Tal Levy may be six feet four, but he does not stand out in a crowd. He speaks softly and hesitantly, and prefers to look away whenever people stare at the poster he is holding, which has a photograph of his younger brother and a single word: “KIDNAPPED.” Levy’s brother Or is one of the two hundred and forty people held in captivity in Gaza. Last Saturday night, a throng of hostages’ families and hundreds of sympathizers gathered outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art—an area now known as Hostage Square—shouting “Achshav!” (“Now!”) Levy, who is thirty-five, joined, his voice rising to no more than a whisper.
On the night of October 6th, Or slept over at his in-laws’ home, in the central town of Rishon LeZiyyon, with his wife and two-year-old son. At daybreak, Or, who is thirty-three, and his wife, Eynav, thirty-two, left their son sleeping in bed while they drove south to attend an outdoor music festival, Nova—music was a shared passion of theirs. They arrived at the party shortly after 6 A.M. Some twenty minutes later, Hamas militants breached the fence from Gaza and stormed the site. Or and Eynav took cover in a public bomb shelter, but dozens of gunmen were throwing grenades and firing into the shelters and the bushes where partygoers had been hiding. Speaking on the phone with his mother that morning, Or told her, “You don’t want to know what’s happening here.” At 7:33 A.M., all communication with him stopped.
Levy’s mother then called him, sounding panicked. “I thought she was exaggerating,” Levy told me. “I was actually angry with her for waking me up.”
On October 10th, Eynav’s body was identified near the site of the party. Four days later, a military officer and two social workers knocked on the door of Or’s parents’ home and delivered a message: Or had been kidnapped and was being held in Gaza. It’s unclear how the military was able to ascertain this fact. A third brother, an employee at TikTok Israel, had scoured dozens of Hamas videos online—a grisly method many relatives of the missing resorted to in order to learn news about their loved ones—but he did not find any footage of Or.
“At first, when they told us that he was kidnapped, I was relieved,” Levy said. “It didn’t feel as helpless as him being missing. But then the feeling of helplessness returned. Because now what?” Amid the grief over Eynav and the uncertainty and fear over Or, Levy, along with his longtime boyfriend, Yoav Weinfeld, found himself a caretaker for his nephew, Almog—yet another role no one had prepared him for.
As Israel marks a month since it was invaded by a Hamas-led force that committed massacres along Israel’s southern communities—and retaliated with air strikes, cutting off Gaza City from the rest of the coastal enclave—the families of more than two hundred hostages held by Hamas and by other Palestinian armed groups are living in a nightmarish state of limbo: not knowing the fates of their loved ones, or whether they will see them again. “They just vanished,” Levy said, of his brother and sister-in-law.
Levy’s daily life has been upended. Every other morning this past month, he and Weinfeld have driven from their apartment in Jaffa to Levy’s parents’ home to spend the day with Almog: play with him, feed him, bathe him, put him to bed. Levy is the only one who is able to accomplish the latter—perhaps, he thinks, because of his resemblance to his younger brother. At first, whenever Levy or Weinfeld was in a car with Almog, he would repeat a phrase they didn’t understand which sounded like “ice ache.” Then Levy remembered driving with Or and Eynav once and seeing them give their son rice cakes. “Children should come with an instruction manual in case the parents disappear,” Levy said, with a faint smile.
For now, he worries that he and Weinfeld are ill-equipped to deal with Almog’s many questions, which will only increase with time. “He says that he wants to go home, and that he wants his mom and dad,” Levy said. “We don’t know what to tell him.”
Anxiety has set in; so has sleeplessness. Levy also detailed some of the more prosaic aspects of being the brother of a captive: “An Internet bill arrives in their home. Do I pay it? And electricity? And water? Someone needs to clear out their fridge, because things have been rotting. And water the plants. What do I do with their apartment? If he comes back—when he comes back—will he even want to live there anymore?”
Many family members of those kidnapped describe a paralyzing awareness that time may be running out. “There’s a lot of public empathy, but it’s not translated into action, and that can drive you crazy,” Shaked Haran, who has nine relatives who were taken hostage, told me recently. “Every day, it gets harder,” Levy said. “It’s as if I live with a timer now that’s always on.”
The sense of urgency has been compounded by the Israeli air strikes—a campaign considered one of the harshest in the twenty-first century—coupled with a ground incursion, which the Israeli military launched last month. These have claimed an extraordinary number of Palestinian lives—eleven thousand so far, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza. Relatives of those kidnapped worry that the Israeli operation also puts the lives of the hostages at risk. A spokesman for the military wing of Hamas claimed last weekend that more than sixty hostages were missing because of the Israeli air strikes, including at least twenty-three who had been trapped under the rubble—claims that were impossible to verify.
The hostages’ families “live in an impossible situation—every development that takes place, they worry how it will affect their loved ones,” Nadav Tamir, a volunteer with the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, an organization that represents families of those abducted, told me, two days into Israel’s ground operation. “Statements about a ground incursion have to do with deterrence and negotiation tactics. But the families hear them, and it tears them apart.”
The scale of Hamas’s civilian abductions—the hostages range in age from a nine-month-old baby to an eighty-five-year-old woman—is unmatched in the annals of Israeli warfare. During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, some three hundred Israelis were held hostage by Egypt and Syria. But those were soldiers, trained for such a scenario, and better prepared for the brutal conditions of life in captivity. If Hamas’s ultimate goal is to coerce Israel into a prisoner swap, it must insure that the hostages stay alive. How do you do that over time when the hostage is a baby? A grandmother?
On Monday, President Joe Biden urged Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, to approve humanitarian “pauses” in Israel’s military operation and allow aid trucks to enter Gaza. On Thursday, Netanyahu consented, allowing daily four-hour breaks in the fighting. But, in an interview with ABC News, Netanyahu said that, though he may approve “tactical little pauses,” any cessation in fighting would be conditioned on the release of those kidnapped. “There’ll be no ceasefire, general ceasefire, in Gaza without the release of our hostages,” Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu’s public-approval numbers have plummeted since the Hamas attack: seventy-six per cent of Israelis believe that he should resign immediately or at the end of the war, according to a new poll by Channel 13. Yet his stipulation that a humanitarian ceasefire must be coupled with the release of hostages is a popular sentiment inside Israel—one that demonstrators kept repeating during last Saturday’s vigil in Tel Aviv. (Just how many hostages would be released under such a deal remains vague.) “We emphasize that humanitarian assistance goes both ways,” Ramos Aloni, whose two daughters and their young children are among the hostages, said in a speech, to wide applause and cheers.
Alongside such a proposal, there has also been a growing call among the hostages’ families for an “all for all” deal: the release of all hostages in exchange for the release of all Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. There are roughly six thousand Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, including about a hundred and thirty militants directly responsible for carrying out the atrocities of October 7th. But less than a third of Palestinian prisoners are reportedly affiliated with Hamas; the majority are aligned with Fatah—Hamas’s chief political rival. So Hamas may be unwilling to accept such a deal.
Gershon Baskin helped secure the release in 2011 of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who had been held in Gaza for more than five years. Baskin believes that, despite the complicated nature of the proposal, an “all for all” deal is the only way to guarantee the safe return of the hostages. But such a deal is not likely to materialize soon, Baskin said, given the extremist makeup of Netanyahu’s government and the Prime Minister’s own poor standing. “Knowing the people sitting around the government table and how weak they are, it’s highly unlikely that this deal will be accepted,” Baskin told me.
Only five hostages have returned home thus far, under circumstances that remain too scattershot to provide a road map. The release of a mother and daughter, both U.S. citizens, was negotiated by Qatar via U.S. mediation. The Qatar channel goes through the Hamas political wing, many of whose leaders are based in Doha. The subsequent release of two elderly Israeli women was the result of Egyptian efforts, through negotiations with the Hamas military wing in Gaza, particularly Yahya Sinwar, who has emerged as Hamas’s most powerful leader. The return of the fifth hostage, a female I.D.F. soldier, was the result of a successful Israeli rescue mission.
Baskin, whose substantial relations with Hamas leaders stretches back to 2006, believes that Qatar can do more to pressure Hamas to release hostages, but that the “only way for the Qatari channel to be effective is if the Americans pick up the big guns,” he said. Baskin argued that the U.S. should tell Qatar to “threaten Hamas that, if they don’t release the hostages, the Hamas leadership will have to leave Doha forever. And, if the Qataris don’t, then the Americans will list Qatar as a state that supports terror.” Such a threat, according to Baskin, will put Qatar’s attempts at gaining international recognition—by hosting the soccer World Cup, or buying Silicon Valley-based companies—in peril. According to recent reports, Israel and Hamas are considering two proposals that were mediated by Qatar: one for the release of ten to twenty hostages, and another for the release of about a hundred.
Still, the Egyptian channel may hold more sway with Hamas leaders in Gaza, because Egypt, as Baskin put it, “controls the lifeline of the Gaza Strip.” As an example, he cited Egypt’s successful pressure on Hamas to stop supporting Islamic State activities in northern Sinai in 2018.
So far, Israel’s wartime cabinet, which is made up of Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Benny Gantz, a centrist opposition leader, has presented Israel’s ground incursion into Gaza as improving the chances that the hostages will be released. “If there is no military pressure on Hamas, nothing will progress,” Gallant told family members of abductees last week. No doubt, Israel’s military operation is squeezing the Hamas leadership, which has been hiding out in a maze of underground tunnels since the war began. But there is no knowing just how Hamas will respond to such pressure. As Baskin put it, “Will they agree to a deal or will they start doing, God forbid, what the Islamic State did with the prisoners that they were holding, and execute them on camera?”
In the meantime, U.S. patience with the Israeli offensive appears to be wearing thin. The U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has said that “far too many Palestinians have been killed” and warned that there can be no reoccupation of Gaza once the conflict ends. According to Amos Harel, a military analyst for the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, the window in which the U.S. tolerates military action will likely close sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. After that, Israel may find itself diplomatically isolated, with irrevocable damage wrought on Gaza.
Levy, who works as a filmmaker, has watched Israel’s military campaign with a growing pessimism that is rooted in his profession. “Images of destruction are much more dramatic than those of some guys coming home,” he said. “It’s clear that the politicians prefer the image of the strongman, and it’s just not right. To be strong is to take care of your citizens and their security—not to crush or to kill.”
Like Or Levy, Yarden Roman-Gat is a hostage being held in Gaza with a toddler waiting back home. On October 7th, militants broke into Kibbutz Be’eri, near the Gaza border, and forced Yarden, her husband, Alon Gat, and their three-year-old daughter, Geffen, into a pickup truck at gunpoint. As they reached the border, three of the four militants got out of the vehicle; Yarden and Alon noticed that their driver was unarmed. Signalling to each other, they opened the passenger doors, jumped out, and started running; Yarden, who is thirty-six, held Geffen in her arms. Gunfire soon erupted all around them, according to Yarden’s older brother Gili. Yarden, running barefoot, felt that she was falling behind and handed the child to her husband, while she ducked into the nearby woods, covering her head with her arms. That was the last Alon saw of his wife. He emerged with Geffen from another clearing in the forest twelve hours later, in total darkness, without food or water. He began an hours-long journey by foot back to Be’eri, all the while searching in vain for Yarden.
Alon returned to his kibbutz to find it ravaged: houses burned to the ground; more than a hundred kibbutz members murdered. Among those killed, he learned, was his mother. His sister was also taken hostage. Now he is left to care for his daughter alone, not knowing the fate of her mother.
Meanwhile, Yarden’s parents’ home, in a tree-lined suburb of Tel Aviv, has been converted into what her three siblings call a “war room” for bringing back their sister. When I visited last week, a large paper roll was spread out on the carpet for Geffen, who had drawn little stick figures. Yarden’s brother, her sister, and six of her friends sat around a nearby table in silence, each glued to a laptop and tasked with a different assignment: from reaching out to foreign diplomats to deciding on a strategy for the month ahead.
“It’s what we know how to do: function,” Yarden’s sister Roni, who is twenty-five, said.
Reflecting on her older sister, Roni cringed slightly. “She is such a private person. She would have hated seeing her picture” plastered on posters all over the country, Roni said. She went on: “I try to think about her as little as possible. Otherwise, it’s constant: I’m drinking coffee. What about her—when did she last eat? I’m sleeping in a bed. What about her—where is she sleeping? I’m playing with Geffen. What about her? This encounter with reality makes me not want to do anything, like shower or eat, but I know that I have to stay sane for her.”
In one respect, at least, Yarden’s family stands apart from some of the other hostages’ families: Yarden is a dual national, holding both Israeli and German citizenships (her grandmother is a Holocaust survivor); many others are not. Over all, the group of hostages is highly global, and, while the Israeli government has been slow to provide families with information on their loved ones, foreign governments have sprung into action. Biden, on a recent visit to Israel, spent more than an hour with the families of fourteen Americans who are missing in Israel, and said, of the meeting, “We’re not going to stop until we bring them home.” The government of Thailand has been in contact with officials in Qatar and Egypt about the release of twenty-three of its citizens, who had been working as farm laborers in Israel. The leaders of Britain, France, and Germany also held meetings with relatives of their nationals in Israel. Germany’s Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, met with a group that included Yarden’s siblings, who later travelled to Berlin, where they spoke at a rally in front of twenty-five thousand people.
One of the more controversial proposals being floated in recent weeks calls for the release—independent of a broader deal—of the roughly fifty dual nationals who are being held in Gaza. This proposal, first reported in the Times, has led to murmurs in Israel about a kind of “selektzia,” or selection process, whereby the lives of Israelis who hold second citizenships may be more prized than the lives of others. That term is a loaded one in Hebrew parlance, harking back to the sorting of prisoners at Nazi concentration camps.
Officials tasked with securing the release of the hostages see nationality as a potential flash point. “The foreign-citizenship issue is a very delicate matter,” Tamir, of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, told me. “Because, on the one hand, you want for everyone to be released and not to have a process of selection. On the other hand, when a family approaches us and says that’s the route they want to take, we’ll do everything in our power to help them.” Gili, Yarden’s brother, was clear that, in all his family’s diplomatic interactions, “We always stress that we are calling for everyone to be released.”
Tal Levy sees the issue as yet another in a long list of moral dilemmas that the relatives of the hostages have had to wrestle with. He mentioned another proposal, which calls for the release of children, women, and the elderly. Though that would make intuitive sense to anyone, he said, “It’s very hard for me to articulate it. Because it means that people like my brother may spend years in captivity.” Such contradictions add to what is already a heavy burden. “There are things that I think are morally right, but emotionally I’m just not there.”
On a recent Saturday vigil, a supporter, seeing Levy hold his sign with Or’s picture on it, approached him and told him not to be disheartened: protests for the hostages will only increase, she said. Levy thanked her. Then he replied, wearily, “I don’t need them to increase. I need them to end.” ♦
