Hospital, in Ramat Gan. Thirty-one of the hostages who were released in November came to his hospital for a few days of examination and rest, a “buffer” period before going home. Pessach helped care for nearly all of them. The hostages at the hospital ranged in age from four to eighty-four. None of them escaped physical injury, abuse, or trauma. The hostages he saw were not raped, he said, but sexually abused all the same. (“Touched” was the word Pessach used.) Some hostages were kept in tunnels equipped with holding cells; others were in apartments. The Hamas guards played incessant “mind games” with their captives, Pessach said, separating parents from children for extended periods to deepen their anxieties and their sense of dependency. They told hostages that they’d been forgotten by their government, that their towns had been destroyed and their loved ones killed. Some, Pessach recounted, were informed that they were being released and then heard, “Oh, sorry, now you are staying.”

Pessach witnessed deliriously happy reunions, with hostages running into the arms of their friends and families. Then he witnessed their more private grief-stricken “crashes” when they learned that a parent or a neighbor had been killed. And, for hours on end, he listened to their stories. “It is not different from the experiences that people have had in concentration camps,” he said. “When you hear them talk about conserving food or worrying about being alive in the morning or worrying every time the door opens or trying to figure out the slight differences between the terrorists. Or worrying about what they say or if they can dare to cry. I’ve heard testimonies over the years from Holocaust survivors, and the choices parents had to make.”

He talked about a hostage in her thirties, Yarden Roman-Gat, from Kibbutz Be’eri, whose family was being pursued by Hamas soldiers and had to make an excruciating choice: she handed her three-year-old daughter, Geffen, to her husband, Alon, because he was the better runner. Alon sprinted off carrying Geffen and eventually hid in a ditch, for eight and a half hours. Yarden, who was running alone, grew exhausted after a while, fell to the ground, and tried to fool the Hamas terrorists who found her by playing dead. They picked her up, threw her in a car, and took her to Gaza, where she was a hostage for fifty-four days. She was released in November.

But there was one thing that Pessach was focussed on now: “When will the next group of captives come?” Or would there be any at all? Numerous sources had told me they were concerned that at least some remaining hostages had been so badly abused that it would not be in Hamas’s interest to turn them over. “Every day that passes, I get more worried,” Pessach said. “I see what captivity did over fifty days to the elderly women we accepted, to the children. I’m really worried that those who are there will not come back or that they’ll be in horrible shape.”

Pessach said he’d been watching interview shows on television in which former hostages described their experiences. He worries that doing so might hinder their recovery. “But I understand why they are doing it,” he said. “They seem to have no choice but to tell their stories. They feel it is their duty to the others still in captivity.”

“Wish me luck! Edwin is introducing me to his parents, so I can check if he’ll still be hot at fifty.” Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop

What had been, until now, the most famous hostage crisis in the history of Israel was instrumental in Netanyahu’s rise to power. On June 27, 1976, two Palestinians affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and two Germans from a guerrilla group called the Revolutionary Cells hijacked an Air France flight carrying some two hundred and forty passengers from Tel Aviv to Paris after a stopover in Athens. Intent on freeing Palestinian prisoners in Israel and scoring a multimillion-dollar ransom, the hijackers directed the flight to the Entebbe airport, in Uganda. This was the era of the Ugandan despot Idi Amin, who sent soldiers to support the hijackers when they landed.

As Israeli officials negotiated with the hijackers, Mossad and various military commanders devised a rescue plan led by Sayeret Matkal, an élite special-forces unit. Both Bibi Netanyahu and his older brother, Yonatan, did their military service with Sayeret Matkal, and Yonatan, known as Yoni, was selected to lead the mission at Entebbe. The scheme was almost preposterously daring, involving four cargo planes and two Boeing 707s. Flying over the Red Sea, the rescuers had to maintain an altitude of around a hundred feet to avoid radar detection. Inside one of the cargo planes was a black Mercedes equipped to look like Idi Amin’s Presidential car. Once they landed at Entebbe, the Mercedes, with Yoni inside giving orders, led the charge toward the hijackers and their Israeli captives. The mission succeeded beyond all expectations, liberating nearly all the hostages. There were, however, casualties. Three of the Israeli hostages died. And Yoni Netanyahu was shot and killed.

It was left to Bibi Netanyahu to tell his parents the terrible news. He was in the United States at the time, working for the Boston Consulting Group and studying at M.I.T. Rather than call his parents in Ithaca, where his father had been a professor at Cornell, Bibi drove seven hours to see them, “a Via Dolorosa of unspeakable pain,” he wrote later. “If there was a moment in my life worse than hearing about Yoni’s death, it was telling my parents about it. I felt like a man on a rack whose limbs are torn from him one by one.”

Eventually, the family collected Yoni’s letters and published them as a book that became a talisman of national valor. Yoni came to represent the highest level of sacrifice, and the family name became ubiquitous in Israel. Being a brother, and a brother-in-arms, to a martyr seemed to give hard focus to Netanyahu’s ambitions. Yoni, according to Netanyahu, once told a friend that Bibi had what it took to be Prime Minister one day. This, too, became part of the legend. “Though Yoni had died in the war on terror, he never thought this battle was merely a military conflict,” Netanyahu has written. “He saw it also as a political and moral struggle between civilization and barbarism. I now devoted myself to this battle.”