Fate of Israeli hostages consumes and unifies a terrorized nation

JERUSALEM - Shelly Shem Tov’s house has become a command center of panic.

Since her 21-year-old son Omer was kidnapped during a dance party Saturday - as his parents helplessly tracked his phone entering the Gaza Strip - every room has been filled with friends and family, working to find something, anything, that will give them hope.

More than two dozen volunteers had laptops on counters and phones in hand Monday, tapping out messages, working social media, scouring the world for answers they haven’t gotten from official sources.

“Nobody has contacted us, nobody has told us anything,” Shem Tov said, the tears coming again. “We need people to do their jobs.”

The scene is being re-created across the country, as the families of more than 100 Israelis thought to be held captive inside of Gaza grow ever more desperate for information. In the absence of a government response, they are dreading the one most likely: a massive military operation, which they fear could put their loved ones in the firing line.

Shem Tov’s group has created a WhatsApp channel with more than 500 family members, who are watching and waiting with horror.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday made a belated appointment to the vacant position of commissioner for prisoners and missing persons, responsible for building relationships with local and international negotiators. He named Gal Hirsch, a reservist brigadier general.

Israel has a long and controversial history with hostage taking, hostage swaps and hostage rescues -sometimes deadly ones. Previous governments have bargained for hostages and battled for them.

In 1976, Israeli commandos stormed an airport in Entebbe, Uganda, freeing more than 100 Israelis held by Palestinian hijackers. (Three of the captives were killed, as was Netanyahu’s commando brother.)

In 2011, Netanyahu agreed to release 1,027 Hamas prisoners from Israeli prisons in exchange for a captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who had been held in Gaza for more than five years.

But none of the previous episodes, experts say, compares with the mass kidnapping of children, grandparents and whole families, much of it captured on video and shared on social media. And none of the options the government may be considering are likely to end without more bloodshed, they said.

“This is unprecedented. We’ve never had so many people taken and held in a hostile territory,” said Gershon Baskin, Israel’s backchannel negotiator in the Shalit case. “It’s a new reality, and it’s difficult to measure how society will respond to this.”

Among the challenges, Baskin said, is the ability of Hamas to hide captives throughout the 140-square-mile, densely populated enclave, which includes extensive subterranean networks.

Hamas has said the hostages are being held in tunnels and other secure locations. Ahmed Abdul Hadi, Hamas’ representative in Lebanon, denied reports that the group was in talks with Qatar over a prisoner exchange: “There is nothing like that right now at all,” he told The Washington Post on Monday. “It’s too early for this conversation.”

Israel’s intelligence in Gaza was thought to be effective until Saturday’s surprise attack, but even before that, Hamas had proved its determination to conceal hostages. On the day Shalit was released, the militants sent out more than 30 decoy vehicles, Baskin said. The captive wasn’t in any of them.

“There is no mass rescue opportunity because there is no way Hamas will keep them all together,” he said.

The prospects for a grand bargain aren’t much more likely, according to Danny Orbach, a military historian from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The public sentiment that largely supported the lopsided swap of numerous prisoners for a lone soldier has eroded over time. Some analysts have blamed the released fighters for fueling future terrorist attacks.

“Israel will not be able to surrender to Hamas on this one,” Orbach said.

The multipronged attack, which killed at least 800 people, shattered Israel’s shaky but enduring coexistence with Hamas. The regular rocket launches and periodic wars were largely deemed an acceptable price for otherwise containing the militant group. Now the country appears unified in calling for a major military intervention, whatever the costs.

“I think the Israeli public, from the far left to the far right, feels that the price of coexistence with Hamas is intolerable,” Orbach said.

[How a night of music and revelry in Israel turned into a massacre]

Both experts thought a small-scale hostage deal was possible - the exchange of children, elderly and sick Israelis for female and ill Hamas prisoners, for example. But neither thought the hostages would keep Israel from launching an overwhelming attack on Gaza.

“The public wants to go into Gaza and attack Hamas,” said Orbach. “The public also wants the hostages to be safely rescued. I don’t think they’ve come to terms with the inherent contradiction.”

For families of those held, the scenarios are another agony.

Adva Adar, 32, tunes out the debate over next steps raging on social media and television. She clings to hope that her 85-year-old widowed grandmother will come home.

“We are trying not to entertain those thoughts,” Adar said. “We just want her back.”

Yaffa Adar, a resident of Nir-Oz, a kibbutz just miles from the Gaza border, last made contact from her basement at 9 a.m. Saturday, the day the family had plans to gather for the Sukkot holiday: “There are terrorists in the road,” she texted them.

The family had no idea what had happened until a video surfaced showing their grandmother being driven, in her own golf cart, across the Gaza border. She suffers from heart and lung ailments and takes medication for chronic pain.

“Without her medication, every minute is a horror for her,” Adar said.

And for her family.

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Sarah Dadouch in Beirut contributed to this report.