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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We'll focus first today on the hostages being held by Hamas. Tomorrow will be two weeks since the October 7th assault in which they were taken. Probably doesn't even need to be stated, but Human Rights Watch lists hostage-taking as a war crime. The numbers are imprecise, but Israeli and Hamas estimates are similar. As Reuters reports it, Israel says 203, Hamas says it has 200 hostages itself, and that 50 more are held by other armed groups in Gaza.

Hamas claims more than 20 hostages have been killed by Israeli airstrikes, but hasn't provided any evidence of that. Who are the hostages? Well, Reuters quotes Israel saying they include 30 teenagers and young children and 20 people over the age of 60. Reuters reports the hostages include people from dozens of countries many of them with dual Israeli citizenship. 20 or more Americans are missing said U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on Tuesday according to Reuters but he couldn't say how many of those were being held hostage.

Republican Senator Jim Risch told reporters on Tuesday that 10 of the hostages were Americans. Thailand revised to 17 the number of its citizens being held. Eight Germans are among the hostages, about half of whom were seized at a kibbutz, according to local media. Argentine President Alberto Fernandez said in a video call with families that 16 of his countrymen were being held. France has not said exactly how many of its citizens are held in Gaza, although there are seven unaccounted for after the attacks of which some they say are being held hostage.

Again, all this according to Reuters, Ofir Engel, an 18-year-old Dutch national, was kidnapped from Kibbutz Be'eri and taken to Gaza, according to the Dutch government. Again, some of the statements collated by Reuters News Service regarding hostages from different countries. President Biden in his speech last night made hostages topic number one in the first minute of his 15 minute speech.

President Biden: Scores of innocents, from infants to the elderly grandparents, Israelis, Americans, taken hostage. As I told the families of Americans being held captive by Hamas, we're pursuing every avenue to bring their loved ones home. As president, there is no higher priority for me than the safety of Americans held hostage.

Brian Lehrer: President Biden last night. Now what? What's the best way to win their freedom? Prisoner swaps? Military raids? Something else? What does Hamas want? Why did they take hostages as part of the October 7th operation? Atlantic magazine staff writer Graeme Wood joins us now from Jerusalem. He published an article yesterday based on what he calls a Hamas hostage-taking manual that he says he obtained. Spoiler alert, Graeme thinks taking hostages back to Gaza was not part of the original plan.

Besides being an Atlantic staff writer since 2006, Graeme Wood is author of the book The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State. He has reported for The Atlantic from every continent except Antarctica, he says. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and teaches at Yale. Graeme, thank you for joining us from Jerusalem today. Welcome to WNYC.

Graeme Wood: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: What's this hostage-taking handbook and how did you get it?

Graeme Wood: This handbook has been circulating around online and in some sources, and the IDF confirmed to me that they found it in the possession of some of the Hamas fighters who penetrated the Israeli border on October 7th. They gave me most of the handbook. I was able to find through other sources the rest of it and read it through. It is exactly what it sounds like. It's a manual for what you do once you've got a bunch of hostages in your possession, what the concrete steps are that you take and it also gives a bit of a sneak preview of what Hamas intended to do once it had these people which turns out to be slightly different from what actually seems to have happened.

Brian Lehrer: I just have to ask before we really get into the details of it, how much should we trust that this handbook is real or really used by Hamas? I'm sure as a journalist you don't automatically trust anything necessarily that you get from any party in an act of war and you say this came largely from an official of the Israeli Defense Forces. How do you know it's real?

Graeme Wood: I went through it. I went through the original Arabic, tried to find anything including marginalia that was written on it, anything that would suggest authenticity or possibility of forgery was certainly on my mind as well. The fact that it was available through multiple sources, the fact that it was authenticated by the IDF and that it was consistent with other documents that are out there that are associated with Hamas makes me think it's probably real.

There's also the fact that the IDF asked me not to publish certain aspects of it. If it was a forgery by by Israel, and they were rather sneaky and suggesting that some of their forgery was better off unmentioned.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Thank you for that. Let's go through some details. You quote the handbook saying hostages should be taken "in the field" in areas that have been "cleansed" and brought under control. What does that mean?

Graeme Wood: It's suggesting that the hostages should be taken where they are found. When Hamas went into Israel, they went into military outposts, they went into civilian areas, and what they actually did was take hostages and then bring them back to Gaza. That is not even mentioned or contemplated in this manual. What it says is you control areas, you cleanse them which means basically dominating them through force, killing the people who were there who were providing resistance.

Then in those places, you gather everybody together, figure out who's going to cause trouble, kill them, torture them, force them into compliance. Then this is the really amazing thing. They were clearly contemplating the possibility of a siege, a longstanding, prolonged, protracted standoff with the Israelis. That's what the bulk of the manual is planning for is the mechanics of that standoff.

Brian Lehrer: The difference between what we have which is a siege and a standoff inside Gaza, you're saying what they were planning for was a siege and a standoff inside Israel. Am I hearing that right?

Graeme Wood: Yes, and it could be more than one of these. This was found in one particular place, and they may have had different overall plans, different plans for different places, but this suggested they expected to go in and counter-resistance, defeat that resistance, and then very quickly have to take those hostages and put them in a place where they could be most effectively controlled and then used for bargaining. That could have been in 10 different sites around the Gaza border within Israel.

In fact, what they seem to have done is actually just killed a lot of people on site, but then had the free time, the leisure to take those hostages and bring them all into Gaza, all 200 plus of them.

Brian Lehrer: On what you just described as the free time, the leisure, it's a separate issue, but that scenario would indicate a failure of the Israeli military to really engage as I guess Hamas expected they would based on that scenario. Is that an issue among Israelis now in the aftermath?

Graeme Wood: It's, I think, impossible to express how infuriated Israelis are with their government, with the Israeli state. Israelis thought that if nothing else then their government was focused on not allowing pogroms as one might have found with Cossacks 100-plus years ago to take place. This is exactly what happened. Hamas, I think, was surprised at how little military resistance they encountered, the fact that it took 12 to 24 hours for the IDF to show up, and the Israelis were.

Of course, the Israelis who were actually kidnapped and killed were probably pretty surprised, but everybody else was just horrified by this. When Israelis are able to take a breath from the immediate trauma of the situation there's going to be a political reckoning like we've never experienced in this country.

Brian Lehrer: Since Hamas had this leisure, this luxury, they preferred to take the 200 plus, by all accounts that's a number, into Gaza?

Graeme Wood: So it appears. When looking at the manual, there's a section at the end that it talks about the negotiation that should take place. It says we're probably going to have some losses here, we Hamas, and the bodies should be marked, the graves should be marked because we're going to have to eventually leave these places after the standoff and then maybe come back once Israel is no more to take the bodies and put them where they want to be.

That suggests that they were expecting old 1970s style, dog day afternoon, or OPEC minister in Vienna situation where the final outcome was very much open to doubt could be the deaths of everybody. It could be in negotiated and some negotiated settlement. By actually bringing everybody back to Gaza, hundreds of people, they are able to negotiate from a very different position where Israel's probably unsure where the hostages are, and there can be some consolidated bargaining for Palestinian prisoners, or who knows what other concessions will be requested.

Brian Lehrer: Now listeners, your calls are welcome for Graeme Wood from The Atlantic as we focus on the 200-plus hostages believed to be held by Hamas in Gaza. Tomorrow will be two weeks. 212-433-WNYC. First of all, is anybody listening right now who knows anyone personally who is being held hostage? We always want to humanize individuals in situations like this. If you know anybody firsthand, even secondhand, whose story you would like to tell, or whose name you would like to say out loud, who's a hostage, you are welcome to do that. 212-433-WNYC.

Second, what do you think anyone should do to free them? Attack, refrain from attacking, negotiate, refuse to negotiate so it doesn't encourage future hostage taking, or any other questions for Graeme Wood on his reporting or the situation. He is in Jerusalem. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text. Graeme, does having the hostages put Hamas in a stronger or weaker position than they would be right now without hostages?

Graeme Wood: You could see it in a couple different ways. Obviously, Hamas knows that Israeli hostages are extremely valuable bargaining tools. As you probably recall, there was a single Israeli soldier who was held hostage, who was exchanged for a thousand Palestinian prisoners. These are extremely valuable. On the other hand, I'm not sure anybody, including Hamas, expected that hundreds of hostages would be in their clutches.

It's not as if they are likely to have planned to have this many bargaining chips to take to the table. They certainly couldn't have planned the amount of fury that they would've provoked in Israel. There's a real consensus in this country that Gaza has to be dealt with in a very brutal and harsh way. I'm not sure that that would've been the case if Hamas hadn't taken so many hostages and killed so many people in the catastrophic success that even it didn't expect.

Brian Lehrer: The Hamas hostage handbook you obtain says, kill those hostages expected to resist or who pose a threat. That's pretty directed cold-blooded, right there. It then says the other should be blindfolded and "reassured" to keep them docile, but then it says, "use them as human shields and use electric shocks to force compliance." How extra cool. Do you know of Hamas actually shocking hostages in the past?

Graeme Wood: I cannot tell you that Hamas has actually shocked hostages in the past. The brutality with which they treated Israeli civilians on October 7th suggests that electric shocks is not even close to near their limits. The fact that they were expecting to do that is not a surprise. It's still pretty shocking to see that in print. There's always a possibility that in a battlefield situation, people go a little crazy. They do things they didn't expect to do, they're in the heat of the moment. This is something that's written down in print. By the way, the date on it is two or three years ago. It's just chilling to see that that kind of brutality was contemplated, expected, even hoped for.

Brian Lehrer: The human shields issue referred to in that passage is obviously a big one. It's one of the central claims about Hamas by Israel, about Gaza's own civilian population, that Hamas embeds their military and terror operations among civilians to use them as human shields. That's among people they supposedly care about Gaza Palestinians. Here's evidence of Hamas using human shields, in this case, hostages based on the manual. Any clues as to where any of these particular hostages are being housed to use them that way?

Graeme Wood: I don't have any more knowledge than anyone else, but Hamas itself says that they have 500 kilometers worth of tunnels underneath the Gaza Strip. In the manual, it says, find a basement, find a place where they can't be seen, don't give information about where they are, how many they are, or what their condition is. It would be totally unsurprising if Hamas is using whatever kind of subterfuge that it has at its disposal to keep the hostages and to make sure that these very valuable flesh commodities that they have, are invisible to the Israelis and difficult to get back.

Brian Lehrer: It was reported a week ago now by NBC News that a spokesman for the military wing of Hamas threatened to kill hostages for each civilian killed by Israeli airstrikes. By that calculus, there would probably be no more hostages alive anymore today. Do you have reason to think that that was just talk because it's not actually in Hamas' interest to do that?

Graeme Wood: I would not dismiss the possibility that it was not just talk. Again, this situation with 203 confirmed hostages doesn't seem to be something that anyone was prepared for on either side. Did they coordinate in advance? Did they strategize in advance all the messages that they would put out? Did they want to titrate the fury of the Israelis that it arrived exactly the way that Hamas preferred? I think that there was a lot of improvisation that's been going on. That statement might have been part of that.

Brian Lehrer: This relates to a separate article you have in The Atlantic from last week called Hamas May Not Have a Step Two. What do you mean by a step two?

Graeme Wood: When the attack happened, it was amazing how well they penetrated the Israeli defenses, how well they predicted, how well they planned for the attack in such a stealthy manner that Israeli intelligence apparently had no idea it was coming. The fact that they did that so well suggested that they had thought this through really well. They suggested that they had various strategic plans of what do you do on October 8th. On October 8th, it seems they thought that they might have a lot of hostages in a lot of different places, and they would start to be able to bargain for them.

The other possibility that had to be contemplated, and believe me, Israelis were contemplating it on October 7th, is maybe they've coordinated with Hezbollah, and that would open up a second front in the war, which would be very difficult for Israel to recover from. Israel has to take time to call up its reserves and so forth. These were all strategic questions, and it's reasonable to wonder, if step one was having this raid in the early morning, October 7 from Gaza, then is there a step two, is there a step three? There's also the possibility that there wasn't, or that step one got out of hand, that yes, there was an expectation that they would take hostages, that they would be brutal, that they would be killing.

There was no understanding of how seriously with the magnitude of that could be. I think a lot of people around Israel are wondering exactly how much of this was planned and how much of it was something that Hamas was able to do with, I used this phrase before, catastrophic success that they did so well, that Israel has had no choice but to plan for a full invasion of the Gaza Strip. As they keep on saying, the total annihilation of Hamas as an operational entity. That may not have been exactly what Hamas was looking for in the magnitude of the response.

Brian Lehrer: Has Hamas accidentally committed a murder-suicide here; killed or injured thousands of Israelis, the worst day of killing of Jews since the Holocaust, plus the taking of the hostages, but spurring the Israeli government to start this operation meant to destroy Hamas, not to contain it?

Graeme Wood: That is certainly possible. I don't presume to know the entire strategic vision of Hamas, but it does seem very likely in this hostage manual is one more piece of evidence for this possibility. It seems very likely that this did not go quite exactly how they expected it to go. That could mean that it's having repercussions that were not expected by Hamas.

Brian Lehrer: NPR's Morning Edition had a report on a station today that many Israelis are upset that their government isn't taking the hostage situation as seriously as it should, and perhaps not as seriously as the US is taking its hostage situation, meaning regarding US Nationals being held in this group. Are you aware of that being an issue there reporting from Jerusalem?

Graeme Wood: Yes, absolutely. One of the things that's frequently mentioned is the failure of the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to meet with the families. There's 203 people which means a large number of families, and Israelis will often say, "Nobody doesn't know someone who's affected by this in this country." There's only 10 million people here so 203 people distributed among those 10 million, it's a personal thing for everyone.

I think there's many Israelis who just noticed that the government was caught flat-footed in the day of the attack and continues to be ineffective in its response. Not only have they not actually gotten the hostages back or invaded Gaza, but there's no real known plan for what's going to happen, certainly after the invasion, but the government is as reeling, it seems, as anyone else.

I think it's important to see, too, like many Israelis remember the period when Gilad Shalit was a hostage in Gaza. That one guy, if you went to Jerusalem during that period, you'd see his face stenciled, you'd see on murals and so forth. He was known to literally everyone. There were many Israelis who could tell you exactly how many days he had been captive. That was one guy. I don't think the Israeli government has ever contemplated that there might be 203 of those people all at once. Its response I think is taken by many Israelis as really illustrating the incompetence of the government, the incompetence to expect that this would happen and to react in a humane and urgent way.

Brian Lehrer: On this being personal to almost all Israelis, because it's such a small country, roughly the size of New Jersey, roughly the population of New Jersey to give US listeners a little bit of context. Max in central Jersey, I think, has a relevant call. Max, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Max: How are you doing?

Brian Lehrer: All right. What do you got for us?

Max: I just want to say, just so listeners know, I'm Orthodox Jew living in Jersey. The whole Jersey, New York area has probably the largest, for sure the largest amount of Jews, definitely Orthodox religious Jews outside of Israel. I personally, and a lot of people that don't know anyone captured or killed, everyone knows someone who is some, I know people, friends of friends who were called up, I know a person who was supposed to get married the next week, and he postponed his wedding, which, especially in our religious circles, is not a small deal. We get engaged and get married the next month, it's something that we do. They went back.

Even though personally, I don't know anyone affected, I do have family in Jerusalem. It's definitely it's scary. Right now they're safe there but as especially as religious Jews, we believe all Jews, whether religious or not, and there are plenty of divides and arguments between, especially in Israel about between the religious and the secular, but when anything happens to any Jews because they're Jews, and that's what this was, they were not attacked because they're Israelis, they were attacked because they're Jews it's --

Brian Lehrer: Well, that part is open to debate but we'll leave that for another day.

Max: We can debate about it, but if I-- Listen, I'm not Israeli, and especially maybe you could probably call me ultra-orthodox if that's the term people would use, or Haredi if you know. I looked the part. If I walked into Gaza, it doesn't make a difference what I'd be saying, I would be without a head in a couple of minutes or [unintelligible 00:24:24] That's my opinion. You could agree or disagree with that.

Brian Lehrer: I hear you, Max.

Max: My point is that when any of this thing happens, it's such a personal experience for us. We know, and for especially the day, I don't know if this was mentioned at all, the day that it happened, I believe it was also 50 years to the day from the Kippur War, which I'm sure is not a coincidence. It was also one of our holidays, which was a symbolism of love between God and the Jews.

Brian Lehrer: That's what it all stands--

Max: [unintelligible 00:25:01] happen on that day was such a personal, everyone was just left reeling. It's supposed to be a day of closeness and everyone's happy and it was-- I literally heard about it. On the holidays we don't use phones or technology, no one could really hear about anything [unintelligible 00:25:22] [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: On the Sabbath, no less.

Max: Right. The Sabbath and the holidays, so it was like a double blow.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have any opinion, Max, about what you would like to see the Israeli government, and for that matter, the US government do to secure the freedom of the hostages, exchange a lot of other Palestinian prisoners who may be prisoners because of past acts or planned acts of terrorism, or not negotiate at all or try to stage however many military raids it may take, which of course puts everybody at risk as well. No easy choices here. Do you or people you're talking to have any preferences?

Max: It's a hard question. I believe your guest mentioned that they traded a thousand prisoners for one soldier, but then what do you do when there's 200? You can't trade. There's no 200,000 prisoners. Every time you up the ante, you're just left stuck the next time. Unfortunately, there's things like there's always going to be a next time. Hopefully, [unintelligible 00:26:34] next time.

Brian Lehrer: Max, I appreciate your call. Thank you very much. Stay safe. Ralph on the Upper West Side, you're on WNYC. Hi, Ralph.

Ralph: Hi, thanks a lot. Unlike the previous caller, I actually do know somebody who was taken captive. I'm not sure that she would remember me but we've met both in Israel and in New York. She's a lifelong peace activist. She's originally from Winnipeg, Canada. Her name is Vivian Silver. She has some notoriety, maybe you even know that name.

Brian Lehrer: I don't personally.

Ralph: What she did in Israel was she co-partnered with a Bedouin activist to work for Israeli Bedouin rights. She is now 74 years old. When she retired from that, she worked in a women's peace group called Women Wage Peace. She's also volunteered with a project called Project Rozana that takes people from Gaza. She met people at the Gaza border to take them to Israeli hospitals for treatment. She is a resident of the Kibbutz Be'eri which was one of the Kibbutzim that was devastated by these attacks. We hope to God that she can come home in one piece.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Ralph. Thank you for naming her name. Vivian Silver, you said, right?

Ralph: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Ralph. I hope she and everybody comes home safely. Graeme, we're assuming that story is accurate. What does Hamas do with a 74-year-old hostage?

Graeme Wood: I Do not know. The manual that that I looked at did say that women and children need to be separated from the men so it's not as if they weren't expecting to have people who are not in combat demographic classes in their clutches. The prognosis is not good. I've spoken to a number of families of hostages. They've described to me these horrific ordeals of getting a series of messages during the attack and then stopping getting messages.

Sometimes they've seen images of their loved ones on social media, on Telegram and other platforms, and that's how they know they're still alive and also know that they're in Hamas captivity. I've spoken to people whose grandmothers are in captivity and they need medication. These are old people and just to maintain them in their own homes is complicated enough. Now, to have the whole demographic age gamut from infants all the way to old people is not easy. It's not easy to attend to all these people, and who knows what the conditions are like. The images that we've already seen suggest that they're not particularly nice.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, my producer, Mary just showed me that there's a Time Magazine story published two days ago about Vivian Silver. Part of the angle is that it's ironic that here's a peace activist who gets taken hostage in this war. If she was active in trying to forge Israeli-Palestinian peace or a two-state solution or more respect for the people in the occupied territories, anything like that, would that matter to Hamas?

Graeme Wood: It might, and it might not matter in a good way, either. It might not be something that they're really in favor of. You have to remember that the Gaza Strip was closed off, but there were 10s of 1000s of Gazans who were going into Israel for work. They'd have these passes where they could go work in agricultural jobs and go back to Gaza. I spoke to members of communities that are now empty, totally evacuated, because they're so close to Gaza, that they're threatened by the war, and all 10s of 1000s of their citizens are scattered to other parts of Israel.

Those people would describe the relationships they had with people in Gaza and say, "Oh, there's this guy who named Muhammad with seven kids who we paid to work, and we will never see him again. We will not even contemplate having these relationships in the future because we can't while Hamas is in charge." I'm sure that is, in fact, exactly what Hamas was hoping for. That type of relationship that would prolong the existence of Israel and create bonds or relationships or contracts between Gazans and Israelis. Is not something that Hamas is really that enthusiastic about. To have a peace activist who was trying to forge those bonds, was possibly not something they would really appreciate.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Graeme Wood from The Atlantic in Jerusalem on the hostages and more, stay with us.

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President Biden: Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common. They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy, completely annihilated.

Brian Lehrer: President Biden there equating Hamas and its attack on Israel and Putin and his attack on Ukraine, in last night's speech, as we continue with Atlantic staff writer, Council on Foreign Relations member, and Yale University Professor Graeme Wood, mostly on his new article about how Hamas uses hostages based on a Hamas hostage-taking a manual, he says obtained. Your calls and texts, 212-433-WNYC.

Just as an aside for a minute, Graeme, what do you think about that clip in Biden's attempt last night to pair these wars in Americans' minds as he asks Congress for billions in aid for both wars today? Was he using the almost universal support for Israel and Congress as a wedge to get funding for Ukraine, which, as we know, leaves Republicans especially more divided?

Graeme Wood: Yes. It's very interesting that he would connect these two causes in that way. The huge expense of supporting Ukraine, and the expected huge amount of support that the United States will have to give to Israel, does start making a lot of people in policy circles start counting the ammunition, seeing what's left for Taiwan, if that front opens. It doesn't escape people's notice that who is on Russia's side in the Ukraine war? It's Iran. Of course, in the case of Hamas, Iran is the principal armor for Hamas and gives most to its military budget.

It's not as if there's no connection between these two causes, but I think the President quite reasonably thinks that he needs to shore up political support and try to get an understanding that it's possible to have an absolute political imperative, geopolitical imperative to support both of these allies at the same time, which is going to be a big ask.

Brian Lehrer: Big ask indeed. We'll see how that plays out. That's for future segments, maybe Monday with Mara Liasson after Biden sends that aid request to Congress, pairing the two in one bill as I understand it.

Now let's go on to what you see as the range of choices facing the US, or Israel, or any government now since we learned at the beginning that there are like 17 countries that have people among these 200 plus hostages. What's the range of choices with respect to trying to free them?

Graeme Wood: Well, the first thing I'd point out is that the range of choices may be constrained by what Israel has announced as its objective from the start. Israel, it's a rare moment when I can just say Israel and mean the consensus of as far as I can tell everyone in any position of influence in Israel. Everybody agrees that there has to be something that is done within the Gaza Strip to eliminate Hamas. I don't think anyone accepts anything short of eliminating the possibility that anything like this would ever happen again by eliminating the operational capability of Hamas.

Now, that in some way is a very difficult bargaining position to put yourself in because exactly what type of concession could be offered to get people back, if you've announced from the start that you are going to hunt down the perpetrators of this to the ends of the earth. I mean, we're talking about Munich-style assassinations for 20 years, 30 years, whatever it takes. You don't give yourself very much negotiation room in those circumstances.

What we've seen in the last couple of weeks, really in the last week is an unexpected delay in the invasion itself. There are many reasons for that delay to happen. Of course, there's plenty of airstrikes that have happened within Gaza, and plenty of rockets that are coming in other direction, massive loss of life in Gaza itself.

Some of the reasons for that delay may have to do with concern about exactly how that's going to go, how the stated objective, this maximalist objective that Israelis has decided on unannounced, is actually going to play out when there's the possibility of, say Hezbollah entering the war, the possibility of lots of hostages being killed intentionally or accidentally, in the course of the invasion. These things really have to be thought through, of course, and that may be one of the reasons why the invasion hasn't started as quickly as many expected.

Brian Lehrer: Peter in Huntington, you're on WNYC. Hi, Peter.

Peter: Hi, Brian, thanks for taking the call. I've got family in Tel Aviv, that I have not been able to get a hold of. Normally through emails, get a response quickly. I'm wondering if your guest has any information on how you can find out who unfortunately was killed or murdered or who might be being held hostage, just to even find out the finality of what might be going on overseas?

Graeme Wood: I'm sorry you're not being able to hear back. Of course, the country is still connected, so there's no reason that someone who's well in Tel Aviv couldn't return an email. There is a very well-organized grassroots effort to organize the families of hostages, to make sure that the world knows who is being kept, who these people are, who they are as humans too. That's something I think we'll hear more of.

One thing that I don't think many people appreciate is there's also a lot of uncertainty. In a way, this is one of the more torturous states that one could be in here, which is we don't even know if some of the people are actually taken hostage. Remember, some of the mass slaughter occurred out in the desert. There could be people who were killed and whose bodies have not been found. There are bodies that were found that were almost not recognizable as bodies because they were desecrated, burned to such an extent.

In addition to the people who know that their loved ones are dead, the people who know that their loved ones are in some dungeon in Gaza, there's some people who really just are unsure what the state of their loved ones is, other than they don't know where they are.

Brian Lehrer: Peter, I hope that's somewhat helpful, and good luck locating the folks who are trying to locate. Good luck. You touch on the question in your Atlantic article, why did Hamas do this now? With one source just replying, "Because they're effing terrorists, and they spent all day figuring out how to kill Israelis and Americans." Others have said, because Saudi Arabia was about to recognize Israel with nothing real for the Palestinians in the bargain, or other more specifically strategic reasons.

In fact, we have a question here, from a listener via text message, the question is, "Can the guest comment on something I heard on the show on Wednesday. That was that several Arab governments had committed to billions in funding for Palestinians that would bypass Hamas. Would Hamas have acted now in order to avoid being stripped of political power due to this deal?" To that range of questions, why did Hamas do this now as far as you can tell?

Graeme Wood: First of all the the source that I quoted, I think that's a possibility that has to be kept in mind. Which is there might not always be an interesting answer to why now. It could be because well right now, they were able to do it and they always want to do this, so that's why. The Palestinians are not stupid. They're not less strategic than any other people, and so it's also worth considering the geopolitics here, what type of AOK they got green lights, they got from other powers including Iran, which we don't know that happened but Iran is one of their supporters so it'd be worth figuring out how that might have interacted with their timing.

As regards Saudi Arabia, the real talk of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel as opposed to just the off-the-books strategic relationship that they've had, that's ramped up in just the last year or so. It's been talked about but it's ramped up more recently than I think the planning for this operation took place. I don't think it's certainly not just because of that. I do think Hamas realized that there were efforts and they were bearing some fruit to make sure that Israel was integrated into other Arab states, and that would leave much less leeway for them to have their own eliminationist policy toward Israel and its inhabitants.

I think what we are seeing now with other Arab states pledging aid for Gaza, trying to figure out ways that they can lend a hand to the people of Gaza without being directly implicated in helping Hamas, in many cases it is-- in addition, it might be sincere but it's also self-serving. Arab states, the ones who are at peace with Israel have diplomatic relations like Jordan, like Egypt, like the UAE. They have to be concerned about the fact that their population is loyal to Gaza. They are sympathetic to other Arab populations.

If you're Egypt you have to worry, if you have a peaceful relationship with Israel that your population will take that out on you. Remember that Sadat was assassinated over that over that relationship. I think that some of the Arab states that are looking for other possibilities, other ways that this could end other than a very bloody and costly in human lives invasion. They're of course thinking about themselves, thinking about their continued survival and the ability of their governments to survive the displeasure of their own people.

Brian Lehrer: Graeme Wood, covering the situation in the Middle East for The Atlantic from Jerusalem. Thank you so much for joining us.

Graeme Wood: Thank you, Brian.

[00:43:28] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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