President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a dinner in the Blue Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on July 7. Photo by Al Drago/Bloomberg
Columnist
Dan Perry
July 8, 2025
About 20 living hostages are still believed to be held by Hamas in Gaza. According to intelligence estimates, most of them are trapped deep underground, in stifling, sweltering, dark tunnels. They have little food and virtually no access to medicine. Many are injured.
Based on witness testimony from those who’ve been released — often in skeletal and broken states — we know just how inhumane the conditions are. There are brutal details, like children branded using the exhaust pipe of a motorcycle to prevent them from escaping. Then there are more mundane, but no less harrowing, stories of hunger and despair. Of captors feeding children sedatives to keep them quiet. Of women kept in cages. Of wounds left untreated. Of isolation. Relentless interrogations, and physical and psychological torture.
As part of the equation, hostages have had some access to Israeli media — just enough to watch their families beg, scream, and plead for their return, only to be rebuffed or ignored by the very government coalition that claims to defend them. They’ve seen how some Knesset members insult or dismiss hostage families. They’ve heard far-right ministers say the hostages are not the priority. And they probably saw the glittering display in Washington, D.C. on Monday, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump reveled in a night of handshakes and self-congratulation.
With his wife, Sara, smiling at his side — First Lady Melania Trump was conspicuously absent — Netanyahu surprised Trump with a letter nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize. “It’s well deserved, and you should get it,” Netanyahu said, handing it across the table. “This I didn’t know. Wow,” Trump beamed. “Coming from you in particular, this is very meaningful.”
Imagine being a hostage, and seeing that absurd scene unfold: Two world leaders, praising each other for their handling of the wars that have consumed the Middle East since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, while utterly failing to address your plight.
There was something particularly garish about this feast of mutual congratulation, at this time, when Israel’s aims in continuing the war have never appeared more muddled. Trump declared the two leaders’ partnership a “tremendous success” and predicted even “greater success in the future.” Netanyahu called Trump’s efforts a “pursuit of peace and security,” saying that “he’s forging peace as we speak, in one country, in one region, after the other.”
Forging peace? Maybe: The U.S. is pushing for Israel and Hamas to agree to a proposed 60-day ceasefire in which 10 living hostages, and 18 dead ones, would be released in two phases.
But that’s a pause, not peace. And it’s not enough.
In Israel, the hostage families are scandalized.
“We are in the same place all going round and round in this tragedy,” said Danny Miran — father of 47-year-old Omri Miran, a hostage from Kibbutz Nahal Oz — in an interview with KAN radio. “Why do they need to talk for 60 days? Whatever you are willing to do on the 61st day, do now. Our words have exhausted themselves. We cannot even beg anymore.”
It is easy, as a Jew living in Israel and writing for a Jewish publication, to focus on the hostages. Their names and faces are known. Their suffering is personal. It’s human to cling to what we know.
But I’m thinking also of the Palestinians in Gaza.
For 21 months now, they have endured unrelenting fear and instability. The majority of Gaza’s 2 million-plus residents have been displaced again and again — sheltering in tents, hospitals and United Nations schools, then fleeing again when the bombs follow. Their homes have been flattened. Their hospitals have collapsed. Their shops are dust. They are trapped — unable to leave, even if they wanted to — and ruled by a cynical, genocidal mafia in Hamas.
They are targeted by a military that is no longer taking great care to protect civilians. Things are not as they were, say, during the second intifada two decades back, when I headed the local AP operation. Then, the IDF treated civilian Palestinian deaths as a PR disaster, dispatching spokespersons to our office to justify, explain, persuade.
They seemed, back then, to care.
Gazans will also have seen the footage from Washington. I’m sure that they, too, will be struck by the absurd detachment of the spectacle. Some will turn, as the endless insults and injuries mount, to ever more fanatical religion. Some to violent despair. Many to depression. Hatred of the Jews, and of the West, will deepen. If Palestinians in Gaza are wise, they will blame Hamas for bringing this horror upon them. But traumatized people are not always wise. It is hard to see nuance and perspective through the haze of fear and fire.
And it’s hard to see those things when the two men with the most power over the course of the conflict are feasting on fine china, apparently more preoccupied with boosting one another’s egos than on finding a real end to a conflict that has brought incalculable pain to so many. If I were at that dinner, I might have tried to remind Trump and Netanyahu that there is no universal roadmap to peace. But wherever we start the journey, the first station along the way is a place called empathy.
