‘Muslims and Jews, we’re all in the same boat, going through the same Hamas horror’

At the entrance to the village and on walls within it are posters bearing photographs of Youssef and Bilal and the slogan of the Israeli Hostage and Missing Families’ Forum, the grassroots organisation based in Tel Aviv. It reads “Bring Them Home”, in Arabic, Hebrew and English.

“We are in a state of complete distress,” Ali Alziadna says, “it’s a situation that can’t be described in words. We can’t sleep, and when we hear the Israeli artillery and airstrikes, we are afraid they will hurt our family. We are asking the government to do whatever it takes to get them back, even if it means all for all – releasing every Palestinian prisoner in return for every hostage of Hamas.

“We sent a list of the medications Youssef takes to the Red Cross. He needs to inject himself with insulin every day. But Bilal told us that before he was released, his father wasn’t getting it. Hamas has failed to meet his medical needs.”

The terrorists’ onslaught on Muslim Arab Bedouin on October 7 is an aspect of the atrocities that has received relatively little attention. But at least 21 were murdered – mainly in the kibbutzim where they worked alongside Jewish victims – and other have been killed in rocket strikes.

According to Liora Or, a Hostage and Missing Families Forum volunteer who focuses on the Bedouin abductees, besides Hamza and Youssef Alziadna there are still at least another three Bedouin hostages. One lived in Rahat, a city of 80,000 people near the Gaza Strip which is formally recognised by Israel and has the usual range of public services such as grid electricity, education and refuse collection.

The others, however, come from “unrecognised” villages such as Ziadna, which means they have none of the usual municipal services. To get there requires driving several miles down an unpaved road, with piles of uncollected rubbish strewn at its side. The only electricity there is supplied by solar panels or generators, and the village has no schools.

“Rockets fired from Gaza sometimes land here,” Ali Alziadna says. “But none of us have safe rooms, and there are no shelters.

“The Bedouin families don’t know what they can get from the state, so we try to help them,” says Or, “and they have been made a lot of promises by politicians which haven’t been followed through.”

Nevertheless, it is striking that unlike the last round of the Israel-Hamas conflict in 2021, there has been little tension, let alone violence, in Israeli towns with a large Arab population such as Lod and Nazareth. Perhaps that was because it was evident that Hamas did not differentiate between Arabs and Jews.

“Maybe one good thing will come of this crisis,” Or says. “It’s a good opportunity for Israeli society to see that the Bedouin are good people, and that if we treat them well, we will reap a big reward.”

Another member of the Alziadna clan is Bashir Alziadna, 27, who is studying law and was brought up in Rahat. A Forum activist, he has been forced to relocate from his student accommodation in Sderot, the town closest to the Gaza Strip, because it has been evacuated. Speaking fluent English, he tells the JC: “My cousin was murdered in a kibbutz along with his Jewish wife. They were a normal couple who met and fell in love: an Arab and a Jew. And Hamas butchered them both.”

Many Bedouin, Bashir points out, already play an active part in the Israeli mainstream. His father Kamal, now a lawyer, spent 24 years as an investigator in a national police special unit that deals with the most serious crimes. As for October 7, he says, “you simply can’t rationalise it. Gaza was not occupied. Israel withdrew in 2005. And even if it hadn’t, nothing could justify what happened. There is evidence the terrorists had taken drugs. Not very Islamic of them!”

Ziadna’s poverty makes its people economically dependent on the nearby kibbutzim. On the morning of October 7, Youssef, Bilal and Hamza were working in the cowshed at Kibbutz Holit, less than a mile from the Gaza border, and that day Aisha was accompanying them to help her family out.

Outside his uncle Ali’s home, the freed hostage Bilal joins him and other relatives sitting in a semi-circle of plastic chairs, sipping tiny cups of pungent Arabic coffee. Dressed in a tracksuit, he looks subdued, and when the JC tries to ask him questions about what happened, Ali Alziadna intervenes, saying he is still “too traumatised” by his ordeal to talk to a journalist.

But he relays what Bilal and his sister Aisha have told him: that all four members of the family were held in a single room, much of the time in darkness, and that the food was “very poor” and the water brackish, tasting strongly of salt. Aisha, he says, lost 15kg in weight during the 55 days she was a hostage – “it wasn’t just hunger, but her fears and anxiety over her father’s health”. Physically, he says, Bilal and Aisha have begun to recover, but their psychological wounds are deep.

Their guards, Alziadna says, were Hamas members who did not speak to them at all. There was no shower, and no chance of exercise. Meanwhile, his and Youssef’s father is 90, and poor health: “I am worried that my brother will not get a chance to say goodbye.” Alziadna says he communicates frequently with other hostages’ families, both Jewish and Bedouin. Ultimately, he says, “we are all in the same boat, going through the same horror.”