Since January, hostages held by the terrorist group Hamas have begun to return home to Israel. The images of these innocent people after 15 months of captivity in Hamas’s hands have been shocking, appalling, and beyond anything I’d ever imagined. We’ve seen images of people who look emaciated, having been held underground and tortured for months on end.
President Donald Trump said they looked like Holocaust survivors. I agree, but as a member of the black community, they remind me of something else too: the pictures of black innocents being violently transported on slave ships starved so severely that they ended up looking like no more than skin and bones.
This is not a problem I’ve often commented on in the past, but when I saw the condition of the hostages returning from Gaza, who were starving, pale, and ill from torture, I knew I had to speak out. To see innocent men, women, and children right now, in the year 2025, being abused and held against their will by an oppressive regime, in this case, Hamas, requires taking a stand. As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said in his letter from a Birmingham jail cell, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invaded southern Israel and slaughtered 1,200 innocents. It’s no wonder so many commentators have compared the released hostages to the Holocaust survivors liberated from the Nazi death camps in 1945. In a way, the images the world saw at the end of the war of deathly thin survivors at the brink of starvation, obscured the true horrors of the Nazi genocide.
The black community also lives with the scars of genocide. We know that slaves in America were regularly whipped and tortured. Harriet Beecher Stowe described an escaped preacher who had been branded on both breasts and had toes cut off on both feet.
At least 2 million Africans died in the terrible slave ships during the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic. This all happened recently enough that photographs of emaciated Africans on slave ships exist, eerily similar to those of hostages being released from Gaza in 2025.
Some commentators argue that the plight of terrorists imprisoned for their crimes in Israeli jails is somehow the same as that of civilians being raped and tortured in underground cages in Gaza after being stolen from their homes on Oct. 7. Let’s not forget that 12 Americans were among those kidnapped by Hamas on that terrible day and that some of the victims are black, such as Avera Mengistu, Joshua Mollel, and Clemence Felix Mtenga.
It is no longer possible to deny that Hamas as an organization is pure evil, with a fundamentally monstrous ideology and a cruel means of implementing it. Hamas’s 1988 founding charter calls for the violent destruction of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic state under sharia law. Hamas’s education system normalizes racism and antisemitism, with textbooks referencing the Jewish Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, as “fabricated,” terrorists being lionized, and deadly attacks on Israeli civilians described as “a barbecue party.” Enough is enough.
Hamas is not an organization one makes peace with, leaving it in control of territory from which to launch future attacks and, worse, young minds to shape into the killing machines of the next generation. Like the Nazi regime and the slave traders of old, Hamas needs to be utterly destroyed, its power broken, and its ability to wreak havoc brought to an end.
The black community has seen what happens when this kind of hatred is allowed to run rampant. We must be among the foremost voices standing in support of the Israeli victims and calling for the final defeat of Hamas terrorism. Justice and humanity demand nothing less.
George Edward Foreman III is a professional boxer, entrepreneur, and trainer. He is also the founder of EverybodyFights, a real-life fight club.