'Humanitarian intelligence:' Debriefing head lays out protocol for questioning freed hostages

The tension between the needs of the victims of the Hamas October 7 attack and national interests raised challenges for professionals tasked with treating victims or receiving freed hostages.

Speaking Tuesday at a conference on sexual violence in the Israel-Hamas war hosted by Israel's Association of Rape Crisis Centers, Former Mossad Chief Psychologist Glenn Cohen, who led the team tasked with debriefing the returned hostages, explained how he handled this tension.

Cohen thought of the Yom Kippur War's freed prisoners of war when preparing to receive hostages from Hamas captivity.

For the freed Yom Kippur POWs, one of the worst parts of their captivity was how they were received by Israel, Cohen said, explaining that they were examined by Israeli authorities for two weeks.

He kept that tension in mind when determining how the freed hostages would be received, he said, stressing the balance and tension between their needs and the need to get life-saving information from them as quickly as possible.

Cohen decided that "it is most important to give them a 'soft landing' and to see the person, first and foremost."

Israel prioritizes 'humanitarian intelligence'

The existing protocol in the US dictates that the first person a released hostage meets is an examiner who immediately asks them questions - placing national security and saving lives first before the trauma of the person returning, Cohen explained.

"For us - that would not work," he said. "We knew it would be better if we built a protocol where the person comes first."

Cohen coined the intelligence collecting mechanism, which puts the person being examined first as "humanitarian intelligence."

This is "intelligence that can be produced in a humanitarian way - with kid gloves."

This meant that his team planned every aspect of interaction with the hostages, from who would greet them and how to the first words that would be said to them when they arrived back in Israel.

"Every word was taken into consideration. We prepared our people, who goes up [to the returning hostage] and how. We made sure that women met women and didn't touch them without consent. They don't say 'welcome home,' they say 'welcome back,' because the home is burned," he said.

Debriefing team meetings with the hostages were called "information sharing conversations, and not investigations or questioning, to empower those who returned and give them a chance to have an impact and save lives," Cohen explained.

"Aside from that, part of the production [of the intelligence] was for humanitarian needs, to bring solace to the families," he added, explaining the other reason behind the label humanitarian intelligence.

"There were those who didn't know if their loved ones were even alive. There were hostages who returned and spoke about people they had seen who, until then, we had not known if they were hostages or missing - and thanks to them, we knew."

Cohen also touched on what he said is a major factor in determining how hostages will fare in captivity, "the most important thing is faith," he said.

"Faith that I will survive, that I will be taken out of here," he explained.

Cohen talked about one of the women who returned from captivity and embodied this. "There was an 80-year-old kibbutznikit who was put on a motorbike [and taken into Gaza], and she told herself, 'I am capable. I have a mission to remember as much as possible, to survive captivity, because I need to tell as much as possible [about captivity].'"

This belief can't be blind faith, Cohen clarified, saying that whoever puts all their faith in the fact that they will be let out at a certain date can die of heartbreak if it does not happen.

"The idea is to find a balance between realism and optimism," he said.