As Hamas militants stormed into the kibbutz of Nir Oz, Chaim Peri hid his wife behind a sofa and surrendered himself to the masked fighters.
For more than a fortnight, the 79-year-old’s family had no idea if he was dead or alive. Then came word from Yocheved Lifshitz, a neighbour and one of two women released this week by Hamas. Deep underground in the militant group’s subterranean tunnel network, she had spotted Peri.
“Finally, we had a sign of life,” said Lior Peri, his son. “It was a kind of relief, but now the stakes are higher. We have a lot more to lose, and our anger towards our government has only grown bigger.”
But what can one family, or the families of the more than 200 civilians and soldiers held by Hamas, do to secure the release of their loved ones? Israel is at war, its leaders are bent on revenge and its armed forces stand on the verge of an invasion that could endanger the hostages.
What can one do, Peri worries, when your personal trauma is an international dilemma? His father’s fate lies in the hands of Hamas, of envoys in Qatar and Egypt seeking to negotiate the hostages’ release, and those of men such as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, resistant to compromise and untrusted by many, even by Peri’s father himself. Rumours swirl of a possible release of the elderly in return for a pause in the bombing, a fuel-for-hostages swap or a trade of Palestinian prisoners for Israeli soldiers.
“I’m telling my government — I don’t care what the price is, you have
to pay it,” said Lior. Netanyahu’s administration had “completely failed” Israelis by not preventing this month’s devastating Hamas assault on the Jewish state. “You abandoned them, and now you pay whatever the price is to make this right,” he said.
Hamas fighters killed 1,400 people, civilians and soldiers alike in the multipronged October 7 attack, according to Israeli officials, and dragged the hostages back to the blockaded enclave. Israel has responded with a punishing aerial bombardment of Hamas-controlled Gaza, killing more than 7,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities. Four hostages have so far been released — and more could be, if Qatar-mediated talks succeed. But Israel’s military campaign, which could expand to a full ground invasion, threaten those efforts.
To force the government to listen, the families of the hostages are slowly coalescing into a fledgling political force of their own, an influential interest group to be reckoned with even as their army bombs Gaza, where Hamas fighters are holed up in the same tunnels and bunkers as their loved ones.
They lead protests outside the military’s headquarters in Tel Aviv and on Israel’s streets under the slogan “Bring Them Back”. They host sabbath dinners, with empty chairs for the missing. At the Western Wall in the old city of Jerusalem this week, several dozen prayed with David Lau, Chief Rabbi of Israel. Some were solemn, some in tears, as Lau recited from Psalm 142: “Free me from prison, that I may praise your name.”
And they relive their horrors, publicly and frequently, so the country and the world do not forget. Meirav Leshem Gonen spent four hours on the phone with her daughter Romi Leshem on the morning of the Hamas attack as the 23-year-old tried to flee the militants who descended on the Nova music festival.
“Mummy, I have to be quiet so they will not hurt me,” Romi whispered to her mother, hiding behind cars as gunshots rang out. A friend who tried to rescue her was killed. Then, at 10:14am, nearly four hours into the rampage, Hamas found her. “I’m shot, I’m wounded, I’m bleeding,” she told her mother.
Meirav asked herself, what does a mother tell her child at a time like this? “Once I understood that I could not help her, I decided I will not lie to her. She needed to hear that she is loved,” she said. “And that’s what I told her.”
The fighting was close. She heard Arabic, and then someone hung up the phone. “Our heart is in Gaza now, and we want to bring them back, and I know . . . the only way we’ll be able to [achieve this] is if we stay as we are now — united, together,” Meirav said.
Worried that their loved ones have been reduced to a number, a picture on a placard, an asset to be traded between warring parties, the families plead with the world to remember their individual humanity.
Peri, the man who sacrificed himself to save his wife, was a gregarious farmer, even coaxing grapes out of the sandy soil to make his own wine.
An amateur artist and DIY enthusiast, he was a reluctant soldier in Israel’s long-ago wars and evolved into a full-time peace activist, urging Jewish settlers to leave Gaza long before the official 2005 disengagement by the Israeli military.
Peri, grandfather to 13 children, would drive the rare Gazan to have a medical permit to hospitals in Israel and the occupied West Bank for treatment. In one picture, he sits by a road, holding a sign that reads “Better the pains of peace than the agonies of war.”
“I know it’s a cliché, but he’s an amazing person,” said his son.
Or Levy, 33, and his 32-year-old wife Eynav were living the “new Israeli dream” outside Tel Aviv and working in the tech sector, according to his brother Michael. “We had a normal childhood, a lot of fun together,” he said of his younger sibling. “He’s one of these geniuses that almost annoyed the big brother: things came easily to him.”
A love of music took the couple to the same festival near the Gaza border where Romi Leshem was snatched. On the morning of the attack, they left their two-year-old son Almog with Eynav’s parents, and headed out before dawn. Just after 6am, when they heard the sirens alerting civilians of a barrage of rockets heading their way, they ducked into a roadside shelter.
“It became a death trap,” said Michael. Two hours later, judging by the videos sent by Or and others hiding in the shelter, Hamas had found them. Grenades were tossed in. Some were thrown back out, some exploded.
At some point in the carnage, Eynav was killed. Michael spent days scouring the bloody videos of the slaughter for any sign of his brother. “I watched those videos frame by frame, to look for anything — his clothes, his shoes, anything.”
He found one, with four people being kidnapped from what looked like the shelter. His brother was not one of them. Just over a week later, the Israeli army told them that Or was officially listed as a hostage, but that “we don’t know anything about his condition”.
“How do they know? Is he even alive?” asked Michael.
As for the faraway machinations that will decide the fate of their son and brother, the families’ demand is that Netanyahu’s government “keep the hostages in their decision-making”.
“We want our loved ones back,” said Michael. His message to the Israeli premier: “Do whatever you have to do.”
The family spends its days consumed by anguish, trying not to let the Hamas propaganda videos distress them. A military liaison checks in daily. Their mother plans a party for when Or returns, with his favourite Moroccan and Turkish dishes. Michael smiles when he imagines the homecoming.
Then, the sadness returns. Eynav is dead, Almog is without a mother, and the infant’s father’s fate unknown. And in Michael’s phone, a reminder of Or’s childhood nickname, Hoshi.
The boy hated his name, Hebrew for light, and demanded to be called Hoshech, meaning darkness. And now he languishes in the depths of an unimaginable darkness, somewhere deep within a tunnel in Gaza.
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