In a moving and poignant piece published on the international news website Time, Israel’s First Lady, Michal Herzog, made an impassioned plea for people around the world to call for the release of the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza – especially the women and girls following ongoing emerging testimony of the sexual abuse suffered by a number of victims and hostages.
The piece comes out as Israel this week marked the highly symbolic nine-month anniversary of the mass terror attack perpetrated by terrorists from Gaza on October 7, and since which Hamas has continued to brutally hold men, women, and children hostage in Gaza.
In the article, First Lady Herzog says, “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?”
She notes, “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.”
She continues, “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.”
Herzog stresses, “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.”
First Lady Herzog concludes by emphasizing, “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.”