Watching Arbel Yehud being freed in Gaza today, I thought to myself: this is what it must have been like at Salem. Here we had a diminutive woman being paraded through a baying mob of hollering men. They barked religious slogans at her. They shoved and jostled to get a better view of the marked woman. They thrust their mobile phones in her face to capture her terror for posterity. They’ll no doubt share the clips. ‘Look! See how scared she was!’

Mercifully, Ms Yehud was being marched, not to the gallows, but to liberty. She was kidnapped from her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz during the Hamas-led pogrom of 7 October 2023. She was held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad for 482 days. Her partner Ariel Cunio, seized alongside her, remains in captivity. Arbel, though, following tense talks between Israel and her jihadist captors, has at last been spirited back to her homeland.

Yet even as we celebrate the freeing of this 29-year-old woman, we cannot overlook today’s diabolical scenes. It was a positively medieval spectacle. Ms Yehud was displayed like a war trophy, forced to walk through a crowd of fuming men roaring ‘Allahu Akbar!’ at her. The Jew-hating militants of Hamas, in their green bandanas, towered over her. Her pale face was etched with fear.

It seems Hamas and its allies are hell-bent on taunting their hostages to the very last. This was not just a ‘handover’ of an Israeli captive. It was a kind of ritualistic humiliation. A Jew was hauled to a public square packed with men who hate her kind. She was made into a spectacle for the sport of radical Islamists. Not content with stealing her liberty for 16 months, they scorned her as she left. It was an outrage from another century.