Hamas terror group’s slow release of Israeli hostages is seemingly designed to inflict the maximum amount of anxiety and terror on Israeli society and the families of hostages.
On Sunday evening, when Israeli newscasters announced that 4-year-old Avigail Idan was among the third batch of hostages being released by Hamas from Gaza, it seemed as if the entire Jewish state breathed a collective sigh of relief.
The curly-haired toddler, an American citizen whose parents were both brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists on their kibbutz in southern Israel on Oct. 7, is only one of the hundreds of horrifying stories that have captured the public’s attention here over the past seven weeks.
Yet her release – and that of other Israeli children – as part of a ceasefire deal now playing out between Israel and the terror group that governs the Palestinian enclave can be seen as a clear symbol of the psychological warfare that continues to be waged by the terrorists against Israelis.
« This is psychological terrorism, that is the only way to describe it, » Lt. Col. (res) Shaul Bartal, a senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, told Fox News Digital.
For the past three days, since the truce went into effect early Friday morning with the promise that some 40 children, their mothers and maybe even grandmothers, would be released by Hamas after nearly 50 days in captivity, a real-life psychological thriller – akin, some have said to the fictional survival process themed in Suzanne Collins’ popular trilogy The Hunger Games – has been playing out.
Under the U.S.-Qatari-Egyptian-brokered cease-fire, every day, Hamas hands Israel a list of around a dozen names of civilians it kidnapped during its terror attack, and in return, Israel gives them a list of some 30 Palestinian prisoners, mostly women and minors convicted of terror offenses it will release and, in addition, allows truckloads of aid, including much-needed fuel, to enter Gaza.
It is a process seemingly designed to inflict – at least on the Israeli side – the maximum amount of anxiety and terror. Each day, as the Israeli media, government authorities and hostage’s relatives countdown to the scheduled release time, Hamas, apparently aware that its hostage-taking extends far beyond some 200 people it still holds, seems to invent a myriad of caveats and hurdles that exacerbate the event, making it far more traumatic and stressful.
For example, the first group of hostages released on Friday evening, which saw 13 Israelis – mostly elderly women – and an additional 11 Thai nationals (agricultural laborers who had been working in Israel), was Hannah Katzir.
