I never forgot her face as the world watched the footage of her kidnapping on 7 October.

I heard her cries on the breeze rustling the eucalyptus trees in the Reim Parking Field in Gaza where I walked through the aftermath of the carnage, days after her abduction by motorcycle into the ghoulish nightmare of the Hamas war. Noa Argamani’s face was a symbol for all the hostages taken that day.

I had arrived at Ben Gurion, under darkness, two weeks later. Only Hamas missiles illuminated the Negev darkness. That first sleepless night was punctuated by the rustle of mortar reverberating from aftershocks of Israel’s opening salvos into the pink dawn that rose. So, I began my heavy work as physician witness.

In the months since I still recall the images of walking through those bloodstained living rooms of Kibbutz Beeri, through the stained saferooms turned places of slaughter and gang rapes; in the wet cold of the Shura and Abu Kabir morgues, inside the refrigerated trucks of unidentified bodies.

But on Saturday 8 June, Noa Argamani was returned home through simultaneous daring rescue operations two Israeli commando teams conducted in broad daylight deep in central Gaza City where she was held hostage. Three other hostages were freed from a neighbouring building less than 200 metres away. Against all odds, the operation succeeded, challenged to the last moment by Hamas terrorists who opened a full gun battle on the streets of Nuseirat forcing Israel to call in airstrikes on dozens of Hamas strongholds in the area. Hundreds of Palestinians were killed – including those who had kept the hostages captive, as Hamas maintained heavy assault on the Israeli assets and the fleeing hostages, with some of the Hamas fire also killing Palestinians.

Knowing Noa is home, overwhelmed with emotion, I discovered, while I’m neither Israeli nor Jewish, that this war is mine.

For over 120 families, their relatives remain captive in Gaza and may never come home. Israel has confirmed at least 30 of these hostages have perished, their remains desecrated and almost certainly lost. Many fear the number is far greater.

As an observant Muslim who has been welcomed and sheltered in the Arab world where I once lived in Saudi Arabia, I have to confront the reality that entire Palestinian communities and families, like me, also observing Muslims, were and remain deeply invested in keeping hostages captive. It is a galling revelation for me to confront. Not only are the hostages captive, but Palestinians are captive to the whims of Hamas.

Targeting of civilians is absolutely forbidden in Islam, particularly of women, elderly, children, infants and unarmed civilians. It is a particular crime to separate child from mother – something Hamas did repeatedly and with repugnant relish. If such non-combatants are found to be taken as captives, Islam demands Muslim leaders release them immediately, their captivity a grave violation of Islam. Prisoners of war in conflict under the laws of war in Islam can only be taken if they are enemy warriors on the battlefield captured by Muslim military forces during just war, not civilians taken for base cruelty, torture, psychological warfare and pure bestiality. That there remain 120 or more hostages, not only in the subterranean complex of Hamas tunnels, but in homes of Palestinian families is such a terrible reality to confront for us as Muslims, it shakes me deeply.

Yes, some brave Palestinians defy and denounce Hamas. We hear their voices through the incredible work of Joseph Braude, Founder of The Center for Peace Communications and projects such as ‘Whispered in Gaza’ or the work of non-profit social media initiative ‘Builders in the Middle East’ – critical work humanising Palestinians and empowering these key voices of dissent. This week their voices are published in the National Post and the New York Times confirming there is deep resentment towards Hamas and a deliberate effort by external powers to marginalise their voices. But there are so many Palestinians who remain deeply invested in Hamas – some certainly through coercion, others clearly by choice.

Meanwhile, Muslim diplomats and lawmakers, whether phalanxes of Qatari mediators or Muslim Brotherhood Patron President Erdogan of Turkey and his lieutenants receive Hamas leaders who jet from Doha to Ankara to Beirut to Cairo together maintaining Hamas’ legitimacy instead of exposing these rank criminal Islamists who are thus aggrandised. In so doing, the Muslim majority world renders Hamas legitimacy while further dehumanising Palestinians. Instead of rejecting Hamas as beyond the bounds of Islam, Muslims continue to embrace them, empower them and to elevate them. This is simultaneously damaging Islam and lionising Islamism in the eyes of an increasingly militant Muslim diaspora in western Europe as demonstrations in Britain, France and Germany reveal.

The tragedy deepens and to me seems almost insoluble. I have met Shia and Sunni civilian and military Muslims: Muslim Pakistanis; Muslim Afghans; Muslim, Christian, and Yazidi Kurdish Iraqi Peshmerga, who have each given their lives, their treasures, many family members and their entire nations to fight and reject exactly such Islamist jihadists as Hamas.

Yet I see how deeply invested some civilian populations inside Gaza are in doing the bidding of Hamas. Numerous eyewitness accounts I gathered myself in October 2023 in the Gaza Envelope confirmed to me thousands of Gazan civilians also attacked on October 7. Yahya Sinwar’s texts reported by the Wall Street Journal reveal he too was shocked at the uncontrolled rampage of Gaza’s civilians. Understanding such frenzied community-wide commitment to hostage-taking, I fear for Palestinians caught in the lethal cross hairs of Islamism which have ensnared them for decades. Muslims around the world must acknowledge our complicity in this ideology, through our silence in the face of Islamism. The loss of life not only of the remarkable and valiant Israeli Jewish commander leading the operation, Lt. Col. Arnon Zamora, and more recently the courageous Israeli Druze IDF Captain Waseem Mahmoud, but of also hundreds of Palestinians caught in the crossfire, including many children, is a tragedy and marks one of the deadliest days of this conflict.

As I travel the world to where children as young as six are inducted into Islamist extremism and turned into child jihadists, I see extremists recruiting suicide operatives, creating sexual enslavement or deliberately placing innocents into conflict and warfare.

Children have been lost on the Israeli side, as well as the Palestinian side. Much is made of proportionality, Israel being held culpable for more deaths in this conflict while Hamas is lavished with exoneration and victimhood, yet few acknowledge it is the generations of Islamists who induct tens of millions of Muslim children into lives of Islamist extremism from birth all the way to their ill-fated and premature deaths, deaths so numerous we do not even count them.

Until Hamas is extinguished there will be no other future but the present, one we are forced to live by those who value no child in this world. The acts of war performed since 7 October are not a test of the Jewish people, nor even the Jewish state. Nor are they a question of a Palestinian state.

They are instead a grave test of Muslims and Muslim-majority states to whom the true message of Islam is revealed and it is to Islam alone that we are beholden, not the monster of Islamism. The world owes everyone the chance to return home to their families and to live in peace. While Islamism thrives among us, there will be none.