Lessons From A Hostage Crisis

We needed all the significant figures in Gaza, both political and non-political, to know that we were asking these questions, and where to find us, in case someone decided to get in touch with vital information.

By Citizen Correspondent Anita McNaught

Date Posted: 10/30/06

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You just know when the Head of News for the company your husband freelances for tracks you down at a Damascus hotel late in the evening that he's not ringing to offer you a job. You know as the unfamiliar TV executive hastily introduces himself that he's calling you with extremely bad news.

Probably to tell you your man has been killed. So it was with a perverse sense of relief that I heard the man from Fox News tell me that Olaf Wiig had been abducted at gunpoint in Gaza City three hours previously, and had not been seen since. And my first coherent thought following that relief was: "Get to Gaza. You've got a job to do."

There are no handbooks available to journalists on how to manage a kidnapping. If they exist, they must circulate around offices in old palaces in the Green Zone, or sit dog-eared on the desks of FBI agents in Washington. And chances are if it's been written up, the information is probably already out of date.What there is instead is a network of people out there with first-hand practical experience. Who - with the right introduction and often a promise of complete discretion - will make available to you contacts, insights, pointers and strategies that may prove invaluable.

There are no safe precedents in an abduction. Local after local informed me: They don't kill hostages in Gaza. But of course there's always a first time. The one fact we felt we could put any emphasis on was this: Gaza is not Baghdad. But what precisely did we imagine by this? That the stakes weren't as high? That the people involved weren't as angry? The rather smaller-than-imagined degree to which the situation in Gaza was 'not Baghdad' we were only to discover later.

When it came to Olaf Wiig and Steve Centanni's abduction I had one strong gut feeling: That this was a problem that had to be resolved by the Palestinian people in their own fashion, and that any clumsy or less than benign outside interference would at best only prolong the crisis, and at worst turn it into a much more serious one.

Fortunately, this was an opinion shared by the two journalists from the Fox News Jerusalem Bureau, Jennifer Griffin and Eli Fastman who, like me, felt they had a job to do and had simply picked up their notepads and mobile phones and headed straight for Erez. And we turned out to be right.