“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” William Shakespeare asked in The Merchant of Venice. “Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
Nothing has shaken Israel, a 77-year-old nation long regarded as invincible, as profoundly as Hamas’ use of hostage-taking as a weapon. The holy land has, tragically, become the bloody land.
In case it escaped notice, The Jerusalem Post editorial on September 7, 2025, reminded readers: “Hostages still held in Gaza have been there 700 days too long… Let them go, and end this war with purpose. Let our people come home and turn the page from endless campaigning to responsible resolutions, now.”
I wrote in The Jerusalem Post on August 10, 2014: “As Israelis and Palestinians mourn their dead and the faraway onlookers blame one side or the other, let all members of the human race be realistic enough to acknowledge that no amount of blood spilled by either side will bring peace in a thousand years.”
Throughout history, humans have constantly innovated ways to kill their enemies before the enemy kills them. Ordinary Ugandans invented spears; our Baganda cousins produced the “Magezi ga Baganda,” home-made guns.
The Tamil Tigers pioneered suicide bombers, claiming high-profile victims like Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. The North Vietnamese outwitted the mighty US by moving men and weapons through the 250-kilometer Ho Chi Minh tunnels, some of which ran beneath the US embassy in Saigon.
Europe produced chariots, automatic guns, chemical and biological weapons, atomic bombs, and drones. And tomorrow, artificial intelligence will bring new weapons. How will our UPDF defend us against them?
Fast forward to October 7, 2023, when Hamas, a radical wing of the Palestinian Liberation Front, unveiled a weapon both simple and devastating: hostage-taking. Unlike traditional arms, it does not kill immediately but keeps the enemy alive while exacting maximum psychological, political, and moral pressure.
The victims include men, women, and toddlers. Baby Shiri Bibas, just nine months old, became one such hostage. She spent her brief life in captivity.
Personally, I would rather be shot than witness my beloved child slowly fade in confinement for 700 days. And anyone in that predicament must confront the same impossible choice.
Hostage-taking by Hamas in 2023 mirrors the strategic intent of the U.S. use of atomic bombs on Japan in 1945: both seek to morally and politically coerce the target into submission or face annihilation.
Yet international law, including the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, forbids such acts. But who heeds the UN today? Once conceived in San Francisco on October 24, 1945, the institution has been repeatedly mortally wounded—Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Tigray (2022–23)—and now lies metaphorically buried in Ukraine, 2025.
In its place, state and non-state actors fight with stark, uncompromising logic: victory or annihilation. Israel and Palestine now face this grim reality.
Meanwhile, global powers, including the U.S., attempt short-term fixes—threats, mineral deals, diplomatic posturing—yet history shows that such interventions rarely resolve the underlying conflict.
In the end, hostage-taking is a brutal modern weapon that exposes not only the fragility of military might but also the enduring human cost of asymmetric warfare. As the world watches, the question remains: how long before morality, law, and common humanity reclaim their place in the most intractable conflicts of our time?
