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TEL AVIV — Yonatan Zeigen looked down at his phone. There was a missed call from the Israel Defense Forces’ hostage liaison unit. Then came a flurry of news alerts: Hamas was preparing to release two female hostages in Gaza for “humanitarian reasons.”

It had been 16 days since his mother, Vivian Silver, a 74-year-old Canadian Israeli peace activist, had vanished from her duplex in Kibbutz Beeri. Militants slaughtered many of her neighbors, set fire to their homes and kidnapped those they didn’t kill. The Israeli government believed Vivian was among the 242 people Hamas had dragged back to Gaza.

Now, finally, there appeared to be movement on her case. The military liaison officer texted Yonatan: “I’m sure you’ve heard the news.”

Yonatan dialed her number and swallowed hard.

Kevin Sieff spent nearly every day over more than two weeks with the Zeigen brothers in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Kibbutz Beeri and watched archival interviews and speeches from Vivian to report this story.

There was no confirmation about which hostages would be released, the officer said. But Yonatan sensed promise.

For 2½ weeks, Yonatan, 35, had forced himself to consider the unimaginable: his mother’s body identified in the ashes of her home; a video confirming that she had been executed by her captors; or his mother being killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza.

Suddenly, he imagined the other way things could end: his mother walking through his apartment door.

Sandra Mehl

It seemed fitting that she would be among the first released. She had spent her entire adult life denouncing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, lobbying for diplomatic solutions to the conflict, ferrying children from Gaza to Israeli hospitals. If her captors searched her name on the internet, they would see that they had taken one of the country’s leading progressive activists.

That, too, crossed Yonatan’s mind as he stared at his phone, waiting for information. His brother, Chen, 36, sat next to him, scanning the messages in a WhatsApp group for families of hostages. As always, it was a frenzy of speculation and debate. Some families believed Gaza should be leveled in revenge; some worried that an Israeli siege would <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/28/israel-gaza-hostages-hamas/" target=_blank>endanger the lives</a> of their loved ones.

Then the brothers received a news alert from an Israeli newspaper with the names of the two hostages who had been released. Vivian wasn’t one of them.

Yonatan jerked away from his phone, then looked at the names again. One of them, Yocheved Lifshitz, was his high school photography teacher.

“I’m happy she was released, but …” he trailed off.

Every day, he and Chen did the things they were told might hasten their mother’s release. They met Israeli and Canadian politicians. In interviews, they tried to choose details that would nip at the conscience of her captors. They went to marches with the families of other hostages.

“The mission phase,” Yonatan called it.

Tomorrow would be another day in what felt increasingly like a hopeless campaign. They would repeat the same stories to journalists about their mother — that she grew up in Winnipeg and moved to Israel in 1974 to start a new kibbutz and devote her life to regional peace initiatives. That she had fought against the blockade of Gaza. That she baked decorative cakes for her grandchildren’s birthdays.

They would hold posters with her face under the word “KIDNAPPED” and reread their last text messages with her, looking for clues they had missed the first or the 15th time. They would attend funerals of those killed at the kibbutz. They would ask survivors if they had seen Vivian on the morning of the attack.

How Hamas broke through Israel’s border defenses during Oct. 7 attack

They would try to ignore the social media posts from hawkish Israelis who suggested that their mother deserved to be killed for her activism, and the other posts from around the world that seemed to legitimize the Hamas attack as a form of resistance. They would try to forget that her release depended largely on an Israeli government that they — and she — despised.

They would channel their mother, who had believed in a diplomatic solution when no one else did. Maybe she would have some idea of how to end this.

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Two days later, Yonatan and Chen were walking across central Tel Aviv holding posters of their mother. In the photo, Vivian is smiling, her gray hair swept across her forehead, looking just to the left of the camera. “Bring her home now,” the poster said.

A group of a few hundred demonstrators and family members had gathered to pressure the Israeli government to push harder for the release of the hostages.

“Right now!” the group chanted in Hebrew and English. Yonatan and Chen listened but did not say the words. Aside from wanting the hostages to be released, the crowd didn’t agree on anything.

The night before, the Israeli government had escalated its <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/israel-hamas-war/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">war in Gaza</a>, which had already <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/02/israel-stikes-gaza-children-victims/" target=_blank>killed thousands of Palestinians</a>. Many of the hostage families supported the offensive — the airstrikes and the siege and the ground troops that were starting to move in. Some circulated the same statement: “There will be no cease-fire until everyone is returned.”

The brothers were sure their mother would oppose all of it. Her politics had been unwavering. She had worked to arrange a solidarity bike ride on both sides of the Gaza border fence. Her friends from Gaza called her on Jewish holidays. Even after her sons had given up on the prospect of peace, she persevered.

“I would tell her, ‘Israel is dead. It’s hopeless,’ and she would say, ‘Peace could come tomorrow,’” Yonatan said.

He tried to imagine the role she might be playing in captivity, reasoning with her abductors.

Kobi Wolf

But now it was Chen and Yonatan who would need to square their mother’s moral crusade with a strategy to secure her release, and to satisfy a desire for justice after the Oct. 7 massacre. Even the two of them disagreed on the right approach.

Rail-thin and with a bushy beard, Yonatan is a social worker who tends to Tel Aviv’s homeless. He believed in a cease-fire, and that a diplomatic solution could be reached with Hamas. For years, he had condemned the Israeli government for what he saw as its inhumane policy toward Gaza.

Israel massed troops in the West Bank. Then Hamas attacked from Gaza.

Clean-cut and with red hair, Chen is a doctoral student in prehistoric archaeology at the University of Connecticut who frantically boarded a flight back to Israel after Oct. 7. He was more certain that Israel needed to respond militarily in Gaza, that Hamas couldn’t be trusted to negotiate.

“It’s impossible not to wonder,” Chen said.

She was a “peacenik,” part of a shrinking group of secular Israeli leftists who believed in communal living and a road map for peace. They had been appalled by Israel’s rightward shift and the proliferation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Like Vivian, some chose to live near Gaza, to be closer to their life’s work; on Oct, 7, they were among the first to be killed.

The brothers knew the attack might have changed their mother’s politics.

One of Vivian’s strongest allies on the kibbutz was a woman whose husband was murdered in front of her. She had forsaken the peace movement and called for revenge.

The families of other hostages, too, seemed driven by a desire for retribution, or a belief that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/04/israel-gaza-war/" target=_blank>military pressure</a> could lead to the hostages’ release. Yonatan and Chen were still deciding what kind of activists they would be.

For years, Vivian had dragged them to protests, on trips to Gaza and the West Bank, sending them passive-aggressive text messages when they declined to attend: “Oh, you’re too busy?”

For Vivian, it made no sense to have convictions you weren’t willing to defend. She protested the civilian casualties caused by Israel’s military offensives. She fought for a more active leadership role for women on the kibbutz and, more recently, against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to weaken the Supreme Court.

Her sons had gradually shed their activism. They got jobs. They had children. They got distracted.

As he walked down Eliezer Kaplan Street, a man fell into his arms and began crying. It was Yoav, a former counselor from the kibbutz, who had worked with Yonatan at a youth center there.

“Now every day I’m learning about which kids were killed and which were kidnapped,” Yoav said.

“Is there is any news about your mom?” he asked.

He passed the Kirya, a military installation in downtown Tel Aviv that people had plastered with the faces of the missing.

There was Vivian’s face, again, and others from the kibbutz: a high school classmate, a neighbor, a friend’s child. Some of their bodies, he knew, had since been identified.

The bodies are still being found in this battle-scarred Israeli kibbutz

Of Beeri’s 1,000 residents, about 30 had been kidnapped and at least 80 had been killed — in their homes, theirs cars and their front yards. Some had been tortured and raped. A baby had been shot in the head.

“She’s dead,” Yonatan said, pointing to the photo of one woman.

“He’s dead,” he said, pointing to another photo.

“They’re dead,” he said, pointing to a family.

The morning of Oct. 7, Vivian ran to her safe room and called Yonatan. She heard rockets and gunshots outside her house, she said. In a Beeri WhatsApp group, people reported injuries. It wasn’t entirely clear what was happening, but Vivian told her son that the kibbutz appeared to be under attack.

“What’s happening now?” Yonatan wrote.

She was giving a radio interview on Galei Zahal, a public broadcaster, to a host she had frequently sparred with about her activism. She took the call from her safe room.

“We have Vivian Silver on the line,” the host began.

It was difficult to make out her words over the rocket sirens, but she seemed to be prodding the host about the importance of a deal between Israelis and Palestinians, even as she was under attack.

For Vivian, any conversation could be turned into a platform to argue for peace, and here was another.

“But one side is insane,” the host said. “Look at how they are violently interrupting us on a holiday.”

“We can talk more about this if I survive,” she said.

“She said, ‘I am so pissed about that radio interview.’”

They texted as she sat in her safe room. She tried to put him at ease. After a pause, he wrote, “Say something.”

“Something,” she wrote. “I’m trying to keep my sense of humor.”

But then her texts became more desperate.

“Are there still shots?” Yonatan wrote at 10:17.

“Up until a minute ago. Now there is an eerie silence,” she responded.

“I still don’t know anything,” she wrote next. “I can’t make out if the yelling outside is in Arabic or Hebrew.”

At 10:38: “We might be witnessing a massacre.”

“I’m telling everyone how much I love you and how I’m blessed to have you in my life.”

At 10:41, she wrote: “They’re in the house now.”

At 10:54, she responded: “I’m here. I think they’ve moved on.”

Within a few hours, her phone had been geolocated in Gaza.

It was a Monday — Day 17 — when Yonatan left Tel Aviv for a meeting in Jerusalem with Eli Cohen, the country’s foreign minister, and Gal Hirsch, the head of its hostage rescue team.

It was meant to serve as an update for the hostage families. The government had said little about its efforts to secure the release of <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-says-it-has-notified-families-of-242-hostages-being-held-in-gaza/" target="_blank">the 242</a>. By its own count, Israel had dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza since Oct. 7. No one had explained what precautions were being taken to avoid killing the hostages.

Brown University

Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

Kevin Sieff is an international investigative correspondent at The Washington Post focusing on the places where sports intersects with politics, crime and culture. He served previously as the paper's Mexico bureau chief, Africa bureau chief and Afghanistan bureau chief. 

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