Michal Herzog: We Cannot Give Up on the Women Abducted From Israel

At the nine-month mark since Hamas terrorists attacked Israel and abducted more than 200 people, among them life-loving young women snatched from a music festival, mothers taken from their beds, sisters and daughters ripped from the optimism and vitality of their youth and their lives, we must ask: What has happened to our humanity? Our capacity for empathy for the hostages as well as the innocent women and girls of Gaza? Our ethical intuition? Our sense of allegiance and responsibility to these women hostages?

In the horrifying footage of their capture on Oct. 7, 2023, from the Nahal Oz base, 18- and 19-year-old girls are bound hand and foot and faced against the wall, passive objects in the hands of their captors. “You are so beautiful,” leers one at a young woman, as he binds her hands, kneeling. “Here are the females,” said another, invoking an ISIS idiom. The intimation is clear. And it touches every chord of horror available to the human experience.

The medieval brutality of the Hamas invasion into Israel on Oct. 7, widely documented, indeed seems to belong to a different era. But it hits notes of fear and terror that are so primal, so visceral, so chillingly familiar to us women. Millennia of vulnerability have been encoded in our bodies. We can conjure in our imaginations the darkest images of women captured in war, paraded through the streets as trophies, kept in cages, subject to every whim of their captors. It is a reality in which the darkest and most brutal of human impulses are laid bare. There is no moderating or civilizing force. This should alarm every single one of us. The significance of this particular brand of violence against women, of the reported ongoing crimes against the female hostages in Gaza, is that the rule of law, so carefully put in place over centuries of progress, is being actively disregarded and defiled.

We need to face the facts. This weaponizing of women’s bodies, this weaponizing of sexual assault and rape in warfare since Oct. 7, has taken the entire human race many steps backward. Civilization is failing these captives right now. And it is failing every one of us.

Where is the public outcry? Where is the outrage? Where is the vocal conviction, across the board, that this type of violence against women is unacceptable and will not pass in silence? Where is the voice—broken and piercing and fierce—on behalf of these women? On behalf of civilization? Where is the demand, wall to wall, that they must be brought home now?

I know well the primal vulnerability that comes with being a woman and a mother, but I also know about the primal power that these roles carry. I, along with millions of other women, haven’t given up. Not on these young women. And not on our humanity. I call upon every person to speak out for all the hostages—women and men—still being held by terrorists and help bring them home.