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| By The Free Press |
It’s Monday, October 13. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Woody Allen remembers Diane Keaton. María Corina Machado on Honestly. And much more.
But first: The hostages are free.
At 3:22 a.m. ET on October 7, 2023, I texted my producer: “Candace there’s war in Israel. We should record ASAP.”
At that moment, Hamas terrorists still roamed southern Israel and the details were far from clear. What we knew was that Israel had been attacked and that videos were beginning to make their way from Telegram to X. Scenes of dozens of Palestinian terrorists breaking through the security fence and rushing into Israeli territory; clips of Hamas militants, with AK-47s slung over their chests, driving white pickup trucks through the streets of southern Israel; blurry videos of Israelis running for their lives in roundabouts and fields.
We were only beginning to understand what was unfolding, and there was a lot we did not know. We did not know yet that 251 people would be kidnapped that day, including more than 30 children. We did not know yet that what was unfolding was the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, only this time streaming live on social media. We did not know it was the start of a war of survival Israel would fight on seven fronts, or that it would take two years of war against Hamas to bring Israel to this moment.
Within 48 hours of October 7, we had interviewed more than a dozen people. We published many of those firsthand accounts on Honestly. A pregnant woman named Shaked told us about 11 family members who were taken hostage, including her 3- and 8-year-old niece and nephew. Survivors of the Nova music festival, Amit and Chen, watched the murder of their friends. We talked to a mother whose daughter was killed at the music festival. We talked to a grandmother who hid in her safe room for hours with her 10-day-old grandson as terrorists shot at the door.
And we spoke to a father named Jon Polin whose son, Hersh, was kidnapped. Little did we know that the entire world would soon know his name.
More than two years later, the hostages are finally coming home.
We are under no illusions about what comes next. Hamas’s tragic determination to bring death and destruction down on Gaza as a war strategy has been a terrible aspect of the past two years. Had Hamas been willing at any point to release the living and the dead they dragged into captivity on October 7, and lay down their arms, a great deal of suffering on both sides might have been avoided. Instead, a long war was necessary to arrive at this moment of diplomacy. And this is only phase one of Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan. Today, the president is meeting regional leaders in Egypt to finalize an agreement to end the war. Serious—perhaps intractable—challenges lay ahead. There are many, many outstanding questions. As Free Press Middle East analyst Haviv Rettig Gur put it, “Everything that matters for Gaza’s future is in phase 2 and beyond.”
But none of that detracts from the meaning of this day—a day that Matti Friedman explains the significance of in our lead essay this morning.
“For the past two years,” Matti writes:
Israelis have been walking around with the feeling that some unknown muscle is tightly and involuntarily clenched. This is evident in the set lines on the faces of passersby, in the way people hunch their shoulders as if against the cold, in brittle and combustible interactions at the supermarket or gas station. The feeling intensifies when the war news is particularly awful, like the day last summer when a hostage I knew, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was murdered by his Palestinian captors with five other Israelis in a tunnel under Rafah.
But even on “quiet” days, the ones when we don’t have to rush our children to the safe room because of a missile alert, or steer them away from the news, it doesn’t go away.
It’s a sensation so protracted that many of us stopped noticing—until the moment, this weekend, when the muscle relaxed.
Read Matti on when the call to “bring them home” was finally answered:
Our newsroom has been working hard to cover the story of the hostages since those early hours of October 7. Now that the surviving hostages are finally free, we’ve collected some of the stories we’re reminded of in one place. Click below to read, listen, and watch the story of the hostages:
—Bari Weiss
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For the latest on the hostage release and what comes next, join Haviv Rettig Gur and Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib at 9 a.m. ET this morning on the Free Press livestream. Tune in here at 9, or watch it on our home page. Livestreams like this are for paying subscribers, who’ll be able to join the Q&A. Not a subscriber yet? Become one here.
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On Honestly: María Corina Machado’s Nobel—and Her Fight to Free Venezuela
María Corina Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for stubborn opposition to Venezuelan autocrat Nicolás Maduro. Bari sat down with Machado for the latest episode of Honestly to discuss why she’s choosing to risk her life by staying in Venezuela, her message to democratic socialists in America, why she dedicated her prize to President Trump, and more. Click play below to listen to their conversation, catch it wherever you get your podcasts, or watch it here.
María Corina Machado’s Fight to Free Venezuela The Free Press |
And for more coverage of the Nobel, read our editorial on why Machado is such a worthy winner:
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Woody Allen Remembers Diane Keaton | ||||||
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