Behind the human shields: The forgotten hostages of Hamas

October 7, like September 11, is a date that will live forever in infamy. In the early morning hours of October 7, 2023 Hamas led terrorists launched a massive and well orchestrated surprise assault from Gaza into southern Israel. The result was the brutal and ruthless massacre of over 1,200 Jewish men, women and children and the abduction of 251 hostages taken back into the terror tunnels of Gaza. Entire families were slaughtered in the communities of Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz and several other places as well as the savage murders of 364 young Israeli’s who were attending a music festival near Re’im. These violent and vicious deaths were, in many cases, preceded by rapes, gang rapes and various types of demonic sexualized torture of scores of innocent young victims.

For those of us in our “Baptist family” October 7 came exactly sixteen years earlier. On October 7, 2007 Rami Ayyad, a 29 year old Palestinian evangelical and a member of the Gaza Baptist Church was martyred by Hamas operatives in Gaza City. Rami, who operated the only Christian bookstore in Gaza, had been abducted, stabbed numerous times all over his body and shot point blank in his head…all because he sold Bibles in Gaza. He left behind two young children and a pregnant wife. From that moment until now our Christian brothers and sisters in Gaza have been held mentally and emotionally hostage to Hamas operatives who control the Gaza Strip.

For decades Baptists controlled and ran the Baptist Hospital in Gaza City before turning over the operations to locals who renamed it Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. Just ten days after the October 7, 2023 attack a large explosion was felt at the hospital where many civilians had gathered seeking shelter from the growing war that began to rage through Gaza. Literally within minutes the Hamas run Gaza Health Ministry announced that massive Israeli air strikes on the hospital had killed 500 patients and innocent civilians. Without any verification, media outlets across the world picked up the story reporting it as truth. Days later several independent investigations reached the conclusion that this is not what happened at all. Human Rights Watch concluded that the evidence showed that the damage had been done by rocket propelled munitions and not from an air strike. US intelligence agencies and others revealed that the physical evidence was totally inconsistent with a large Israeli air delivered bomb. There was no impact crater and most of the buildings remained intact structurally. In fact the evidence revealed it was actually an errant Hamas rocket launched from nearby the hospital.

But facts seldom get in the way of preconceived ideas and media bias. The public relations damage was done. Massive protests against the Israeli State popped up all over the Middle East and spread throughout the west. No single event fueled the fire of lies that Israel was guilty of genocide like the blatant unverified and false reporting of this one event.

This is not to say that Israel has not made mistakes. But this was not one of them. The world seems to have a way of remembering forever Israel’s mistakes while at the same time forgetting every Jewish grave. There seems to be no statute of limitations when it comes to blaming Israel for any and all perceived shortcomings. The world has virtually forgotten the atrocities of October 7 but has no problem calling to mind and continuing to blame Israel for the hospital catastrophe and a hundred other like events….even though all the evidence points to the fact that it did not happen at the hands of the Israelis.

During the months of the Gaza War all the focus was on bringing back every single one of the Israeli hostages taken on October 7. Every strategy session in every war room zeroed in on bringing back every Israeli man, woman, and child. And rightly so. Each life was considered valued and every effort was made to bring them all home right up until the day the mission was finally accomplished.

While all the Israeli hostages are back to the safety of their own homes or to a proper burial in their homeland, there are still over two million hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. These are the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza who have been and remain hostages to the ideology and violence of Hamas as it has been propped up with Iranian wealth and weapons for the past two decades. They are held hostage by a group that seems to value death more than life.

This particular hostage situation consists of Hamas’ military command centers that were placed within the confines of hospitals and other public places. Weapons were stashed in the school houses of Palestinian children…rockets were launched from homes in civilian neighborhoods…weapons, explosives and command centers were found to be located in mosques and residential buildings…humanitarian aid was reported to be stolen from the intended civilian population and resold on the black market in order to fund militant operations…hundreds of miles of terror tunnels were used to hide hostages and store rockets. Reports also spread of dozens of Palestinians accused of being “collaborators” without any substantial evidence much less any fair trials. Many of these men and women were tortured and publicly executed for their “crimes.” Often these atrocities were nothing more than personal vendettas turned into false accusations. Civilians were encouraged, and more often forced, to stay in areas that Israel gave prior warnings to evacuate. These areas contained imbedded hostile militant operations that would soon be the target of an attack. Any possibility of evacuation by the Palestinian populace was thwarted by Hamas. In myriad of ways and in a multitude of times innocent civilians were used as nothing more than disposable human shields whose lives seemed to be of no value to the militants of Gaza.

At the same time, and although seldom, if ever, reported by national media outlets, it was Israel who was often coordinating food, medicine, baby formula and other supplies with the help of the U.S., the U.N., Egypt and other international efforts. During the war it was Israel who also sought to come to the aid of the people in the streets with repairs to water systems, desalination efforts, fuel delivery for hospitals and other essential services that had been neglected or forgotten. At the same time, it is no secret that the scale of relief is woefully insufficient to meet the massive needs created by this war which began at Hamas’ own initiative on that fateful date of October 7, 2023.

By the morning of October 8, 2023 thousands of Gazans awoke to the reality that as a result of the attrocties of the day before the Gaza they had known and loved would cease to exist. And it has…for now. They now are the hostages desperately needing to be liberated from the strong arm of their own captors. Hamas still holds two million fathers, mothers, the elderly, and children as hostages in their own land. Rejected by all their Arab neighbors they have no place to go. They live in squalor, trapped in an infrastructure that will take years to rebuild. They await the day when Hamas is no longer in power, when their nightmare finally ends, and a new future can begin. They are not being tortured in terror tunnels by those who speak a different language. These hostages of their own people have been stripped of every semblance of dignity. They are still held captive today by an ideology that does not seem to value the lives of others….specifically, their own lives. As you read this sentence they are still being held hostage to those very people who have repeatedly used them as human shields while cowardly hiding behind them with seemingly little concern for whether they live or die. It is a reminder of the words of God through the pen of King Solomon, “Those who hate me love death” (Proverbs 8:36).

These masses of men, women and children of Gaza constitute the remaining hostages of Hamas. They are still captives. They are deserving of their dignity and in desperate need of hope. A world of good and moral people are waiting to come to their aid bringing with them God’s promise of “a hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11) once again to these….forgotten hostages of Hamas.