It’s much easier to romanticize Hamas when you ignore their brutality. That wasn’t an option for Yair Horn.
Horn was one of around 250 people kidnapped during the terror group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. He was at his home in the Kibbutz Nir Oz community. He and his brother, Eitan Horn, attempted to retreat into a “safe room,” but Hamas terrorists forced their way inside. Horn said the room was more like a bomb shelter.
This was the start of a nightmare that lasted nearly 500 days, which Horn talked about recently at the Congregation Ner Tamid in Henderson, Nevada. Hamas kept him below ground in a tunnel.
“I didn’t see sunlight for almost 500 days,” he said. “I didn’t have fresh air to breathe. We were just bargaining chips, not humans.”
There were days when Horn received only a small bottle of water to sustain him. He lost nearly 70 pounds. He said he was able to shower only every month or two. His captors tormented him by saying that his family didn’t care about him. They suggested he would be imprisoned for a decade or more.
“You’re stripped of your basic human rights,” Horn told his audience. “You just think about your family and friends, and you just keep on going. You hope that maybe one day you’ll get your freedom back.”
Some captives had it worse. His brother was held for more than two years. Female hostages endured sexual abuse. Others didn’t survive.
Think about how foreign this sounds to people living in the safety of suburban America. The idea that terrorists would invade the country and kidnap people seems preposterous. But most people don’t build bomb shelters because America’s enemies don’t dare lob missiles into the country.
That isn’t the case for Israel and its citizens.
If a terrorist group attacked America, the public would demand that the military violently destroy the country’s enemies. That’s what happened after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The country cheered then-President Barack Obama for authorizing the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
Yet Israel faced immense scrutiny for its response to Hamas’ attacks. Most of the vocal protesters on America’s college campuses didn’t demand Hamas immediately release the civilian hostages it held. They instead went after Israel for defending itself. Those protesters may have been on the property of institutions of higher education, but they displayed their ignorance to the entire country.
It’s remarkable that Horn has the courage to talk publicly about the horrors he endured. It’s a shame that many Americans need to hear stories such as his to recognize the evil at work here.
Las Vegas Review-Journal./Tribune News Service
