Karina, Liri, Agam and Daniela must come home

What if it were your beautiful daughter who was being held in brutal captivity?There is no moral case for a ceasefire that doesn’t include Hamas’s surrender and a return of the hostages still living and the bodies of those killed.

Karina Ariev, before and after her capture by Hamas.

The four young women sit bound, with their backs against a wall. Their terrified whimpers are childlike above the white noise that is the soundtrack to their captivity. Lovely young faces beaten, swollen and caked with blood.

They have names, you know. Just like your children do.

Karina, Liri, Agam and Daniela. These four young women have been held hostage by Hamas along with others for almost 100 days. According to the testimony of those who’ve been released, they have been repeatedly violated while in captivity. Violated.

I squeeze my eyes shut tight for a moment to block out the thought of it. But this isn’t the time to turn away.

With each new day of a war started by Hamas’s terrorist savages, we must be increasingly clear-eyed. But so many remain blinkered. If they weren’t, surely Australian streets would be filled with people from all walks of life screaming “rescue them”, “find them”, “bring them home”.

Photo montage from The Daily Mail newspaper on Monday, showing the girls still held by Hamas: Karina Ariev, Liri Albag, Daniela Gilboa and Agam Berger.

Instead of Karina’s face, they’d see their own child. Instead of Daniela’s terrified defiance, staring out from beneath matted, filthy hair, her face dirty with dried blood, they’d see their sister perhaps. A girlfriend. They’d be screaming a demand for their rescue.

Where is the outrage, a stranger asked, when I shared this video and challenged people not to turn away.

On some level I understand the reluctance to fully embrace the truth here. It feels like an act of violence in itself. Like turning full-faced into the sun on a 40C day without protection.

The video I’ve described was released recently by Hamas. A cruel and increasingly desperate act of psychological warfare. Its release was met with momentary disgust, but soon passed with a whimper not much louder than the voices of these young girls. Where indeed is the outrage?

Perhaps the answer can be unearthed by asking a simple question. What if?

Indulge me for a moment. What if, on October 7, 1200 young Australians were gunned down at the Falls Festival. Or at Splendour in the Grass. Imagine a terrorist attack in which they were slaughtered like wild animals on an ordinary Saturday while listening to music under a vast, limitless Australian sky.

Imagine that the women raped and murdered were your neighbours. That later that night you saw footage on the news of a girl your kid went to school with. She’d been dragged from her home. Raped. Killed. Her semi-naked, twisted body crammed into the back of a ute and paraded gleefully down the main drag while people cheered and filmed on their phones.

What if? Two very simple, almost innocuous words that drag this horror from the other side of the world to our front doors. What if it was our families? Our homes? Our existence that an enemy wanted to wipe from the face of the earth? Would we understand then? Would we open our eyes?

We are the lucky country. Families like mine and so many of yours have come here on a wing and a prayer with not much more than the clothes on their back. We were given the opportunity to build lives.

Could it be, though, that over successive generations we’ve become the lazy country? Not in terms of work ethic but in terms of values. Have we become like the spoilt kid who has had it so good all their life they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing?

In the past 100 days I have seen and read so many stories about young Israeli soldiers who, before going off to war, wrote letters to their families that should be opened only if they didn’t come home. Their words hit like plunging into the ocean on a winter’s day. The shock of sudden immersion soothed by the water’s warmth against crisp, cold air.

“I could have chosen not to come here … But that goes against everything I believe in and value and the person I consider myself to be … I would do the same thing if I could choose again.” The words of Sgt Joseph Gitarts spoken to his parents from the grave, after he was killed in Gaza last month. “I fell with honour for the sake of my people. I have no regrets.”

At just 25, he worked in the area of medical science and was developing a start-up in his field.

“I fell with honour for the sake of my people” – my god, how many of us at 25 would have that same conviction, the understanding that freedom is not free, let alone the courage to act on it? How many of us at any age?

Last June I met a young girl as I stood in line for a chicken shawarma at Gush Etzion junction in the West Bank. As I’ve shared repeatedly, I was on a study tour of Israel and the disputed territories. The girl was in a group of young soldiers part way through national service. Curious about our Australian accents, she asked me about our lives and I did the same. She was a slightly built, pale-skinned, pixie-haired wisp of a kid; the machinegun slung casually over one shoulder was almost half her height.

She said doing her military service meant defying her religious parents. In Israel, the daughters of religious families can claim an exemption, but she chose the harder road, with pride and with understanding of the risk. I asked her what her plans were for afterwards and she beamed as she described wanting to become a medical researcher specialising in women’s health. She wanted to rid the world of disease.

I wonder if she’s still alive.

Most of us have no concept of what it’s like to live with an existential threat that is real and consistently present. We’ve forgotten, with the passing of generations, that freedom was blood bought.

We’re too far away, too well-fed (literally and metaphorically), too comfortable and too forgetful, it seems, to understand what others are fighting for and how real is the threat. Would that we stop and think about it.

There is no moral case for a ceasefire that doesn’t include Hamas’s surrender and a return of Karina, Liri, Agam and Daniela, the hostages still living and the bodies of those killed.