From Beirut to Gaza, compassion as currency

THE kidnapping of Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy, in Beirut back in 1987 signalled a turning point. Reporting from the city then, I watched hostage-taking transform from isolated outrage to organised strategy, a shadow form of negotiation that still shapes the region’s conflicts today.Nearly four decades later, that system has re-emerged in Gaza. The latest hostage releases have brought brief relief and international applause, yet they also revive an old question: how far can humanitarian negotiation go before it begins to endanger security? Each exchange saves lives, but each also risks creating the expectation that more hostages will be taken once the guns start again.In Beirut during the 1980s, Hezbollah turned abductions into a disciplined system of leverage. Diplomats, journalists and aid workers were seized according to their symbolic value, dispersed among proxy groups, and traded when the political temperature was right.Western intelligence services treated each case as both tragedy and test, of resolve, secrecy and political nerve. Waite’s captivity, which lasted almost five years, became emblematic of a conflict in which human lives were currency and negotiation itself the battlefield.Hamas, though different in ideology and environment, appears to have absorbed lessons from that period. Its management of hostages since 2023 shows the same operational logic: compartmentalising captives by value, negotiating indirectly through intermediaries, and timing releases to extract temporary ceasefires or humanitarian concessions. These are not spontaneous acts of mercy; they are calibrated exchanges conducted with military precision.But behind every exchange are human stories rarely told. Some of the Israelis who returned home after earlier deals never truly escaped captivity; several have since taken their own lives, overwhelmed by trauma and what one survivor described to Israeli newspaper Haaretz as “the unbearable quiet after captivity.”Among freed Palestinian prisoners, some were released only to find themselves expelled to Gaza or abroad, their homes destroyed or families scattered, a form of freedom that one former detainee told news agencies “felt like another kind of prison.” Liberation, in such cases, becomes another form of loss — proof that the politics of mercy can wound as deeply as the violence it ends.The parallel with Hezbollah is analytical, not moral. It underlines a recurring feature of asymmetric warfare: when one side cannot match its opponent’s military power, it turns to psychological instruments, including hostages, propaganda and the manipulation of global opinion. For the stronger power, the dilemma is perennial: how to rescue its citizens without confirming the utility of abduction as a political weapon.Security planners understand that every negotiation sets a precedent. Each name on a release list is weighed against the risk that a freed prisoner might re-emerge in the field or that a new kidnapping will follow. Intelligence analysts parse every gesture, who speaks to whom, what channels are trusted, which intermediaries gain influence. In the 1980s it was Syria and Iran; today it is Qatar and Egypt. The choreography changes, the structure endures.In Beirut, even the most seasoned diplomats admitted privately that hostage exchanges had become the only functioning diplomacy left. When political dialogue collapsed, negotiation over captives filled the void. Something similar is happening now.The region’s formal peace processes are paralysed; what remains viable is an improvised diplomacy of bodies, lives traded to buy time, pauses or recognition.Today’s hostage negotiations unfold in a far more connected world, where every image and rumour travels instantly. Social media magnifies both grief and propaganda, turning each release or execution into global theatre. Governments must respond not only to the captors but to their own publics, whose outrage or relief can swing policy overnight. This constant visibility has changed the tempo of diplomacy, forcing mediators to perform in real time.Yet the underlying logic remains medieval — bargaining with human lives as tokens of power. What is new is the audience: millions who watch, comment and amplify, ensuring that no negotiation can ever be purely secret again. The moral noise of the digital age has made clarity harder, empathy thinner, and political courage rarer.One Western intelligence official quoted in the British media last year said, “Hostage diplomacy is the only diplomacy still functioning in parts of the Middle East.” The remark could have been made in Beirut in 1987 as easily as in Gaza today.For mediators, each successful release reinforces their indispensability. For armed movements, it restores a measure of legitimacy. For states, it complicates deterrence. The result is a cycle that rewards patience and punishes transparency. Hostage diplomacy thrives in the shadows, where back-channel deals are deniable and the optics of compassion mask deeper calculations.The humanitarian dimension must never be dismissed. Hostages are human beings, not abstractions. But the security dimension cannot be ignored. The very act of negotiation acknowledges that abduction works. Unless governments find collective mechanisms — perhaps through the UN or regional security pacts — to delegitimise this form of bargaining, each new release will invite another round of capture.And there will be another. Every lull in the region’s long wars is temporary, every pause an intermission before the next crisis. As UN envoy Tor Wennesland warned two years ago, ‘The lack of progress towards a political horizon … has left a dangerous and volatile vacuum.’From Beirut to Gaza, the setting has changed but the logic has not. Every life saved is a moral victory; every repetition of the method is a strategic defeat. The challenge for policymakers is to achieve the first without inviting the second — to build a diplomacy that no longer relies on the language of captivity.Shyam Bhatia is London Correspondent with The Tribune. His X handle is @ShyamBh83243946

From Beirut to Gaza, compassion as currency

The challenge for policymakers is to build a diplomacy that no longer relies on the language of captivity.

Shyam Bhatia

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