It is difficult to fully understand who exactly brought about last week’s ceasefire and the start of what we all hope will be a lasting peace process in Gaza and Israel. What has become clear after these two years of bloody conflict is the crisis of traditional diplomacy. During this time, we have witnessed the use of weapons, the so-called intelligence diplomacy at the various meetings in Doha for previous ceasefires, and, following Trump’s return to the White House, a diplomacy focused on business and the reconstruction of Gaza in particular. Yet, since the days immediately after October 7, another actor has moved along the diplomatic path — neither political nor military, neither economic nor state-based, but civilian.
These are the people visited last Saturday by Witkoff, the U.S. envoy for the Middle East, and Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, accompanied by his wife Ivanka Trump: the relatives of those kidnapped on October 7. Witkoff opened the ceremony that, every Saturday evening for the past two years, has taken place in Tel Aviv’s Hostages’ Square, where the Forum of the Hostages’ Families has mobilized thousands of Israeli citizens to demand that the rescue of the hostages be placed above all else. A square that has relentlessly challenged both actors — Hamas and the Netanyahu government — who have played their bloody game at the expense of the hostages’ lives.
Beyond the weekly demonstrations, the Hostages’ Families Forum, with the support of politicians, lawyers, and journalists, has organized a broad campaign of communication and international outreach to raise awareness among policymakers and foreign ministries around the world about the centrality of the hostages in ending the conflict. The Israeli military response — which until just a few days ago seemed to lack any clear time frame or political horizon capable of addressing the Palestinian question — has now found an endpoint, thanks in part to the diplomatic efforts of the Forum and the Israeli citizens who have mobilized alongside it. It is work that might have had an earlier impact if the public opinion of Western countries had paid more attention to this third voice — one that, for two years, has persistently denounced the deception of violence inflicted on both Israeli and Palestinian victims.
Unfortunately, propaganda has prevailed — that war of words that has often made us passive consumers of a flood of information, a mix of truth and falsehood, in which the only freedom granted was to choose which narrative to follow, so that we might find ourselves — within a bubble — together with others on the “right side.” Propaganda’s cognitive trap lies in the power of war to shift from the local ground where weapons resound to every global social context, where partisanship divides schools, universities, political parties, and cultural institutions far removed from the battlefield.
The result is polarization — precisely what Albert Camus observed in 1956 — whereby each opposing group of supporters “chooses among the victims and declares some moving and others obscene.”
My quarter-century of work with the victims of terrorism in Italy and across Europe has taught me to “follow the families of hostages” as an ethical compass between humanism and politics. As I wrote in my first essay in 2017:
“Kidnapping is a form of attack that does not end in the few minutes of a shooting or bombing, but prolongs the time of terrorist action. In that prolonged moment, one can observe media and political dynamics concerning the victims/hostages and their families, with particular significance arising from the impossibility of knowing the outcome of the abduction. This temporal uncertainty forces political and social actors to take a position on the strategy for managing the hostages — whether to negotiate their release or abandon them — clearly revealing how each side (social or political) perceives the victims: that is, whether the human value of the hostages’ lives outweighs or not the Reason of State and the stability of government.”
