Three years ago today, June 25, seven Hamas terrorists crossed the border separating Gaza and Israel, killed two Israeli soldiers, injured four more and kidnapped 19-year-old soldier Gilad Schalit.
He has remained in captivity ever since. In violation of the requirements of international law, not to mention the most rudimentary requirements of human decency, his Hamas captors have refused to let the Red Cross or any other aid group visit him.
Pathetically, the International Committee of the Red Cross last week pleaded with Hamas to allow Schalit’s family or a humanitarian aid organization to establish contact with their captive. The Red Cross admitted both to its own impotence and to Hamas’ sadism when it said that it has asked Hamas repeatedly to allow contact between the young soldier and his family, including requests “at the highest level, but these and all others have been refused.” The organization knows nothing about Schalit’s condition.
The organization thanked Jimmy Carter last week, the self-appointed envoy for many of the world’s dictators, for trying to make contact with Schalit. “We welcome the fact that former U.S. president Jimmy Carter handed Hamas a letter from Gilad Schalit’s family to him,” Beatrice Megevand-Roggo, the Red Cross’ head of operations for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement. “However, this cannot replace the regular and unconditional contacts with his family that Gilad Schalit is entitled to under international humanitarian law. The ICRC regrets that in his case, political considerations are judged more important than the simple humanitarian gesture of allowing a captive to be in touch with his family after three years of separation.”
What Megevand-Roggo euphemistically calls political considerations we prefer to call simply brutality. Hamas’ calculations toward Schalit are of a piece with their calculations toward the Jewish state: brazen and brutal hatred.
At a news conference in Egypt last week, after meetings with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman and Egyptian Defence Minister Hussein Tantawi, in which the subject of Schalit’s release was undoubtedly raised, Israel’s defence minister, Ehud Barak, said there were no new developments to report concerning progress on Schalit’s release.
Israel has offered to release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in return for Schalit, to no avail. Hamas has threatened that the Israeli will “remain imprisoned by us for eternity.”
It offends the conscience, but no longer surprises, that the accusatory circles that incessantly hector and target Israel make no demands of Hamas. They shout no opprobrium at the rulers of Gaza. They shrug off the ruthlessness of the kidnappers’ paymasters.
But we will never be indifferent to the fate of Gilad Schalit. Nor will we ever recoil from pointing to the hypocrisy and moral vapidity of Israel’s accusers who are also Hamas’ apologists.