Families of Israeli Hostages Held in Gaza Start Hunger Strike
ISRAEL'S WAR IS NOT ABOUT SAVING HOSTAGES
OR CIVILIAN LIVES
Families of Israelis held hostage in Gaza hold banners and photos during a protest near Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's residence in Jerusalem on September 30 (EPA)
Tel Aviv:
Asharq Al Awsat
-5 October 2024
-5 October 2024
AD ـ 02 Rabi’ Al-Thani 1446 AH
Family members of Israelis held in Hamas tunnels in the Gaza Strip began a hunger strike, accusing the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of completely abandoning their cause by waging a brutal war in Lebanon.
Family members of Israelis held in Hamas tunnels in the Gaza Strip began a hunger strike, accusing the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of completely abandoning their cause by waging a brutal war in Lebanon.
They said Israel’s decision to expand the war to the north with Lebanon and possibly to a regional war with Iran, is “a death sentence for their sons and daughters” who were taken captive by Hamas a year ago in Operation Al-Aqsa.
The hunger strike came after the Israeli Army’s Home Front Command ordered a ban on gathering for fear of Hezbollah, Houthis and other parties firing rockets at the protesters.
Despite this decision, some family members of Israeli hostages chose to continue their protest. But there were only a few hundred who participated.
Meanwhile, 18 Israelis continued a hunger strike, demanding a deal that would bring the hostages home.
Danny, the brother of Itzik Algert, one of the hostages in Hamas captivity said he understands that the hunger strike is a desperate move, but added that he cannot remain silent while his brother faces the danger of death in captivity.
“We have a government that does not shy away from committing a crime against its children,” he said. “Demonstrations are now limited and forbidden while the public is indifferent. They will not move until they watch us die, and even then, I'm not sure they will. But, we can't celebrate the holiday while our children suffer,” Danny added.
There are 101 hostages held by Hamas since October 2023, about 31 of whom Israeli officials estimate have died. Their families urge the country's leadership to secure a ceasefire deal that would free the captives before they see more deaths.
The hunger strike was started by activist Orna Shimoni, who is 83 years old. Shimoni became prominent during the first Lebanon war in 1982 when she established a movement called the Four Mothers.
Protesters who joined Shimoni include David Agmon, a retired Brigadier General in the Israeli army, and Rabbi Avidan Freedman.
Those striking are staying outside the Knesset west of Jerusalem.
Michal Deutsch, who is taking part in the protest, accused right-wing activists of attacking and insulting everyone at the hunger strike. She said those activists were sent by the government to harass the strikers.
Four Americans are still held hostage by Hamas a year after Oct. 7 attack
As the anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel approaches, a deal to release the hostages appears remote.
By Joanna Slater
October 5, 2024
Aviva cannot bring herself to watch the video of Keith released by Hamas in April. The sadness in his eyes would be too much to bear. She has been asked to attend commemorative events on Oct. 7 but hasn’t said yes to anything yet. “I just want to vanish out of the world,” she said.
But she refuses to surrender to despair, pledging to push every day for Keith’s release. “I’m not going to let myself lose hope,” Aviva said.
Edan Alexander, 20
Edan Alexander was 2 months old when his parents Yael and Adi moved from Israel to Maryland for his father’s job. He grew up in Tenafly, N.J., just across the Hudson River from New York City.
As a teenager, Edan became an accomplished swimmer and a foodie who loved eating out. When his friends needed someone to listen to their problems in the middle of the night, he was the person they would call. Each summer, he and his two younger siblings would visit relatives in Israel, where his grandparents live a short walk from the beach in Tel Aviv.
After graduating from Tenafly High School, Edan decided that instead of going straight to college, he would join a program to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. Once he completed his training with an infantry unit, he returned to New Jersey for a month-long break in August 2023. He drove his beloved car, spent time with friends home from college and joined his mother at a Guns N’ Roses concert at MetLife Stadium.
When he went back to Israel, he was assigned to a small outpost on the Gaza border staffed by 16 soldiers. He was in a concrete guard post when Hamas militants began their attack on the morning of Oct. 7. At 6:57 a.m., he called Yael, who was visiting Tel Aviv. The call was short, and he was almost shouting. “You will not believe what I’m seeing here,” he told her.
Five days later, the family learned he had been kidnapped. After the hostage release deal in November, they found out more. Several former captives said they had seen Edan, then 19, in tunnels under Gaza. He tried to reassure one older couple that they would be all right: “You’re civilians, you will get out,” he told them. Thai hostages described how Edan had tried to mediate with their Hamas captors using his fluent English, explaining that they were migrant workers, not Israelis.
Since then, there has been only silence. For nearly a year, Yael said, she feels like she has been waiting on a precipice, heart pounding. Sometimes she sits in Edan’s car, listens to the music he loved and weeps.
In Tenafly, the borough put up two large billboards bearing Edan’s photo, one at the entrance to downtown and another near the basketball courts. The mayor promised Yael they will remain there until Edan comes home.
Sagui Dekel-Chen, 36
The morning of Oct. 7, Sagui Dekel-Chen rose early and went to his workshop. He was using nearly every spare hour to convert a bus into a mobile classroom. When he saw gunmen enter Kibbutz Nir Oz, the community where he has spent most of his life, he raised the alarm and raced to help repel the attackers.
Weeks later, a handful of released hostages told his family that they had seen Sagui briefly in an underground room in Gaza. He was wounded but alive.
Sagui’s father, Jonathan, a Connecticut native, immigrated to Israel in the 1980s. In 1997, when Sagui was entering fourth grade, the family moved to the Boston area. They spent the next four years in the United States, where — much to his father’s delight — Sagui began playing baseball. He became so good that he joined Israel’s junior national team.
Sagui and his wife Avital first met when they were teenagers and have been together ever since. Like many young Israelis, they explored the world after their mandatory army service, including a coast-to-coast RV trip in the United States.
Sagui was never a big fan of school, Jonathan said, but machines of all kinds fascinated him. About a decade ago, he helped his father transform an abandoned building into a school for the arts. The main funder, a Britain-based nonprofit, was so impressed with Sagui that it hired him as a project coordinator in Israel.
On the side, Sagui had an unusual hobby: converting old and decommissioned buses into something entirely new. He turned his first bus into a mobile home where he and Avital lived for about a year; she would sometimes jokingly ask if he loved his buses more than her.
The couple turned another bus into a mobile grocery store. A few years ago, a nonprofit asked Sagui to convert four airport buses into mobile classrooms. Two were completed. On Oct. 7, Sagui was working to finish another one.
Avital, who was seven months pregnant, and their two young daughters, now 7 and 3, survived by hiding in a safe room for nine hours. Two months later, she gave birth to their third daughter.
Avital named her Shachar, the Hebrew word for dawn. The choice was both a nod to hope and a living memorial. The couple’s closest friends were killed on Oct. 7, along with their three children and a grandparent. One of the children was a girl named Shachar.
Last month, Avital wrote that when she scrolls through recent photos on her phone, she sometimes doesn’t recognize her own life. “In all this chaos, I just want to see one thing,” she said in an Instagram post addressing her husband. “Your face.”
Omer Neutra, 22
In 1999, Orna and Ronen Neutra moved from Israel to New York City. Their first son Omer was born at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital just weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Orna remembers the posters put up around the city as people searched for their loved ones.
She still finds it hard to grasp that now her son’s face is now the one on posters.
Omer was raised on Long Island in the hamlet of Plainview, N.Y. Tall and sometimes goofy, he showed a knack for leadership. He was captain of his school’s soccer, volleyball and basketball teams. He became president of a regional Jewish youth group. He loved cats and sports and felt a deep attachment to the country where his parents grew up.
After graduating from high school, he decided to spend a gap year in Israel before attending Binghamton University. When the pandemic forced him to come home in 2020, he told his parents he was thinking about enlisting in the IDF, something that is mandatory for most young Israelis.
Omer was torn, his father recalled. He could start college, hang out with his friends, drink beer, have fun. Or he could do what his new friends in Israel had to do. He chose the latter.
He joined the armored corps, rising to become a tank commander and trainer. On Oct. 7, he was the leader of a small army post near the border with Gaza, the same one where Edan Alexander was stationed.
The day before, he called home. It was an ordinary call, and he sounded calm, Orna remembers. “We’ll talk tomorrow,” he said. Since then, all they’ve had is a glimpse of him in a video of soldiers being pulled out of a burning tank.
The year of anguish has hollowed out his parents. All their travel, all their advocacy, with no progress. The milestones — holidays, birthdays — “keep passing by,” Orna said this summer. “And we’re stuck and they’re stuck.”
Hamas’s execution last month of six hostages, including Goldberg-Polin, underscores how imminent death could be for their son and the other captives, Orna said. So his parents will keep doing everything they can: putting themselves in front of leaders who could make a difference, demanding a deal to release the hostages.
The Oct. 7 attack is “not a historical event for us, it’s not something in the past,” Ronen said. “We live it every day.”
As the anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel approaches, a deal to release the hostages appears remote.
By Joanna Slater
October 5, 2024
WASHINGTON POST
Nearly a year ago, these four Americans were among hundreds of hostages taken into the Gaza Strip.
As the months have passed, their families have clung to glimpses of their loved ones, fragments of hope in an ocean of fear.
Keith Siegel, a grandfather born in California, was last seen in a video released by Hamas in April, gaunt and weeping.
Edan Alexander, who grew up in New Jersey, and Sagui Dekel-Chen, a father of three, were spotted alive in late 2023 by other hostages.
Omer Neutra, a New York native, was shown being pulled out of a tank by Hamas gunmen in a blurry clip recorded on Oct. 7, 2023.
As the anniversary of the attack on Israel approaches, a deal to implement a cease-fire in Gaza and release the remaining hostages — dozens of whom are believed to be alive — appears remote.
The families of the four American hostages are painfully aware that months of desperate advocacy around the world, including at the highest levels of the Biden administration, have failed to free their relatives or end the bloodshed.
They worry that the Israeli government’s focus has shifted from Gaza to a deepening conflict in Lebanon and the possibility of a broader regional war.
They know that time is running out. In late August, 23-year-old Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a fifth American hostage, was shot and killed by his Hamas captors along with five other hostages. His emaciated body was found in a narrow tunnel far underground, his parents said.
About 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Nearly 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in the subsequent assault on Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry.
For Hamas, the captives are currency, said Christopher O’Leary, the former director of the U.S. task force on hostage recovery. And neither Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar nor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seem interested in striking a deal to release them and stop the fighting without achieving their wider goals, O’Leary said.
Still, the families push forward. They’re joined by relatives who are trying to recover the bodies of three Americans killed on Oct. 7 and taken to Gaza — Itay Chen, Judy Weinstein and Gad Haggai. Each of the American hostages also hold Israeli citizenship. Four other Americans were previously released from captivity in Gaza last year.
For Jonathan Dekel-Chen, whose son Sagui is still being held in Gaza, the one-year mark means little. “Our world stopped on Oct. 7,” he said. “It will only restart when the hostages come home.”
The last time Aviva Siegel saw her husband of more than 40 years, he was lying on a grimy mattress in an apartment in Gaza, a bullet wound in his hand.
Aviva was one of more than 100 hostages — women, children and non-Israeli citizens — released in November in deals struck with Hamas. As she was pushed toward the door, she told Keith to stay strong for her sake. She would do the same for him.
Raised in Chapel Hill, N.C., Keith went to Israel to work on a kibbutz that grew cotton and wheat. Aviva still remembers the first time she saw him there: his good looks, his gentle way of speaking, his irrepressible sense of humor.
After their wedding, they spent a year in the United States, living with Keith’s family and working jobs at McDonald’s to fund their travels around the country. They returned to Israel and settled in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where they raised their four children.
By last year, they were active and doting grandparents. Keith, a lifelong vegetarian, was working for a pharmaceutical company while Aviva taught preschool.
Now Aviva is plagued by what ifs: At her insistence, the couple returned home to Kfar Aza at 8 p.m. on Oct. 6 from northern Israel, where their daughter lives. Keith had wanted to extend their visit.
In captivity, the couple was moved 13 times, Aviva said, from airless tunnels to apartments. Even when they were mortally afraid, Keith somehow made them laugh, she said, by imitating an instruction by one of their captors in broken Hebrew to remain silent.
Nearly a year ago, these four Americans were among hundreds of hostages taken into the Gaza Strip.
As the months have passed, their families have clung to glimpses of their loved ones, fragments of hope in an ocean of fear.
Keith Siegel, a grandfather born in California, was last seen in a video released by Hamas in April, gaunt and weeping.
Edan Alexander, who grew up in New Jersey, and Sagui Dekel-Chen, a father of three, were spotted alive in late 2023 by other hostages.
Omer Neutra, a New York native, was shown being pulled out of a tank by Hamas gunmen in a blurry clip recorded on Oct. 7, 2023.
As the anniversary of the attack on Israel approaches, a deal to implement a cease-fire in Gaza and release the remaining hostages — dozens of whom are believed to be alive — appears remote.
The families of the four American hostages are painfully aware that months of desperate advocacy around the world, including at the highest levels of the Biden administration, have failed to free their relatives or end the bloodshed.
They worry that the Israeli government’s focus has shifted from Gaza to a deepening conflict in Lebanon and the possibility of a broader regional war.
They know that time is running out. In late August, 23-year-old Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a fifth American hostage, was shot and killed by his Hamas captors along with five other hostages. His emaciated body was found in a narrow tunnel far underground, his parents said.
About 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Nearly 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in the subsequent assault on Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry.
For Hamas, the captives are currency, said Christopher O’Leary, the former director of the U.S. task force on hostage recovery. And neither Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar nor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seem interested in striking a deal to release them and stop the fighting without achieving their wider goals, O’Leary said.
Still, the families push forward. They’re joined by relatives who are trying to recover the bodies of three Americans killed on Oct. 7 and taken to Gaza — Itay Chen, Judy Weinstein and Gad Haggai. Each of the American hostages also hold Israeli citizenship. Four other Americans were previously released from captivity in Gaza last year.
For Jonathan Dekel-Chen, whose son Sagui is still being held in Gaza, the one-year mark means little. “Our world stopped on Oct. 7,” he said. “It will only restart when the hostages come home.”
The last time Aviva Siegel saw her husband of more than 40 years, he was lying on a grimy mattress in an apartment in Gaza, a bullet wound in his hand.
Aviva was one of more than 100 hostages — women, children and non-Israeli citizens — released in November in deals struck with Hamas. As she was pushed toward the door, she told Keith to stay strong for her sake. She would do the same for him.
Raised in Chapel Hill, N.C., Keith went to Israel to work on a kibbutz that grew cotton and wheat. Aviva still remembers the first time she saw him there: his good looks, his gentle way of speaking, his irrepressible sense of humor.
After their wedding, they spent a year in the United States, living with Keith’s family and working jobs at McDonald’s to fund their travels around the country. They returned to Israel and settled in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where they raised their four children.
By last year, they were active and doting grandparents. Keith, a lifelong vegetarian, was working for a pharmaceutical company while Aviva taught preschool.
Now Aviva is plagued by what ifs: At her insistence, the couple returned home to Kfar Aza at 8 p.m. on Oct. 6 from northern Israel, where their daughter lives. Keith had wanted to extend their visit.
In captivity, the couple was moved 13 times, Aviva said, from airless tunnels to apartments. Even when they were mortally afraid, Keith somehow made them laugh, she said, by imitating an instruction by one of their captors in broken Hebrew to remain silent.
Aviva cannot bring herself to watch the video of Keith released by Hamas in April. The sadness in his eyes would be too much to bear. She has been asked to attend commemorative events on Oct. 7 but hasn’t said yes to anything yet. “I just want to vanish out of the world,” she said.
But she refuses to surrender to despair, pledging to push every day for Keith’s release. “I’m not going to let myself lose hope,” Aviva said.
Edan Alexander, 20
Edan Alexander was 2 months old when his parents Yael and Adi moved from Israel to Maryland for his father’s job. He grew up in Tenafly, N.J., just across the Hudson River from New York City.
As a teenager, Edan became an accomplished swimmer and a foodie who loved eating out. When his friends needed someone to listen to their problems in the middle of the night, he was the person they would call. Each summer, he and his two younger siblings would visit relatives in Israel, where his grandparents live a short walk from the beach in Tel Aviv.
After graduating from Tenafly High School, Edan decided that instead of going straight to college, he would join a program to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. Once he completed his training with an infantry unit, he returned to New Jersey for a month-long break in August 2023. He drove his beloved car, spent time with friends home from college and joined his mother at a Guns N’ Roses concert at MetLife Stadium.
When he went back to Israel, he was assigned to a small outpost on the Gaza border staffed by 16 soldiers. He was in a concrete guard post when Hamas militants began their attack on the morning of Oct. 7. At 6:57 a.m., he called Yael, who was visiting Tel Aviv. The call was short, and he was almost shouting. “You will not believe what I’m seeing here,” he told her.
Five days later, the family learned he had been kidnapped. After the hostage release deal in November, they found out more. Several former captives said they had seen Edan, then 19, in tunnels under Gaza. He tried to reassure one older couple that they would be all right: “You’re civilians, you will get out,” he told them. Thai hostages described how Edan had tried to mediate with their Hamas captors using his fluent English, explaining that they were migrant workers, not Israelis.
Since then, there has been only silence. For nearly a year, Yael said, she feels like she has been waiting on a precipice, heart pounding. Sometimes she sits in Edan’s car, listens to the music he loved and weeps.
In Tenafly, the borough put up two large billboards bearing Edan’s photo, one at the entrance to downtown and another near the basketball courts. The mayor promised Yael they will remain there until Edan comes home.
Sagui Dekel-Chen, 36
The morning of Oct. 7, Sagui Dekel-Chen rose early and went to his workshop. He was using nearly every spare hour to convert a bus into a mobile classroom. When he saw gunmen enter Kibbutz Nir Oz, the community where he has spent most of his life, he raised the alarm and raced to help repel the attackers.
Weeks later, a handful of released hostages told his family that they had seen Sagui briefly in an underground room in Gaza. He was wounded but alive.
Sagui’s father, Jonathan, a Connecticut native, immigrated to Israel in the 1980s. In 1997, when Sagui was entering fourth grade, the family moved to the Boston area. They spent the next four years in the United States, where — much to his father’s delight — Sagui began playing baseball. He became so good that he joined Israel’s junior national team.
Sagui and his wife Avital first met when they were teenagers and have been together ever since. Like many young Israelis, they explored the world after their mandatory army service, including a coast-to-coast RV trip in the United States.
Sagui was never a big fan of school, Jonathan said, but machines of all kinds fascinated him. About a decade ago, he helped his father transform an abandoned building into a school for the arts. The main funder, a Britain-based nonprofit, was so impressed with Sagui that it hired him as a project coordinator in Israel.
On the side, Sagui had an unusual hobby: converting old and decommissioned buses into something entirely new. He turned his first bus into a mobile home where he and Avital lived for about a year; she would sometimes jokingly ask if he loved his buses more than her.
The couple turned another bus into a mobile grocery store. A few years ago, a nonprofit asked Sagui to convert four airport buses into mobile classrooms. Two were completed. On Oct. 7, Sagui was working to finish another one.
Avital, who was seven months pregnant, and their two young daughters, now 7 and 3, survived by hiding in a safe room for nine hours. Two months later, she gave birth to their third daughter.
Avital named her Shachar, the Hebrew word for dawn. The choice was both a nod to hope and a living memorial. The couple’s closest friends were killed on Oct. 7, along with their three children and a grandparent. One of the children was a girl named Shachar.
Last month, Avital wrote that when she scrolls through recent photos on her phone, she sometimes doesn’t recognize her own life. “In all this chaos, I just want to see one thing,” she said in an Instagram post addressing her husband. “Your face.”
Omer Neutra, 22
In 1999, Orna and Ronen Neutra moved from Israel to New York City. Their first son Omer was born at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital just weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Orna remembers the posters put up around the city as people searched for their loved ones.
She still finds it hard to grasp that now her son’s face is now the one on posters.
Omer was raised on Long Island in the hamlet of Plainview, N.Y. Tall and sometimes goofy, he showed a knack for leadership. He was captain of his school’s soccer, volleyball and basketball teams. He became president of a regional Jewish youth group. He loved cats and sports and felt a deep attachment to the country where his parents grew up.
After graduating from high school, he decided to spend a gap year in Israel before attending Binghamton University. When the pandemic forced him to come home in 2020, he told his parents he was thinking about enlisting in the IDF, something that is mandatory for most young Israelis.
Omer was torn, his father recalled. He could start college, hang out with his friends, drink beer, have fun. Or he could do what his new friends in Israel had to do. He chose the latter.
He joined the armored corps, rising to become a tank commander and trainer. On Oct. 7, he was the leader of a small army post near the border with Gaza, the same one where Edan Alexander was stationed.
The day before, he called home. It was an ordinary call, and he sounded calm, Orna remembers. “We’ll talk tomorrow,” he said. Since then, all they’ve had is a glimpse of him in a video of soldiers being pulled out of a burning tank.
The year of anguish has hollowed out his parents. All their travel, all their advocacy, with no progress. The milestones — holidays, birthdays — “keep passing by,” Orna said this summer. “And we’re stuck and they’re stuck.”
Hamas’s execution last month of six hostages, including Goldberg-Polin, underscores how imminent death could be for their son and the other captives, Orna said. So his parents will keep doing everything they can: putting themselves in front of leaders who could make a difference, demanding a deal to release the hostages.
The Oct. 7 attack is “not a historical event for us, it’s not something in the past,” Ronen said. “We live it every day.”
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