The Gazan Malignancy

We have struggled to find, especially since that 7 October, the righteous among the civilised.

- RAHUL GOSWAMI

Our first sighting of a novel horror came on 19 January this year. That was the day, under the agreement between the State of Israel and the terrorist group Hamas, three Israeli hostages were released from captivity. The three—Emily Damari, Romi Gonen and Doron Steinbrecher—were the first of what was to become a series of releases.

They had been captive for 471 agonisingly long days. Nothing could have forewarned their anxious families, nor a country waiting for the hostages to be freed, for the blood-curdling spectacle to follow. The video footage of the three young women's release showed them being herded between vehicles by squads of masked men wearing new combat fatigues, the Hamas green bandana on their foreheads, brandishing submachine guns.

Around them, in every direction, the videos showed enormous mobs, some armed, all screaming, roiling madly around the epicentre of their demonic focus, three terrified young women, the transfer vehicles all but lost in the frightful tide of bloodlust. It was the closing counterpart to the ghastly spectacle, again glimpsed through video footage in the days after 7 October 2023, of the demonic mobs in Gaza who abused the live hostages and desecrated the bodies of the murdered ones.