Hostage-Taking Is a War Crime, and the Law Behind the Families' Campaign

The plaza outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art used to be a place people crossed on the way to somewhere else. In the weeks after October 7, 2023, it became the place people came to. Families of the roughly 250 people taken into Gaza that day set up a long Shabbat table with empty chairs, posters with faces under the word "Kidnapped." The square acquired a new name, Hostages Square, and kept it. Week after week, through two years, parents and siblings stood on a stage there and spoke to crowds and cameras, asking their own government and the world to bring their people home. Behind that campaign sat a body of law that is older than the State of Israel and that says something unusually simple: no one, under any circumstances, may take hostages.

In short: Taking hostages is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions in every kind of armed conflict, is a war crime under the Rome Statute and is outlawed by a dedicated 1979 treaty. The ban applies to every party, state or armed group, and no grievance or reprisal justifies it; the families who campaigned for the Gaza hostages were invoking one of the clearest rules in international law.

The day and the long wait

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and allied armed groups attacked communities, army posts and a music festival in southern Israel. About 1,200 people were killed, most of them civilians, and around 250 were taken back into Gaza: babies, children, elderly people, soldiers, festival-goers, farmworkers from Thailand and elsewhere.

The families organized almost immediately, forming the Hostages and Missing Families Forum. Their campaign was not a single political line. Some families were close to the government; some were furious at it; many argued, in public, that only a negotiated deal would bring their relatives home alive and that it should take priority over military goals. Their unity was around one demand.

Releases came in stages. In a week-long truce in late November 2023, more than a hundred hostages, mostly women and children, were freed in exchange for Palestinian women and minors held in Israeli prisons. A ceasefire that began in January 2025 brought further releases before it collapsed in March. Some hostages were rescued by Israeli forces; others were killed in captivity, among them six whose bodies were recovered from a tunnel in Rafah at the end of August 2024. One of the six, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American, had become widely known because his parents, Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, had spoken across the world, including at the Democratic National Convention that August.

On October 13, 2025, under the ceasefire that had taken effect three days before, the last twenty living hostages were released. The return of the remains of those who died went on afterward, slowly, one family at a time.

What the law says, plainly

The rule against hostage-taking is not a matter of interpretation. It appears in the text of every major instrument of humanitarian law.

Common Article 3 of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, the article that applies to civil wars and conflicts involving armed groups, lists acts that are prohibited "at any time and in any place whatsoever" against people taking no active part in hostilities. The taking of hostages is on that short list, alongside murder, torture and summary executions. This matters because it binds non-state armed groups, not only governments.

The Fourth Geneva Convention, which protects civilians in enemy hands, says in Article 34 that the taking of hostages is prohibited. Additional Protocol I of 1977 repeats the ban in Article 75, its list of fundamental guarantees for anyone in a party's power. Additional Protocol II does the same for internal conflicts.

The International Convention against the Taking of Hostages, adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1979 and in force since 1983, makes it a crime for anyone to seize or detain a person and threaten to kill, injure or continue to detain them in order to compel a third party, a state, an international organization or a person, to do or not do something. States that join it must either prosecute suspected hostage-takers found on their territory or extradite them.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court lists hostage-taking as a war crime in both international and non-international conflicts.

And the International Committee of the Red Cross, in its study of customary humanitarian law, concluded that the prohibition binds all parties to all conflicts as a matter of custom, independently of any treaty.

Why the rule is absolute

Most of the law of war involves balancing. Attacks are judged by whether expected harm to civilians is excessive compared with the military advantage. Detention is lawful if it follows rules. Hostage-taking is different. There is no proportionality test and no exception.

The reason lies in what hostage-taking is. It turns a human being into a bargaining chip, using fear for that person's life to force someone else's hand. The victim is chosen not for anything they did but for their value as leverage. The law treats that as an attack on the basic idea that people are ends in themselves.

The rule also rejects one particular excuse: reprisal. Through much of history, armies took hostages from occupied towns to guarantee good behaviour, and shot them when resistance fighters struck. The Second World War saw this on a terrible scale in occupied Europe. After the war, the drafters of the 1949 Conventions banned it outright, and they banned reprisals against protected persons too. A grievance, however real, does not license seizing someone else's child.

There is a practical logic, too. If hostage-taking worked as a tactic and carried no lasting stigma, every armed group and every desperate government would have a reason to try it, and civilians everywhere, aid workers, journalists, tourists and migrant labourers, would become currency. The absolute ban is a wager that keeping the practice beyond the pale protects more people over time than any single trade ever could. Treating it as one tactic among many would lose that wager for everyone.

A treaty written during a hostage crisis

The 1979 hostage convention has its own strange timing. West Germany, which had lived through a decade of hijackings and kidnappings by armed groups, proposed a treaty at the United Nations in 1976. Negotiations dragged on for three years. The General Assembly finally adopted the text in December 1979, a little more than a month after students supporting Iran's revolution seized the American embassy in Tehran and took its staff captive.

That crisis lasted 444 days. The United States took Iran to the International Court of Justice, which ruled in May 1980 that Iran had violated its obligations under diplomatic law and must release the hostages. Iran ignored the judgment. The fifty-two Americans who remained in captivity were freed in January 1981, minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in, under an agreement brokered by Algeria.

The episode taught two lessons that still shape the law. The first is that hostage-taking is not only something armed groups do. Governments do it too, holding foreigners on thin charges to trade them later, a practice now often called hostage diplomacy. In 2020 Congress passed a law named for Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent who disappeared in Iran, that strengthened the US government's tools for recovering Americans wrongfully detained abroad and for punishing those responsible.

The second lesson is that legal judgments alone rarely free anyone. Deals do. The law's job is to make clear that the deal is a rescue, not a reward, and to keep the crime on the record so that those who committed it can be pursued afterward.

That combination, negotiate to save lives now and prosecute later, is exactly what many of the families in Hostages Square demanded of their own government. It was not naive. It is how hostage crises have usually ended.

The edges: detention, exchange and fairness

Here is where the subject becomes harder, and honest writing has to go there.

Prisoner exchanges are not hostage-taking. Exchanging captured soldiers or detainees at the end of hostilities is old and lawful. Israel has traded Palestinian prisoners for captives before, most famously in 2011, when it released more than a thousand prisoners in exchange for the soldier Gilad Shalit. The law does not forbid paying a price to bring people home; it forbids creating the hostage in the first place.

Detention by a state is not automatically hostage-taking, but it has rules. Palestinians and their advocates point to Israel's use of administrative detention, holding people without charge or trial on secret evidence for renewable periods, and to the detention of many Gazans during the war under a law on "unlawful combatants." Human rights groups and UN bodies have reported serious abuse in some detention facilities and long periods in which detainees' families did not know where they were, and the International Committee of the Red Cross said it was not allowed to visit Palestinian detainees after October 7. Israel's government says its detentions are lawful security measures under judicial review and that it investigates allegations of abuse.

These concerns are serious and deserve their own examination under human rights and humanitarian law. But they are a different legal category. Detention without fair process is a violation; abuse in detention is a violation; detention as a bargaining chip, designed to compel a concession, would be hostage-taking. Collapsing these distinctions, in either direction, weakens the law that protects everyone.

The rule does not depend on reciprocity. One party's violations do not license another's. That is true of starvation, of attacks on hospitals and of hostages alike.

Accountability so far

International justice is slow, but it has started. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Mohammed Deif, a commander of Hamas's military wing, on charges that included the war crime of hostage-taking along with murder and other crimes. The prosecutor had also sought warrants for Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh, who were killed before judges ruled. On the same day the court issued warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on separate charges relating to the conduct of the war in Gaza.

National courts matter too. Under the hostage convention, countries can prosecute hostage-takers who come within their reach, and many hostages held dual nationalities, which gives their other countries jurisdiction as well. The United States has a federal hostage-taking statute that reaches crimes against Americans abroad. These cases can take a decade or more.

Why progressives should hold this rule tightly

Here is an argument, stated as one.

Parts of the left were slow, after October 7, to say plainly that the abduction of civilians was a crime with no justification. Some treated it as a footnote to a longer history; some went quiet because they feared that naming it would be used to justify what came next in Gaza. That was a mistake, morally and strategically. The moral case is obvious: an elderly peace activist from a kibbutz and a festival-goer in their twenties did not forfeit their rights because of their government's policies. The strategic case is that humanitarian law only protects Palestinians if it is applied as law, to everyone. A movement that wants the rule against starvation enforced in Gaza cannot be seen to shrug at the rule against hostage-taking.

The same holds the other way. Many people who rightly demanded the hostages' release were silent about Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza or held without charge. The families themselves were often more generous than the commentators, and many of them argued in public for a negotiated deal over more war.

The consistent position is not a compromise between two sides. It is the law: hostage-taking, collective punishment, starvation and the targeting of civilians are forbidden, whoever does them.

Square, table, chairs

When the last living hostages came home in October 2025, the empty chairs at the table in Hostages Square did not all fill. Some families received coffins. Others are still waiting for answers about what happened in captivity. The place has become, in a sense, a monument to a rule: the rule that a person cannot be taken and held as leverage. Following the reporting on the hostages, the detainees and the war's legal aftermath, from many outlets in one place, is what our Gaza and Palestine page is for.

What you can do

• Defend the rule in public, evenly. When the subject comes up, name hostage-taking as a war crime and name the abuse of detainees as a violation, in the same breath. You will be surprised how often that disarms an argument that was about to start.
• Press your members of Congress on Americans held abroad and on detention standards. The representatives page gives you your representative's and senators' phone numbers, contact forms and their latest votes from your address. Ask what they are doing for Americans unlawfully detained anywhere, and whether US security aid is conditioned on humane treatment of detainees.
• Support people living with the aftermath. The organizations directory lists nonprofits by cause in every state, including legal aid, immigrant services and health groups, some of which work with survivors of war and detention and their families.
• Learn the text. Read Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, about a page long, on the International Committee of the Red Cross website. It is the best short statement of what humanity owes people in war.
• Follow the wider picture. The human rights and foreign aid topic page tracks hostage cases, detention and humanitarian law in conflicts beyond Gaza.