This post is so misleading. First, Almog (the hostage) didn’t say Hamas made him a birthday cake, he said his captors (civilians) made him a birthday cake as a “cynical” gesture. Second, whenever a country is held hostage by terrorists, such as Iran by the Islamic Republic or Gaza by Hamas, civilians don’t have a “choice” about what they’re told to do, the alternative being death or disenfranchisement. For example, because Iran is run by the IRGC, if you act against the IRGC, either your life is at risk or your livelihood is compromised. In this way, there is no way to know whether the civilians who held hostages did it out of choice or whether they had a (literal or proverbial) gun to their head. I imagine nobody signed up for this because they knew the IDF would take them out as soon they found them, so unless you were directly working with or for Hamas, an ordinary civilian would’ve run a mile from this request, again, unless they were forced. In any case, even if the birthday cake wasn’t a cynical one, but a kind gesture, it is perfectly possible, and in fact believable, that civilians who were forced to hold hostages against their will may have developed some caring relationship for those hostages. That is civilian to civilian bonding, not Hamas. Please stop whitewashing terrorism. You cannot make kidnap okay, under any circumstances.