Why won't Hamas release more Israeli hostages? Because they can't.

Pro-Palestinian protestors across the US continue to call for a unilateral Israeli cease fire while failing to call for the release of the hostages. Why? Because they can't.

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While demanding an immediate and unilateral Israeli ceasefire, pro-Palestinian demonstrators across the US have failed to call for the release of hostages taken during Hamas’ invasion. They condemn what they claim is genocide, but are unwilling to condemn, or even acknowledge, the weaponization of sexual violence against Israeli women, or that Hamas refuses to release hostages as part of any ceasefire agreement.

Police in New York City arrested more than 100 pro-Palestinian protestors on Thursday who had set up an illegal tent city on the campus of Columbia University. Those arrested included the daughter of US Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn). According to various news reports the Columbia students who were part of the encampment protest were suspended by the university.

The university President, Nemat Shafik, said the encampment, “severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students.” The students who created the encampment, she said, “violated a long list of rules and policies.”

And earlier this week coordinated pro-Palestinian protests across the country blocked roads and bridges to airports and major highways as, “part of a global effort,” reported the New York Times, “to disrupt economies and pressure world leaders to push for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.”

While student protestors at the encampment shouted slogans like “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” and “By Any Means Necessary,” and demonstrators blocking traffic called for a unilateral Israeli ceasefire – it was reported that Hamas, yet again, rejected a ceasefire plan proposed by Israel, Egypt and Qatar.

“It was a deep disappointment to get a negative reaction from Hamas,” said CIA Director William J. Burns, “Right now, it’s that negative reaction that really is standing in the way of innocent civilians in Gaza getting humanitarian relief that they so desperately need.”

According to State Department spokesman Matthew Miller, “Israel moved a significant way in submitting that proposal,” but Hamas rejected it. “It is Hamas right now that is the barrier and the obstacle to a cease-fire in Gaza.”

One of the sticking points? Hamas does not have enough live hostages taken during the October 7 attack. But isn’t that the purpose of taking hostages — as despicable, cowardly and against even the norms of war — as that is? To use hostages as leverage in some future negotiation?

In return for a six-week ceasefire, one of the conditions of the most recent ceasefire proposal was that Hamas would return 40 of the more than 100 hostages they still hold. According to the New York Times, a senior Hamas official, speaking on condition of anonymity, “said there were not enough living civilian hostages left who met Israel’s criteria to reach their proposed figure of 40 hostages.” The criteria? Women, children, and the elderly.

“After months of negotiations over the release of 40 hostages among the women, older men and the sick,” writes the editors of the Wall Street Journal. “Hamas now says it can produce only 20, and it wants far more Palestinian terrorists in return. It demands 30 for each civilian hostage and 50 for each captive female Israeli soldier, including 30 terrorists who are serving life sentences.”

As the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory states, “[t]he taking of hostages is a violation of international law and constitutes an international crime. Persons deprived of liberty are protected against murder, torture, and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and sexual violence.”

Yet where are the condemnations from pro-Palestinian demonstrators? “Taking civilian hostages and using civilians as human shield,” continued the report, “are war crimes.”

This, unfortunately, is no surprise.

Thinking back on the initial reporting of the Hamas invasion, I’m haunted by the image of the young woman abducted at the Supernova desert music festival and forced onto a motorcycle with two Hamas terrorists. As she was sped away to an unthinkable fate, a look of abject horror on her face, she reached out desperately for help. But those who could save her were likely dead, or hostages themselves.

At the time I remember thinking that she – like many of the hostages, but especially the women — would never be seen again. Sadly, that’s turned out to be true.

Back in December the New York Times published the disturbing results of a two-month long investigation that charged Hamas with the “weaponization of sexual violence.” During the Hamas invasion, the Times concluded, rape became just another weapon of war waged against innocent Israeli women.

A Record of Pure, Predatory Sadism.

The investigation, wrote the Times reporters, “uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.” It is unsettling reading – you can read it for yourself here. Writing in The Atlantic about many of the videos that formed the core of the Times investigation, Graeme Wood called it “A Record of Pure, Predatory Sadism.”

In the wake of the Times investigation, the United Nations special representative on sexual violence in conflict, Pramila Patten, found “grounds to believe sexual violence, including rape, occurred during the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and that there is clear and credible evidence that female hostages were raped.” Patten urged a more formal U.N. investigation.

“The true prevalence of sexual violence during the [Oct. 7] attacks and their aftermath may take months or years to emerge,” Patten told the press, adding that they “may never be fully known.” While she said that that sexual violence tends to be underreported in conflicts, the investigation would be hindered because many victims who could have testified to the sexual brutality of the invasion were killed by Hamas.

The U.N. report also said there was clear and convincing evidence of “sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” against women and children held hostage in Gaza. There were, according to the report, reasonable grounds to believe the violence is ongoing.

Hamas, predictably, called the allegations of rape and sexual violence “lies and slanders against the Palestinians and their resistance.”

The "New Rape Denialism."

In a powerful essay titled “The New Rape Denialism,” New York Times columnist Bret Stephens takes progressives to task for failing, or being unwilling, to condemn the widespread rape and torture of women that was – and still is – part of Hamas’ plan to terrorize Israelis.

Stephens is puzzled by the immoral refusal of many of the protests, and protestors -- who so gleefully condemn Israel for genocide -- to also condemn Hamas’ rape and torture of Israeli women as part of their campaign of terror. By their silence, argues Stephens, they join Hamas’ denials.

The Oscar ceremony, for example, was delayed as protestors, calling for a ceasefire outside of the venue, blocked traffic. "Organizers of the protest," reported CBS Los Angeles, "said that they gathered to 'disrupt the Academy Awards' and expose 'retaliation against anyone in the film industry who speaks out against Israel's atrocities and war crimes'." But what about Hamas' "atrocities and war crimes?"

Hamas and their "useful idiots."

“Hamas’s fellow travelers and useful idiots in the West, most of them self-described progressives,” writes Stephens, “parrot that denialism in the face of powerful and deeply investigated evidence of widespread rapes, documented most recently in a United Nations report released on Monday.”

This denialism, argues Stephens, is an integral part of the binary worldview embraced by many progressives. “A large and expanding corner of the West refuses to accept that Israel’s war in Gaza is a response to evil, or that Israelis might be victims in any way. It disturbs the narrative of the war in Gaza as a case of strong against weak, the settler-colonialist Israelis against righteous and indigenous victims.”

In the months that have passed since the war began, Israel and the U.S. — as well as Muslim nations like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar — have made many overtures, including the recent offer of ceasefire, in exchange for the release of hostages. With only a few minor exceptions, those overtures have been rebuffed by Hamas. We now know why.

At last report 112 of the more than 240 held by Hamas have been released under an agreement that for each hostage Hamas released, three Palestinian prisoners would be released from Israeli prisons. But the release of more hostages has stalled as Hamas has admitted that they don’t have enough live hostages left to release even 40 of the women, children, elderly and infirm, captured on October 7.

"Hamas claims it wants a cease-fire. Well, there is a deal on the table. And as we have said, Hamas needs to agree to that deal," Vice President Harris said of a ceasefire rejected by Hamas weeks ago. "Let's get a cease-fire. Let's reunite the hostages with their families. And let's provide immediate relief to the people of Gaza."

At this point there is apparently little or nothing to be gained by Hamas’ continued refusal to release some, or all, of the hostages. Clearly the war rages despite Hamas holding hostages, and Israel has said it will continue to press the fight against Hamas, even if more hostages are not released.

You would think that by releasing hostages Hamas would put more pressure on Israel to agree to a broader ceasefire -- and gain some international goodwill. Not so.

Won’t? Or Can’t.

But the real reason Hamas won’t agree to a ceasefire that includes the release of more hostages? Especially women hostages. They can't.

For if they do the full extent of Hamas’ systematic torture and rape of female hostages, and the true depth of the depravity and hatred that Hamas has for Israelis, will be known to the world. Many of these women will probably never be released, or never released alive. It’s better for Hamas to say they are dead than to release them to tell their tales of rape, torture, and mistreatment. In explaining their deaths, Hamas will likely blame Israeli bombs.

As anti-Israeli protests continue throughout the US, and Jewish students increasingly point to rampant antisemitism on college campuses, why won’t pro-Palestinian protestors – some who stand behind banners proclaiming “By Any Means Necessary” -- also hold Hamas accountable for the weaponization of sexual violence against Israeli women and call for the release of the hostages?

Maybe for the same reasons Hamas denies it – because by calling for the release of more hostages they risk exposing the fallacy and intentional naivete, of their good versus evil, oppressed versus oppressor, settler-colonist narrative that is central to their anti-Zionist and antisemitic ideology.