From Gaza to Hormuz, hostage-taking has reached new levels

I asked the man who is in the thick of it for his assessment of the situation in southern Lebanon. He replied: “Part of our territory is occupied. It is a hostage in the hands of the Israeli army. I wish the Lebanese army were capable of recovering the occupied land by its own forces, but that is not possible. The imbalance of power is massive and terrifying.

“Since Oct. 7, Israel has become more brutal and powerful than it was before. Leaving the task to Hezbollah would be suicidal. Lebanon cannot withstand another round of military confrontation. It is economically exhausted, and most Lebanese oppose resuming the war. Choosing war would also mean keeping Lebanon hostage to a confrontation beyond its capacity,” he added.

“Unfortunately, southern Lebanon, and with it Lebanon as a whole, has spent being held hostage for a very long time. In the 1970s, southern Lebanon was hostage to the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation. It was a mailbox through which Palestinian organizations sent their explosive messages to remind the world of Palestinian rights. The south was treated as territory beyond the authority of the state to which it belonged.

“Muammar Qaddafi sent an arsenal. Saddam Hussein sent weapons and men. Hafez Assad exploited the situation to portray his regime as both guarantor and pacifier. Armed men of many nationalities entered without even considering asking the Lebanese government for permission.”

The Lebanese authorities were “trying to rescue a hostage called the area south of the Litani River, without allowing the south to become hostage once again to the influence of Iran and the Revolutionary Guard Corps. This is why the choice was made to rely on the United States for liberating southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation and freeing both the south and Lebanon as a whole from their captivity to Iran’s regional project. When you do not possess sufficient force to rescue a hostage, a price must inevitably be paid, and efforts must focus on reducing that price.”

Taking hostages is not new in the Middle East. Israel has pursued this policy for decades. It would occupy Arab territory and then force its rightful owners to pay a price for its release: recognizing Israel’s right to exist and withdrawing, at least militarily, from the conflict with it.

Egypt’s President Anwar Al-Sadat made a daring and seemingly suicidal decision. He decided to pay the price for the release of Sinai so that his country would no longer remain hostage to the conflict and its exorbitant costs.

Assad, the Syrian president, by contrast, avoided paying the price for the release of a hostage called the Golan Heights. Perhaps this was because he hails from a minority, or perhaps because he always believed it would be better for his family successor to inherit a cause that justified his rule rather than inherit an Israeli flag flying in Damascus, which would give his opponents a pretext to overthrow him. Thus, the Golan’s hostage status became entrenched and remains so.

Iran was also an early adopter of hostage-taking as a policy. The image of US personnel held hostage in their country’s embassy in Tehran after Khomeini’s 1978 revolution has never disappeared from memory. 

In the 1980s, Iran took the hostage-taking model to Lebanon. Small groups with revolutionary or Islamic names detained Americans and Europeans of various nationalities. This game arose from the belief that democratic countries were inherently weak. It is no simple feat for such countries to launch a dangerous war in a complicated region to secure the release of one hostage.

At the same time, these governments cannot abandon a citizen and declare him or her a martyr, as other regimes can. Detaining one individual seems to have been a way to drag an entire country into a small cage. Those countries had no option but to negotiate, even while continuing to repeat the phrase that there would be no negotiations with kidnappers or terrorists.

Has the hostage story reached its climax with the current war that is shaking the Middle East and its calculations of security and stability?

It is no exaggeration to say that the region — and perhaps the world — is facing an unprecedented hostage crisis, at least in modern times. We are talking here about the Strait of Hormuz.

It could be said that closing the strait has confronted the entire world with the costs of turning the global economy into a hostage, for whose release Iran is demanding a high price. Iran seeks to transform the strait into a permanent bargaining chip through which it can keep its grip on this route, through which energy and goods flow.

Keeping Hormuz hostage affects everyone. It influences fuel prices, pushing up the costs of all other goods. This means the crisis affects the price of bread and the meals of the poor in countries both near and far.

The Houthi threat to close the Bab Al-Mandab Strait risks adding another hostage whose captivity the countries of the region cannot afford. There is no denying that Iran has found in the Strait of Hormuz an opportunity to seize a hostage which the world needs to release as quickly as possible.

To soften the impact of the Iranian move, US President Donald Trump resorted to imposing a naval blockade on Iran, turning the already exhausted Iranian economy into a hostage, in the hope of arranging an exchange.

It is a dreadful hostage crisis. The hostage may be an individual, a city, or a chunk of land that is seized or surrounded by militias. The story is not confined to the Middle East.

Europe, which imagined that it had closed the chapter on hostages and the manipulation of borders, now finds itself facing a difficult situation. For the fifth year, the Russian army has been fighting on Ukrainian territory. Strikingly, Russia refuses to release Ukrainian lands that have been turned into hostages; instead, Moscow is demanding that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky surrender them.

This terrible crisis has exposed the impotence of international law and the falsehood of the phrase “good neighborly relations.” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ tears are powerless to help secure the release of the hostages, from battered Gaza to the Strait of Hormuz.

• Ghassan Charbel is editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper.

X: @GhasanCharbel

• This article first appeared in Asharq Al-Awsat.